This image of a 2003 Lincoln Aviator in Colorado’s “Garden of the Gods” was made with a Canon EOS 10D digital SLR, but was converted to monochrome. It purposely emulates Kodak’s Tri-X film shot with a red filter and gives a slight sepia tone. Getting this magnificent monochrome look was easy: I simply used one of the power tools featured below.
If you’ve ever worked with Photoshop, or its little brother, Photoshop Elements, you may already know this. It is a socially acceptable way of converting color digital images into black-and-white photographs. It involves using Adobe’s built-in controls to produce the desired monochrome effects. You can use Photoshop’s built-in Grayscale mode (Image>Mode>Grayscale), Desaturate command (Image>Adjustments>Desaturate), or the ever-popular Channel Mixer (Image> Adjustments>Channel Mixer) that lets you mix color channels to produce a more or less black-and-white image.
Use power tools
Instead of using these hand tools, wouldn’t it be better—and faster—to use power tools? When working with digital images, I believe in the “twenty-minute” rule. If it doesn’t look the way you want in twenty minutes, chances are you’re never going to get it right.
My own power tools are Photoshop-compatible plug-ins, and I work with many different image editing programs. Including Adobe PhotoDeluxe and Photoshop Elements, JASC Paint Shop Pro, Ulead Systems’ PhotoImpact, Corel’s Painter, Dabbler, and PhotoPaint, as well as MicroFrontier’s Color-It, Enhance, and Digital Darkroom. All the techniques you’ll see here leave the original color file in its original RGB format, although monochrome, in color.
B/W Conversion is part of Nik Multimedia’s Color Efex Pro package of plug-ins and is the easiest to use. You simply move three sliders back and forth slightly to achieve the effect you want which can be seen in its oh-so-tiny, preview window.
For the purists
SilverOxide offers plug-ins that emulate specific black-and-white films from Agfa, Ilford, and Kodak. If you love shooting Kodak’s Tri-X film, as in this example, you can apply the same color spectrum as your favorite film to your digital image files. Not only that, Silver Oxide gives you the option of making the image look as if it was shot using your choice of a yellow, green, red, or no filter. For a list of the available film emulations, visit their website. Oh yeah, they make an infrared plug-in too.
One of the cleverest monochrome conversion tools is Convert to B&W Pro from The Imaging Factory. The plug-in is divided into four sections and you can use any or all of them together. The first section lets you apply a colored filter to the image and a color picker selects the exact filter color and strength. The next section emulates several kinds of black-and-white film. Including Agfa Pan APX, Ilford Delta (used here), Kodak Tri-X, Ilford FP-4, Kodak T-Max, or Kodak Tri-X. The third section gives you the option of mimicking different kinds of paper grades used in the traditional wet darkroom. Plus, the Toning section lets you tone or tint the image in a seemingly infinite number of colors.
Conclusion
All of these power tools are available for Mac OS and Windows computers and are available as downloadable trial versions from their respective manufacturer’s websites so you can try them with your own images to see which one fits the way that you prefer to work.
All photographs ©2003 Joe Farace
Joe Farace is a Colorado-based photographer/writer who has written or edited 24 books. His book “Plug-in Smart” is available through www.joefarace.com.
