B&W conversion

[West Coast Birder]

What do you guys and gals use for color to B&W conversion? I used to have Nik Silver Efex a long time ago (got it for free somehow) as a Lightroom plugin, but since they got taken over by DxO, I haven't bothered paying for it. I want to dabble in some B&W conversion of some of my photos and I was wondering what the best known method is. I have Lightroom classic as my only PP software but willing to obtain something else if warranted.

I know a lot of you do B&W regularly with superb results, so please share your secrets!

 

[Nature's Spectrum]

Sam I just use Lr these days. The masking capability is so good now I just don't have a need for anything else.

I did use silver efex at one time, and still have it.

 

[paddler4]

I use Lightroom most of the time. It offers a lot of control because you can change the tone by color (like using colored filters in the old film days, but with vastly more control), and it doesn't impose styles the way Silver Efex does. To be fair, I'm not a fan of canned filters in general and found that when I owned a current version of Nik, I ended up using only a very few filters.

 

[ShipleyNW]

In a former life, I was a film guy, a lab rat, the king of tri-x. My photo paper of choice was Ilford Cold Tone. Bought it by the 500-sheet box.

When I first started with digital I just used the standard Adobe B&W conversion, the button there in the Basic panel. (I think at the time, there was a dropdown of B&W styles under the "B&W" button in LRC, but I just used the standard, and now, I don't even see the dropdown in the current LRC.) I guess mathematically, that's zero saturation, or whatever, but I don't like that rendering at all. Too warm, too muddy for me.

So I made a preset, the only one I have. It does the Adobe B&W conversion, then, in the Color Grading panel, it adds, globally, 12 units of saturation in Blue-235. It's my version of that Ilford paper.

I use that preset instead of clicking the B&W button, but the preset does click the button so LRC recognizes the image as B&W, All the controls available for B&W fire up in the develop module. I have a Smart Collection that knows when that button's been pushed.

 

[paddler4]

A nifty idea. Thanks for posting. I too was a cold-tone fan in the wet-darkroom days (Agfa Brovira was my go-to), and I thought the warmer Kodak paper (I forget the name) that most people I knew used way back then looked blah. However, I've never tried making the straight B&W conversion in LR colder. I'll play with this.

 

[Patrick J]

I mostly use Silver Efex. There are still free copies floating around out there from before DXO acquired it. I like that it gives me a lot of looks, and then frequently I do some minor tweaks to the result after I go back into Capture One.