Earth Day March, Montreal, April 2012

[bhurley]

A huge crowd (estimated at 250,000) turned out for Earth Day this year in Montréal, and I took a few photos. The black and whites were processed in-camera; I was aiming for the old-style journalistic look but it's a bit too contrasty for my taste. In future I would shoot these RAW and convert after the fact.

[Geoff F]

You normally lose a bit of fine detail with the auto B&W conversion, Brad.

You can use the colour images which you have and experiment with some of the different B&W conversion methods to find out which suits you best; depending on your software.

Modern software can give you the opportunity to tweak colours independently to get the best blend; although this does take a bit of skill and experimentation.

Previously, I used the Channel Mixer method but included a Hue & Saturation layer which I could use to alter colours and affect the monochrome tones. Easier but a bit coarser in application.

[bhurley]

Thanks Geoff. These were not much more than snapshots; I don't have a lot of experience in street photography and am always a bit shy about it (some people clearly don't like having their photo taken at public events), so I took the easy way out. Plus this was a new camera to me so I was experimenting. I've done B&W from RAW files before and much prefer the result but it does take time to do it well.

There are some really good tips on effective B&W processing in the (wonderful) video tutorials on Lightroom by Michael Reichmann and Jeff Schewe. I've learned an awful lot from those videos, which to me are the gold standard for software instruction: instead of the usual approach of running through menus and showing you what a program is capable of doing, they take you through the process of importing, cataloguing, and editing RAW files from start to finish, so you understand the workflow.