If you are a B&W lover like me you know that there are zillions of ways to convert a color photo into B&W. If you are still hooked to the days of B&W film you would probably like to know how to emulate film with a digital camera. Some say the best way to do this is to buy a nice film camera on Ebay and scan the films in the computer and voila, best of both worlds. That’s all fine, but also a lot of work and mostly work you’re not paid for. Furthermore I have far more fun with a camera in the field than behind my Mac spending hours on one picture.

I’ll give you three efficient ways to convert color into B&W. I use them quite a lot because of the time/quality ratio. The first is a Photoshop action from Kent Christiansen, you can find the pdf here and you can download the action itself on this page. It’s 3 years old but still very powerful because of its huge control.

Laura.jpg

Play with it you’ll like it and it saves time with still a high quality output, like the one above, entirely done in 15 minutes. The second one is one from Katrin Eismann. It’s a conversion in the PS RAW editor. Simply go to the saturation tab, set all colors to zero and use the lumination sliders to play with all the tones. It prevents you from banding and noise. Use it for landscapes quite a lot.

The one above was done with the RAW method (click for large). Editing time about 20 minutes.

The great thing of the methods above is that they are fast and for free. There’s a way that I consider as my personal best and that is to use Silver Efex Pro from NIK software. Expensive but very, very versatile. You can find here some lessons which give you an impression of it’s power. There’s also a free 15 days trial version. Julia below was done with the NIK plugin (click photo for large). The film emulation is top notch as well btw.

Just three methods, but there are zillions of others out there. If you would like to share others please do and … keep following lights.