I am going to put this out there right away.
I have a very strong disdain for a simple B/W conversion. OK, I hate them. I really do. There is nothing as boring to me as simply clicking in the camera or in post processing, the black and white button. Grrrr. B/W photographs give you such a great way to transmit depth and emotion to the viewer that I feel it almost becomes and escape route for some people. I almost always spend more time fine tuning my B/W photographs more than my color ones, regardless of the subject of my photograph. So when I see the hordes of photographs out there with just a simple conversion done, it really gets me going.
I will now stand down from my soap box and proceed with the Before and After 😀
Ok, here we go… straight out of the camera, my sister Hannah and her husband Drew. I took this photograph at McKinney Falls State Park, Austin TX when I showed up unannounced in Austin to visit my sister with pantyhose on my head.
The instant I saw this photograph I knew I wanted to move it over to a B/W. Here is a standard B/W conversion using Lightroom 3.0 after I cropped the tree out on the right.
Gag. Now I here I started to tweak it to tease out a little more of the depth I knew was there.
TRA Preset Concrete Jungle
Exposure: +.32
Fill Light: +30
(Tone Curve) Dark Tones: -16 to -41
(Tone Curve) Light Tones: -25 to -56
(Tone Curve) Highlight Tones: +22 to -5
Post Crop Vignette: -31
Grain Amount: +31
BOOM! Take that standard B/W conversion!!
