1st tries at B&W

Hi all,

I'm pretty new to the whole UW photog game, and photography in general, so am keen for any helpful comments at all. After seeing a few B&W pics of wrecks etc, and picking up a mag on B&W digital photography, I thought I'd have a go, but after looking at them for so long have lost all objectivity.

The first try was this:

1st try

My brother (taken a few land pics in his time, but by no means an expert) reckoned bumping up the contrast was a good idea, which resulted in this:

2nd try

Any opinions to help out at all?

TIA

edit: stupid stupid wrong link

First question: Are you SHOOTING black and white, or converting in the computer? If in the computer, what methodology are you using for the conversion?

I like the basic composition of the shot, but as a B&W, it seems to be short on detail. Hence the post processing question.

It was taken in colour. the original looks like this:

colour

The way that I made it B&W was basically took out all the channels but the blue one, and made it grayscale. I tried Image->adjustments->channel mixer-> monochrome, and got this:

first test

Would it be better to go straight to greyscale instead of deleting channels? then I end up with this:

greyscale

Without any mucking around with contrast and brightness.

Note: obviously all of the pics have been greatly reduced to fit 480x640.

One thing you might want to try is to get rid of the blue cast first, and increase the contrast a bit, in color. Then, use the Channel Mixer/Monochrome function.

If you are feeling "lazy" , you might want to download an action called "Underwater". Pretty sure you can find it at www.adobeevangelists.com.

This will help a lot to get rid of the blue cast, giving you more to work with in doing the conversion to B&W.

Nazaar -

The best way to do B&W is as Richard said - the channel mixer. Play with the % but the numbers shoul be close to the following...R-20% G-70% B-20%. You can then make adjustments to both the hue/saturation and brightness/contrast until you get the image where you want it. When B&W film is printed the type of paper can be used to effectively tone the picture "cool" or "warm". One last tip is that PS can be used to effectively tint your B&W. Go to Adjustments>Color Balance and work the slider for yellow/blue to +3-+5 blue for "cool" pics or the cyan/red to +3-+5 red for "warm" pics. B&W portraits sometimes feel better with a warm tone but for landscapes and underwater i usually choose to "cool" my B&W conversions - it just adds a little more emotion to the pics and makes them look good printed...

regards...

- MP

Thanks very much for the replies and tips guys, much appreciated

Hopefully tomorrow will bring some more opportunities to test out the theories.