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Experimenting with black&white conversion

Hi

This weekend in a nearby village, we had a meeting for vintage cars.

The light conditions were really harsh and somehow, the color photos did not really work for me, harsh light, harsh contrast,... I experimented a while with the Silver Efex plugin under Lightroom to convert the photos to black & white. My first goal was not to make them look like vintage photos, but to get rid of the harsh light conditions. Strong contrasts in color remain strong contrasts in b&w, I had to find something else and spend quite some time with a rather trial and error method until I found a treatment perfectly suited to the subject!

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I hope you like the photos. I am used to the more "classical" black&white conversion, but here, I wanted to try something different than my usual b&w photos.
 
Look Great! I just discovered SilverEfx and lovin' it! Being able to control the colors inside the black and white photo helps WAY more than my trial and error method through Pixlr that I was using. Now Pixlr is just for straightening and cropping. Whatever you went with, they turned out terrific!
:thumbup:
 
Thank you for all the comments.
[MENTION=92522]MarkM10431[/MENTION]: yes, I am using Lightroom. Silver Efex 2 is now free and installs as plugin in Lightroom.
 
Lovely conversions, very well done sir :thumbup:

Didn't knew what it was so I have checked out the Nik collection and it is now installed in my Photoshop Elements.
I can see a vast upgrade in the possibilities of enhancing photos in the future - Thank you.
 
Welcome, shm. The Nik Software collection is a great series of tools working as plugins on Lightroom, Photoshop or even as standalone applications. They are really powerful plugins with technologies such as "U Points".

 
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That's great, thank you for sharing.
I will definitely look for more videos, I can see I will be using Nik a lot in the future.
Those points is really something I can use :thumbup:
 
some of the plugings I use in lightroon for BW conversion are Matt's New York vintage and Moriyama's.
$DSC_5522.jpg
Original
$DSC_5522-2.jpg
Moriyama
$DSC_5522-3.jpg
Moriyama
$DSC_5522-4.jpg
Matt's (medium)

plugin locations
http://www.presetsheaven.com/presets/4-free-daido-moriyama-presets-for-lightroom/
lightroomkillertips.com/presets-vintage-new-york-look/
 
Amazing! Nice work and, as others have said, the tones really match the subject. Though, it's kind of a trippy mindf*ck to see that opening photo, old time car with the b&w conversion so perfectly suited to it that it looks period authentic--until you see the awesome 70's muscle cars in the background :) Which, I'm thinking, you could have a really funny shoot using the old timey b&w filters, but with new cars; or like Yugos or something. That would be a hoot. But these are really well done.
 
Yup. The first few are rather convincing.

One thing to try is to play with the levels of the individual RGB color channels first, desaturate it, and finally play with the black, white, and mid-grey levels.
My idea is to fake the colour sensitivity of vintage B&W films. Or to fake using colour filters.

As an example, check this out, the effect of using an orange filter on (real) B&W film:
$orange_filter.jpg
The orange filter in the third one makes the clouds pop.
 
I have found for me that clicking on the yellow filter seems to help an awful lot with my street stuff involving people. A yellow filter, with some boosted reds and decreased blues really makes people 'jump out' more from a photo.
 
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