Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

Digital technology has led to a renaissance in both the appreciation and the practice of
black and white photography, especially in the United States. This is partly because most
digital cameras are fundamentally black and white instruments, despite their ability to
produce color. The Bayer filter adds color by placing red, blue, and green filters above
the individual light-collecting elements of the camera’s sensor, so to get the highest quality
of black and white is simply a matter of removing its effect. There are at least six
ways of doing this:
■ Desaturate the colors
■ Convert to grayscale
■ Convert to Lab mode
■ Use hue/saturation layers
■ Use the channel mixer
■ Use special software
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Black and White
Conversion
Of these methods, simple desaturation of the color is least effective, because it produces
images that look washed-out. Convert-to-grayscale is marginally better, as it takes
account of the different weights given to the filtered colors. In Photoshop the conversion
factor is 59% of the green, 30% of the red, and 11% of the blue channel.
Converting to Lab mode makes the process easier because you can delete the “a”
and “b” chroma channels to leave only the lightness channel. Playing with two hue/
saturation adjustment layers in Photoshop is a time-consuming but very effective option.