Equilibrium B&W

B&W version of this portrait taken in Xiahe, Gansu province, China. Your

feedback is welcome!

very good portrait with nice bw

Alain,  This is an exquisite image.  Very nice composition and capture.  I have a question about the way you convert to B&W. I see some red and brown tones in here.  Also, since you have so many great color tones in the color version, can you use them to create a greater DOF in the B&W treatment?  David

Thanks for your nice comment, David! Until recently I used a Photoshop B&W layer to convert into B&W and sometimes added one, two or three colours with the "Bichromy" (don't know how it's called in English) fonction in PS. Now I mainly use Silver Efex Pro, the NikSoftware plugin for PS. You can get various definite effects... or go through the whole process by yourself : constrast, brightness, structure, film type, quantity of grain, filter, etc. As you mentioned it's great to be able to adjust the sensitivity of each colour layer (same in PS). I really LOVE Silver Efex Pro (and it's colour counterpart Color Efex Pro).

Concerning this shot, I'm not too sure to understand what you mean by increasing DOF. Here the main problem was that the face of the girl was quite dark compared to the rest of the image, especially the clothes. On the colour version this is not a so huge problem because the various strong colours help the eye to differenciate the face from the rest. For the B&W conversion I adjusted the colour layers in order to brighten the skin and darken the rest. I added a sepia effect, some more vignetting, and a new Level layer in PS.

As a friend of mine told me, this picture looks a little flat & cold. Too much middle tones maybe? I wonder if I should add more contrast or more grain (not really visible on this reduced version). Any suggestion is welcome!

Not sure I answered your questions. You know I'm just an amateur so I often don't master what I do. And French speaking, which doesn't help =)

Best regards, Alain

Alain,  I'm glad you mentioned that your friend suggested that the image may appear flat. I believe your assessment is correct.  The image is almost all midtones.  I can see the depth, but I have to look for it.  Consider the striking difference between the color of her face (red) and the collar of her dress (bright green) in the color image.  In this image, they are very close in tone.  As a result, you lost a great deal of the natural contrast that was resident in the color image.  SilverEfex has a color tone slider that would allow you to selectively enhance the red channel.  Using the red channel would brighten her skin tones considerably.  The problem with SilverEfex, though, is that if you brighten the red channel, all the reds in the image are affected, and unless you make more than one conversion and layer them in PS, you can't change a tone in one part of the image, but not another.  Another problem with SilverEfex is that once you make the conversion, the underlying color tones are lost when you're done.  I would like to see what the image would look like with broader tonal ranges for her skin and dress, as well as the background to bring out more depth to the image.  Good luck.  David

Dear David: thanks a lot for your very interesting comment! I might have partially ruined the image trying to brighten the face and darken the rest... because as you wrote it resulted in a lack of contrast. I could have made the face brighter, but it would have resulted in a loss of skin details. Especially the red colour on the cheeks... which is for me an important feature on this picture.

I checked your Split channels technique. Although amazingly powerful, it seems quite complicated and time consuming. I'll try to reprocess this image with PS and Silver Efex Pro. Maybe I should simply keep a rather dark face contrasting with a rather bright environment.

Thanks and best regards, Alain

New version above. A huge thanks to you David for your help!

Here's the first version...

I like it.  Now the depth is much more apparent.  It helps to bring her alive. David

B&W is the right choice here, the intense colors of her clothes distract from her face, IMO.

The new B&W version is indeed much improved. More depth, better contrast. I think this is quite close to perfection.

I like to use Silver Efex myself, for over 90 percent of my B&W conversions. Sometimes a single conversion does not work, and you could do two or more versions with Silver Efex, one for the clothes and one for the face, for example, and combine them with layers and masking then. With this workflow, you get along with Silver Efex almost in every case. Before SFEX I was a great fan of B&W conversion from channels (as discussed above). Sometimes I still look into the R G B, C M Y K, and L a b channels and use PS channel calculations and layer/ mask techniques for the ultimative control, but this can be really time consuming. A nice PS action that separates channels for B&W is http://www.thelightsrightstudio.com/TLRSplitChannels.htm 

Thanks a lot for your comment, Casten. This is exactly what I did: a version for the face and another for the clothes. It was the only way to reach this result. Your work is really amazing. I'll visit your portfolio more often! Regards, Alain

A wonderful portrait. I like both color and black and white versions.