B&W integrity question

[LI Joec]

I have been booted out of a few groups for posting this Flower picture. It was processed in B&W and I tinted it with color grading with a bit of blue to soften it up.

is it wrong to consider it B&W? Is sepia wrong also? or is it some people are just 100% over the top of being purists?

Here is both versions of the image, tell me what do you think and which one you prefer.

5W2A6180-Edit-2-2 by Joseph Colozzo, on Flickr

B&W macro flower by Joseph Colozzo, on Flickr

 

[Anton Largiader]

Sounds like it's more of a rules issue with specific groups. I haven't lived in that world but I can see there being a monochrome vs. B&W thing going on. You are adding color... it may be monochrome (depending on how you did it) but it is not B&W. Adding color for a mood is exactly contrary to the intent of B&W and if you insisted on posting colored images in a B&W forum I can see there being a lot of pushback.

 

[LI Joec]

Sounds like it's more of a rules issue with specific groups. I haven't lived in that world but I can see there being a monochrome vs. B&W thing going on. You are adding color... it may be monochrome (depending on how you did it) but it is not B&W. Adding color for a mood is exactly contrary to the intent of B&W and if you insisted on posting colored images in a B&W forum I can see there being a lot of pushback.

that makes sense, more of a monochrome. I don't live in this world either hense my ignorance. it was something new for me to try with the tinge of blue done in color grading (lightroom). I don't do a lot of B&W/monochrome images that's why I came here to get a better understanding. If I got booted out for rules I don't stamp my feet, I just want to learn why.

Thanks for the perspective.

 

[Cliff Hilbert]

I used to be in a forum like those, Joe, and I booted them off my computer. Who needs them?

 

[Anton Largiader]

I used to be in a forum like those, Joe, and I booted them off my computer. Who needs them?

Without knowing the backstory, I could also hypothesize that the B&W forum folks were saying, "People who post color, who needs them?"

A quick scan through a few of the so-called B&W threads here show a lot of color in there. Just because we're sloppy about it doesn't mean everyone has to be. If I were serious about B&W, I'd probably want the B&W threads to really be B&W.

 

[LI Joec]

Without knowing the backstory, I could also hypothesize that the B&W forum folks were saying, "People who post color, who needs them?"

A quick scan through a few of the so-called B&W threads here show a lot of color in there. Just because we're sloppy about it doesn't mean everyone has to be. If I were serious about B&W, I'd probably want the B&W threads to really be B&W.

I hear what you are saying. I guess it comes down the the way we losely use terms nowadays and people more dedicated to a style such as B&W know the difference and want to be true to the meaning. I get that 100% and I'm sure dealing with so many people that ignore their requests that their the tolerence has become zero. Which I also understand. It was 100% my fault I just wanted another perspective to educate myself.

 

[paddler4]

The terminology is arbitrary, but I think Anton hit the nail on the head: that group is distinguishing between B&W and monochrome. I'll be they would object to old sepia prints too.

In any case, I wouldn't consider this a matter of "integrity". It's just a matter of conforming to his arbitrary rule. And by arbitrary, I'm not disparaging it. I just mean that they could just as easily placed the limit somewhere else. Frankly, I wouldn't be interested in a group with that narrow a perspective, but there's nothing wrong with it.

 

[Anton Largiader]

The terms are used interchangeably (and often incorrectly) in the real world, but I wouldn't call the terminology arbitrary. My take on it is that B&W removes color as a distraction in cases where it does not help the photo, allowing the merits of the photo to show themselves in composition, lighting, texture, etc. It is by definition grayscale.

We hang onto sepia as a technique, not because it's the sole (or nearly so) chemistry that's available to us, but because... we like the color. The color. It's a whole different thing than B&W, we allow that color to give warmth to the image in a way that can't be done in B&W. I'm not a student of this stuff but I suppose sepia is at least originally monochrome and you can do monochrome with other colors as well.

I just took a photo from yesterday and did a quick edit in DPP. After reading this thread, I though maybe the colors in it didn't really add anything but rather amplified the defects such as smudges and dirt. I liked the blue sky but that's about all. The button for turning all of the saturation sliders down was labelled... Monochrome! From there, adding one color back in becomes selective coloring, not monochrome (I think selective coloring covers a few different things, like allowing one hue back into the photo or allowing one item to remain colored) because you have a B&W image with one color reintroduced.

Joe, what did you do to create those images? Did you substitute a bluescale for a grayscale? Would you consider them monochrome? I really know very little about the various processing techniques for monochrome.

 

[LI Joec]

The terms are used interchangeably (and often incorrectly) in the real world, but I wouldn't call the terminology arbitrary. My take on it is that B&W removes color as a distraction in cases where it does not help the photo, allowing the merits of the photo to show themselves in composition, lighting, texture, etc. It is by definition grayscale.

We hang onto sepia as a technique, not because it's the sole (or nearly so) chemistry that's available to us, but because... we like the color. The color. It's a whole different thing than B&W, we allow that color to give warmth to the image in a way that can't be done in B&W. I'm not a student of this stuff but I suppose sepia is at least originally monochrome and you can do monochrome with other colors as well.

I just took a photo from yesterday and did a quick edit in DPP. After reading this thread, I though maybe the colors in it didn't really add anything but rather amplified the defects such as smudges and dirt. I liked the blue sky but that's about all. The button for turning all of the saturation sliders down was labelled... Monochrome! From there, adding one color back in becomes selective coloring, not monochrome (I think selective coloring covers a few different things, like allowing one hue back into the photo or allowing one item to remain colored) because you have a B&W image with one color reintroduced.

Joe, what did you do to create those images? Did you substitute a bluescale for a grayscale? Would you consider them monochrome? I really know very little about the various processing techniques for monochrome.

I personaly do not know what the name of what I did should be.

What I did was in lightroom, I hit the B&W button and edited it for that.

When I was done I went down to the color grading panel and added the slightest bit of blue to the shadows and midtones.

from there I went to photoshop for a hair of sharpening and adding the border.

 

[Cliff Hilbert]

There's a way to let people know what you're doing is different from what their specific forums are about, there is a good way and an ugly way. Unfortunately, on the internet people tend to let their worst sides show and are downright nasty, those are the ones I don't need. On this forum we are requested to only post the same picture two times at the most. Some people regularly post the same picture several times on different threads, but there is no reason to get ugly about it, it's not that big a thing. But on some other forums participants would get quite ugly that a rule is broken or bent, that seems to be the situation with Joe. Joe, if those forums are going to get that upset because you bent a rule that you didn't even know about, then you don't need them and are better off without them.

 

[paddler4]

LR B&W will remove all color, making in B&W. You then added some back, making it "monochrome".

In restoring old monochrome or B&W photos, I usually remove all color and then add back sepia at the end in the rare cases I want it. I generally don't do other monochrome, but that's just me.

 

[ShipleyNW]

With digital, there's really no such thing as B&W. You're just pulling the color saturation data out of what the camera recorded. If you look at the B&W presets included with Lightroom alone, there are dozens of them, and they are all very much different from each other, but all marketed as B&W.

Back when I was shooting B&W film, which when developed produced a color-free negative, the presentation layer was the print, and the medium was the paper. My general preference for paper was Ilford Cold Tone Multigrade. It had a bluish cast that gave it more of a fine-art look in my opinion. Every camera store that sold photo paper sold both warm-tone and cold-tone varieties of that paper. There is no definition of B&W that would exclude prints made on Ilford Code Tone.

I have noticed that most digital B&W presets are very much warm toned. Digital seems to have settled on that as the default. The only preset I've built and kept is one that converts color to Adobe-default B&W, then adds 12% of 235-blue saturation globally with the color grader. That's my implementation of Ilford Cold Tone B&W.

 

[paddler4]

With digital, there's really no such thing as B&W. You're just pulling the color saturation data out of what the camera recorded. If you look at the B&W presets included with Lightroom alone, there are dozens of them, and they are all very much different from each other, but all marketed as B&W.

Sorry, but this doesn't make sense to me. B&W is an image that has only black, white, and shades of gray. This certainly exists with digital. I have a big, digital B&W print hanging a few meters from me.

I think you are mixing three things:

First, a "B&W" conversion may actually be monochrome. However, others aren't. For example, the LR B&W profile does not add color, AFAIK.

Second, the various "B&W" conversions differ in how they treat the three color channels. This is true of both monochrome and true B&W conversions. In effect, they are doing what one does with color filters in shooting B&W film. I don't use film emulations, but I think that is part of what they do as well.

Third, papers add another element to this--essentially, adding color cast to even perfectly B&W images. Back in the Pleistocene era when I shot only B&W film, most people I knew were using Kodak papers. I disliked their warm tone and instead usually used Agfa Brovira, which was a very cold white. The same is true now. When I print B&W, I have to choose the tone of the paper I use, and some are colder white than others. For example, one paper I use (no longer produced) is Breathing Color River Stone Satin Rag. It's a zero-OBA paper and is visibly warmer than something like Canson Baryta Photographique. That is, it adds a very small bit of color in the yellow-brown range. Does that mean that a purely B&W image printed on that paper is now monochrome, not B&W? If you answer yes, than all of my old friends who shot Tri-X and Plus-X and printed on Kodak paper were making monochrome images, not B&W.

 

[ShipleyNW]

Sorry, but this doesn't make sense to me. B&W is an image that has only black, white, and shades of gray. This certainly exists with digital. I have a big, digital B&W print hanging a few meters from me.

I think you are mixing three things:

First, a "B&W" conversion may actually be monochrome. However, others aren't. For example, the LR B&W profile does not add color, AFAIK.

Second, the various "B&W" conversions differ in how they treat the three color channels. This is true of both monochrome and true B&W conversions. In effect, they are doing what one does with color filters in shooting B&W film. I don't use film emulations, but I think that is part of what they do as well.

Third, papers add another element to this--essentially, adding color cast to even perfectly B&W images. Back in the Pleistocene era when I shot only B&W film, most people I knew were using Kodak papers. I disliked their warm tone and instead usually used Agfa Brovira, which was a very cold white. The same is true now. When I print B&W, I have to choose the tone of the paper I use, and some are colder white than others. For example, one paper I use (no longer produced) is Breathing Color River Stone Satin Rag. It's a zero-OBA paper and is visibly warmer than something like Canson Baryta Photographique. That is, it adds a very small bit of color in the yellow-brown range. Does that mean that a purely B&W image printed on that paper is now monochrome, not B&W? If you answer yes, than all of my old friends who shot Tri-X and Plus-X and printed on Kodak paper were making monochrome images, not B&W.

Digital cameras don't record color. They only record data that is mapped to color by software. Somewhere, early on, some software engineer decided that a saturation value of zero maps to "this" and called it B&W. It appears to have become the default in the digital world. To my eye, "this" runs a little warm. I got no problem fixing that and I'm still going to call it B&W, even if it doesn't exactly, mathematically, match an arbitrary saturation zero.

(Have you ever tried to recover blown highlights in post from a color file? With no color data, you get that nasty, muddy, ugly, saturation-zero density. That's mathematically B&W.)

During the Pleistocene I used a lot of different photo papers, but I bought my Ilford Cold Tone by the 500-sheet box and it never occurred to me that I was making anything but B&W prints. I have several that I made during that era hanging a few meters from me. All B&W. All developed in Dektol, same as all the other B&W paper I used. No special handling required.

I worked at newspapers, and while I got to order my own supplies, the photo paper didn't matter at all. My photo prints were turned into halftones, then put on newsprint with black ink that each had their own tone. Other than a preference for glossy, the folks making the halftones didn't care at all about which photo paper it was on or whether it was really B&W. That question never came up. My preference for photo paper was entirely personal, and since nobody cared, I got cold tone. The price was the same, it handled the same, it was just another B&W paper in the cooler at the camera store.

Do all photo software packages produce the same tone for saturation zero? I'm not sure how we'd test that. Too much discrete hardware and software exists between the exposure and the presentation.

Colored filters used with B&W film work at the wavelength level. If you want to darken up your skies, you throw on a yellow filter. Yellow blocks the blue wavelength. Skies are mostly blue, and no blue light gets past the yellow filter to the negative, hence, darker skies. Software can mimic that based on color data the camera collected. While the actual light waves involved are long gone, the data is easily changed.

"If you answer yes, than all of my old friends who shot Tri-X and Plus-X and printed on Kodak paper were making monochrome images, not B&W."

You mentioned a lot of different B&W photo paper brands and types. Which one was your saturation zero? Which one influenced that engineer? Ilford Cold Tone was my zero for B&W. Still is.

 

[docholliday]

I'd ignore those groups for everything they are. Most of those groups are full of armchair fauxtographers who'd rather argue "monochrome" vs "B&W" than actually produce anything worthwhile to be seen. Those same idiots would also say a carbon fiber violin wouldn't be used by a real musician because it's not made of wood and wouldn't resonate properly.

In the (real) B&W world, where we printed in wet trays and dark rooms, one often ran cool tone papers for feel and selenium toner for protection. The result was still B&W - shot on something like Acros or Panatomic-X. One could process using a warm tone developer too and do a sepia, gold, or copper toner. It was still a B&W process, on B&W paper, and from a B&W neg. Nobody would even think about calling it "monochrome". It was pure and simple, a properly printed *and toned* B&W print.

Creating a B&W from a color capture in LR or C1 using the color sliders to contribute/remove from the B&W result is no different than attaching a red vs green, vs yellow filter in front of a lens for B&W neg - you are simply creating the proper B&W translation of a color scene.

Your "color" print simply looks like a cool tone Ilford or Agfa RC paper that's been selenium toned to me.

 

[docholliday]

As an additional note, your image is definitely not sepia. That's an orangish-brown, warm toned output. The purplish-blue is usually produced by a selenium toner or by an actual blue toner.

I also forgot to mention that there were B&W C-41 process films, to be printed using the RA-4 color process, like Iford XP-2. Those were still considered B&W prints, despite never being a neutral, pure black and white. They usually had some sort of color tint to them, caused by the RA-4 process. They weren't good, but were still "B&W".

 

[paddler4]

Creating a B&W from a color capture in LR or C1 using the color sliders to contribute/remove from the B&W result is no different than attaching a red vs green, vs yellow filter in front of a lens for B&W neg - you are simply creating the proper B&W translation of a color scene.

Thank you. that was a point I tried to make, but apparently not clearly. There are some differences, however. One is that one has far more control over this process when using digital. The second is that the results aren't fixed; you can decide long after the capture which colors you want to contribute more or less. I find that flexibility almost magical. With film, once the capture was complete, the effect of the filter was essentially fixed.

But in terms of what counts as "B&W", they are IMHO the same.

 

[docholliday]

Thank you. that was a point I tried to make, but apparently not clearly. There are some differences, however. One is that one has far more control over this process when using digital. The second is that the results aren't fixed; you can decide long after the capture which colors you want to contribute more or less. I find that flexibility almost magical. With film, once the capture was complete, the effect of the filter was essentially fixed.

But in terms of what counts as "B&W", they are IMHO the same.

We used to do the same in the darkroom by photographing the scene on color film and using a dichroic enlarger head to adjust along with masking. B&W papers are more sensitive to specific wavelengths of light so it allowed different densities to form when filtered differently. Granted it is much, much easier being able to play around with some sliders to get the end result that looks best! I definitely don't miss the hours of work making masks, dupe negs, and pin registering to get one final print.

The problem with digital is still getting that actual pure B&W output print. Even with the best B&W inks, they can't truly get the depth and richness of a silver print. One can get close with Cone inks, but it's just not the same. Most people would never know the difference.

 

[paddler4]

Most people would never know the difference.

I hadn't noticed it. I'll have to do some A/B comparisons, if I can dig up appropriate B&W prints.

 

[docholliday]

I hadn't noticed it. I'll have to do some A/B comparisons, if I can dig up appropriate B&W prints.

Yeah, those RA-4 B&W prints were always slightly undercontrast and had a slight bluish tint to them. In a viewing booth with something like a Pantone reference, the tint becomes very obvious. If you printed the same neg on something like Agfa or Ilford RC and processed in LPD, you'd get a whole lot more density and tonality out of it. By themselves, the RA-4 prints look decent, but it was very obvious when sat side-by-side with an actual silver print of the same neg.