B&W adjustment layer in CS3

[Rasbury]

Went digging through my books today and pulled out Advanced Digital B&W photography by John Beardsworth to try to get a handle on converting my images to B&W.This is my first real attempt at doing this kind of work and would like some C&C on how my image looks.Have posted the original color photo.
I do like B&W photography very much and will appreciate all the help i can get.And i guess reading about it will help me also

[jiro]

Considering that you are using CS3 and probably you used the black and white adjustment tool available at CS3, I think that's a pretty good conversion to me, Ron. Usually, an image with lots of color information is a very good candidate for a nice black and white image. Seeing that your image above mostly composes of yellow and green hues, there are only few ways to really convert it to a gray scale image. I did an edit, too on your colored image and I can only really push it that far that is something similar to your edit. The only difference is that I lowered the contrast so the veins on the petals are showing more.

Here's my edit using CS5's black and white tool and some curve adjustment layer added:


And here's a straight black and white neutral edit using NIkSoftwares' Silver Efex Pro version 1 without adjusting any of the sliders:


I think your edit comes close to what SEP 1 did!

[Rasbury]

Thanks Willie.I would love to get SEP but i need other items first(such as a fast prime lens).The buds in the upper left hand corner look good on the SEP edit as mine ended up a little to bright for my taste.And i would have never thought of reducing the contrast to bring out the detail in the veins of the petals.I attempted to burn those areas but that would have been a time consuming project on it's own.Thanks again...Ron

[hoddo]

Here's a tut by Lee Varis and is a technique that generally works exceptionally well http://issuu.com/varis_photomedia/do...owFlipBtn=true

[Rasbury]

Here's a tut by Lee Varis and is a technique that generally works exceptionally well http://issuu.com/varis_photomedia/do...owFlipBtn=true

Thanks for the link.Have been to his site before and really like his work.Also have his book"Mastering Exposure and the Zone System" which has some of the same tuts on his web site.

[hoddo]

And Lee's Skin book is excellent. Most interesting of all though is a new skin softening technique he recently posted as a video tutorial. Lee openly informs that the routnie isn't his invention but must say it's quick and hugely effective using methods leaving you to scratch your head before you play yourself.

[The Blue Boy]

Hey guys,

Alot of people often forget that you can process the raw file twice. One for colour, then again for the b & w version, then combine the two as layers. I'm with colin when he says everything that can be done in raw, should be done in raw. Besides it's got more sliders!