I would appreciate your suggestions to help me with an assignment. I have to do a series of black and white portraits that ultimately will be printed at 13" X 19". At my disposal I have a Canon 5D, PC with Photoshop CS3 and an Epson R2400 printer ( supposed to be very good for B & W )
What is the best way to go about your workflow? Should you start by taking the pictures in the camera Monochrome picture style? Or should I be doing the B & W conversion in Photoshop at either the raw converter or the channels level? Another option would be to only convert at the printer level by following the suggested B & W printer settings?
Would be nice to get it right from the beginning! Thanks for any info.
Andre
Hi Andre,
I am far form an expert but you have the best start with CS3 there, the B&W conversion is fantastic especially as you can alter the image a channel at a time as an adjustment layer. I woudl personally shoot in colour but the choice is yours, some of the best B&W commercial stuff i shot in black and white in camera. Is your monitor calibrated with your printer? If not then a bit of playing around is required but you should get some great results with that setup.
Absolutely agree with Tj; if you take the pictures in monochrome you will be throwing out a lot of information, and limit the degree to which you can manipulate the files afterwards. I also agree the B&W conversion in CS3 is a nice step up in terms of control to previous 1 step conversions in previous PS versions. You may want to experiment a little with printer management whether you want Photoshop to do it or do it through the printer; probably there will not be a significant difference and managing through Photoshop will work fine.
The only reason to shoot in monochrome would be for speed and convenience, say for example high volume portraits for a school group or something, where creating straightforward basic B&W JPEGS is all you need.
Hi Andre,
I am far form an expert but you have the best start with CS3 there, the B&W conversion is fantastic especially as you can alter the image a channel at a time as an adjustment layer. I woudl personally shoot in colour but the choice is yours, some of the best B&W commercial stuff i shot in black and white in camera. Is your monitor calibrated with your printer? If not then a bit of playing around is required but you should get some great results with that setup.
Yes my monitor and printer are well calibrated. Thanks very much for the advice.
Absolutely agree with Tj; if you take the pictures in monochrome you will be throwing out a lot of information, and limit the degree to which you can manipulate the files afterwards. I also agree the B&W conversion in CS3 is a nice step up in terms of control to previous 1 step conversions in previous PS versions. You may want to experiment a little with printer management whether you want Photoshop to do it or do it through the printer; probably there will not be a significant difference and managing through Photoshop will work fine.
The only reason to shoot in monochrome would be for speed and convenience, say for example high volume portraits for a school group or something, where creating straightforward basic B&W JPEGS is all you need.
Thanks Loftus. I will follow your advice and try both colour management through Photoshop and the printer to seee what ends up best. Appreciate you taking the time to reply.
Hi,
I've found that the B&w convertor in camera RAW (or lightroom) give superb results.
This means capturing in colour and RAW, and then conveting to monochrome in the RAW converter. You can then use your normal printer output workflow in CS3.
In my experience, paper choice is very critical with B&W-I've had goopd results with matt textured papers.
All the best
Adam
I'm not sure about using a RAW converter, but channel mixer in Photoshop works well: predominantly using the green channel with a little red to boost the white areas, and a little negative blue to enhance the shadows after checking the monochrome box.
Tim
The the HSL/Grayscale tab in the RAW convertor and the B&W tool in the adjustment menu of CS3 do a great job of convering colour to black and white. The B&W tool allows adjustment of the red, green, blue, cyan, yellow & magenta channels to tune the conversion. The RAW converor also allows tuning by colour channels but uses a more unusual set of colours such as orange and aqua.
With my limited experience I'd say the B&W tool is slightly better than the RAW convertor.
Either way they both remove the need to use the hue saturation layers method of conversion popular in earlier versions of Photoshop.
Thanks again for all the suggestions.
Well I have been experimenting and have done the conversions in both Raw converter and in Photoshop. I then printed as usual through Photoshop with the appropriate printer profiles. Both worked fine and I am very satisfied with the results. Interestingly I also used my best colour corrected image and then used the printer's b &w setting for printing and it came out superbly as well - I guess you just don't know exactly what you are going to get that way!
