Black and White

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Marpel
Posts: 692
Joined: September 13th, 2009, 3:19 pm
What is the make/model of your primary camera?: Nikon D810
Location: Port Coquitlam, British Columbia

Black and White

Post by Marpel »

Disregarding for a second, any subsequent tonal manipulations for effect, is there a best method to initially convert a colour image into a black and white image.

I tried a straight Colour desaturation, then compared that result to a Convert > 16 bit black and white on the same colour image and, although visually similar, there is a difference when using Comp > Absolute Difference. Does this mean one method loses quality/detail more than the other, or is there a better method than these two?

Marv
jsachs
Posts: 4203
Joined: January 22nd, 2009, 11:03 pm

Re: Black and White

Post by jsachs »

The most straightforward method is to extract the Luminance channel which is a weighted average of the red, green and blue channels based on the eye's relative sensitivity to each color. I believe this is the method used in the Convert transformation. The default color of the Monochrome transformation when using the Filter method should also correspond very closely to the Luminance channel.
Jonathan Sachs
Digital Light & Color
couman
Posts: 82
Joined: April 25th, 2009, 8:44 am

Re: Black and White

Post by couman »

I often scan through the R,G,B, luminance, and brightness channels to see what I prefer for a particular image. If 2 or more have appealing features, I use stack images to combine them.
Bob Coutant
Marpel
Posts: 692
Joined: September 13th, 2009, 3:19 pm
What is the make/model of your primary camera?: Nikon D810
Location: Port Coquitlam, British Columbia

Re: Black and White

Post by Marpel »

O.K., thanks very much Jonathan and Bob for the suggestions.

Marv
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