Workflow with B&W conversion

[sam_motskin]

I am still transitioning from film to digital and trying to work out my digital

workflow. If I shoot NEF and use Capture NX or ACR for initial processing and

then CS3 where in the workflow is the best to do B&W conversion

[tim floyd]

Lately, I've been using the Black and White layer. There is a great description of how to do

this in Advanced Digital Black and White Photography by John Beardsworth. It allows an

incredible amount of control over the image.

[patricklavoie]

you can also drop NX and CS3 and simply use Lightroom for that exact purpose. simple and only one software involve. Since you capture in RAW, you could do your BW whenever you like, the shot are not even process yet, just adjust in the raw devlopper.

[sam_motskin]

I guess I need to clarify my question. I am planning to do intial processing in CaptureNX,ACR, or LR and then do some tweaking in CS3. So it is not so much how to do that but at what point in the workflow. Is there any IQ loss if I do conversion before anything else, e.g. capture sharpening, NR? Do I need to do WB/tonal adjustments before or do conversion and then work on the B&W image?

[william-porter]

Sam,

 

In Adobe Lightroom, I don't use the "grayscale" button any more. Instead I use a tip I got from John Beardsworth's book on Lightroom: I move all the color saturation sliders to the left. This retains the color channel info and allows me to play with those channels. I'm actually using Light Crafts LightZone these days for most of my post-processing, but I like Lightroom better for b&w conversions (or "pseudo-conversions," if you go about it this way).

[william-porter]

Oh, sorry, didn't address your clarified question. In Lightroom, I tend to do the color-to-b&w conversion first or very early in my editing of the image, after adjusting white balance (if necessary) and tweaking the exposure and clarity but before messing with the tone curve.

[shutterdrone]

I do my conversion workflow as adjustment layers in CS2 - this lets you do whatever you want, separate from the actual b&w. That is to say, I never do _anything_ sharpening related* to the post-converted image, all dodging, burning, sharpening, happens on the color layers.

 

* - an exception is using noise reduction. My tendencies to push the envelope in my conversion process exacerbates noise levels, so I do noise reduction on the flattenened, print-ready version.

 

!c

[sam_motskin]

Thanks to all. It looks like some people do BW conversion early in the image editing and others towards the end. I gather the image quality does not seem to be affected whether you do it before or after adjustments.

[patricklavoie]

Sorry Sam i jump late in the discussion;

 

Indeed it doestn do anything bad to do the conversion at the end but why?

 

Since you know you will be working in BW, you then should start in BW using let say a channel mixer or else, refine this BW to your taste, then level curve mask etc...

 

Like i said earlier using Lr to do this will not only be done on a RAW (tif r jpeg) but will also be non destructive, and pretty fast, then in need you can bring everything in PS to rfine, dodge burn to your taste.