the nuts and bolts of black and white

CONVERTING DIGITAL COLOUR TO MONOCHROME
If you are frustrated when using the chanel mixer in photoshop,or annoyed at the way a black and white convert in lightroom becomes patchy easily if you are not careful with those colour sliders,this might be the tool for you!!

Silver efex pro from nik software is in my opinion the only place to make Colour to black-and-white conversions.

It runs from within photo shop,lightroom, and aperture,and it provides you with a easy to navigate interface with several options to control your black and white conversion.

some of these options include,

grain structure for 16 classic films,

colour filters,good toning options,

and a fantastic zone system indicator which shows you show how the tones in your image fall into zones from 1 to 10 (a great help in avoiding clipping.)

click on the title above to go to the trial download page(click the lessons tab for demos of the key features of the program)

When printing, to avoid metamerism,(the appearance of a nasty colour cast in certain lighting situations),i generally apply a light copper tone to my outputs in silver efex pro.

as with all good plugins or filters your favourites can be saved and applied with one click in the future.

If anybody knows of a better tool please let me know,but for now this one is tops

revelations

Listening to someone who has produced some fantastic work in the past is a huge revelation.
all your preconceptions about how work is staged, found, or created, can and sometimes are, blown away!!

here are two such revalations

one from Alec soth and one from Gregory Crewsdon

they are both artists working with the large format of 8x10 inches

but they have vastly different ways of seeing,and of working.

both these clips are some years old,but still have a big message.

what do you think?

find alec soth here

find good info on a recent exibition by gregory crewsdon here