Lightroom Tutorial: Color to Grayscale
February 11th, 2009The photo isn’t the ultimate best ever, but it gets closer by the end. My apologies for the intermittent hum. I’ve spent all afternoon trying to figure out why it comes in and out and the only thing I can figure is that the headset I’m using is cheap. I’m wondering if I need a line conditioner or voltage regulator in our office. Probably. o
Tags: grayscale, lightroom, lightroom tutorial, tutorial
While I loved what you did with the picture of Coco, I was a little disappointed with this one, and really preferred the colour pic.
I think you got the effect you wanted with the contrast on the main branch, and I loved the depth it gave to the mess of smaller branches, but for me the thing which didn’t work so well was the effects of shadows on, and the crystalline appearance of, the snow.
Still, I am very impressed with lightroom as a product, and your skill in using it! Thanks very much for the tutorials
Thanks for the demo. I’m gonna have to give Lightroom a spin one of these days.
And speaking of “Color to Grayscale” (in case it’s of interest to Photoshop users): I was once taught a method for converting color to grayscale that, according to the instructor, produced an end result more comparable to actual black-and-white film output than merely changing the image mode from “RGB” (or “CMYK” or “LAB”) to “Grayscale.” It’s a pretty subtle difference, but I think he was right. It involves using “Image -> Calculations.” I was going to post the instructions here, with links to an example image, but it felt like I might be hijacking this post. With your permission, Jon, I’ll post it here (about 300 words). If not, and anyone is interested, you can email me at daddy [at] daddyscratches [dot] com.
(P.S.: I’m who made the comment about the green channel (back in your RAW vs. JPG showdown), but my remark pertained only to using the green channel for sharpening, and not for any other adjustements.)
Why not post it as a blog post on your site and link to it from here??
Good point! Done.
I humbly offer up my own little color-to-grayscale tutorial for Photoshop users. Sadly, it’s all still images and text rather than a cool audio/video presentation, but I think it does the job. Hopefully, someone else will find it worthwhile.
I’d be interested. I tend to like very sharp black and white prints…which is hard to accomplish in Photoshop at time, especially without a great calibrated monitor like I once had with a Mac.
Thanks for the tutorial, for a novice like me it really helped. I’m excited to try it on some of my photos.
You’re welcome! I tried to do this one to provide a range of tutorials. I’m hoping to do a lot more over the coming weeks.
Yay! Thank you for continuing the tutorial work. Us n00bs really appreciate it!
Great tutorials Jon!! Love Love LOVE Lightroom. Lately it seems like all I ever use.
re: hum
Do you have your machines running on UPS (uninterruptable power power supply)?
If I’m not mistaken the UPS also does power conditioning.
Hey Jon,
Can I request a couple of things in way of advice/tutorials?
If you ever use actions, how do you set them up in Lightroom or can you?
Also, printing…advice on getting true tonal colors. I’m having a hard time outputting an image in colors I see on the monitor. I know various machines print in varying degrees of underlying tones (Kodak was always too red for me, Fuji…too green). It’s especially difficult with black and white since they are printing digitally from color files most of the time I believe.
I can not for the life of me remember alot of my old graphics stuff. But when we sent things for printing it seemed as if a photo file could be printed in true black and white, ie meaning the color information taken out completely in the file instead of just having it converted from CMYK (for magazine printing).
Am I imagining that as being the case? Is there something you can do to the RGB/CMYK that will leave only the black and white?
Without true photo labs with dark room processing any longer, is there a particular digital lab you like that you send images to or do you guys print everything yourselves at home? I find I print out stuff less and less after numerous disappointments with prints.