Critique Black and White Conversion - Help and Critique

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486
Name
James
Edit My Images
Yes
Evening all,

Please can you critique the processing of the following images for me as I seem to struggle with getting black and white 'right'. While my son was playing I had an image in mind which I thought would make a good contender for a B&W conversion. I've purposely left the images noisy as I think they suit it.

Here are the photos:



James
 
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They've converted nicely. :) Probably the one thing I'd do would be to lift the lower mid-tones a bit so that his face would be lighter, for example, but keep the blacks & whites.

What did you do the conversion in? Lightroom is usable, but slightly hard work to get a nice conversion without a pre-set or 3. Many (including me) still use Nik Silver Efex (still available FOC in the original version) because it just simply works really well, although I've had excellent results with On1 PhotoRaw too.
 
Thanks for taking the time to reply.

The conversion was mostly done in Lightroom which I found quite fiddly, I then exported to Photoshop where I used the dodge and burn tools to get the tones (if that's the right word) right. I lightened his face quite a bit but didn't want to overdo it but I can absolutely see where your coming from.

I'll have to have a look at Nik Silver Efex as that may work a bit better for me than LR & PS for these sort of conversions.

James
 
Thanks for taking the time to reply.

The conversion was mostly done in Lightroom which I found quite fiddly, I then exported to Photoshop where I used the dodge and burn tools to get the tones (if that's the right word) right. I lightened his face quite a bit but didn't want to overdo it but I can absolutely see where your coming from.

I'll have to have a look at Nik Silver Efex as that may work a bit better for me than LR & PS for these sort of conversions.

James

Nik is probably going to be easier then. There's a bucketload of presets, but I usually find it helps to start with a couple that do what I want & then tweak to taste, saving them to using as starting points for images.
 
I felt this image need a little boost in contrast to enhance the blacks - I used Photoshop CC

original

uz89bp5.jpg


Edit


0jKHAJe.jpg


Les :)
 
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Another vote for Nik Silver Efex. I've spent ages trying to match the SE effect in photoshop, I can get close but theres something about SE thats just better.
 
@Lez325
Thanks for that, I agree that the blacks needed a bit of enhancement.

I'm going to download Nik Silver Efex now as I've got a few more images I want to convert.

James

Edit...
Maybe I'm missing something as I can't seem to find the free version.
 
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