Black & White how?

[sagar]

How does people get so beautiful B&W ricoh? Is using in camera B&W is the way to get these classic look B&W or is it something thats handled in post processing?

Thanks to this forum, I recently bought GRDIII and loving it and still learning how to use the thing to best of its and my ability

 

[odklizec]

It depends Photos from GRDII are better postprocessed from DNG. There is just too excessive noise reduction applied in GRDII JPEGs. GRDI is the king of B&W photography without the need to bother with DNG. GRDIII is a mixed bag. Most of photos are fine in B&W without the need of postprocessing. Maybe not as good as GRDI but very close. It's good to add some contrast and sharpness, but it all depends on your taste.

 

[thelps]

How does people get so beautiful B&W ricoh? Is using in camera B&W is the way to get these classic look B&W or is it something thats handled in post processing?

Thanks to this forum, I recently bought GRDIII and loving it and still learning how to use the thing to best of its and my ability

sagar, best results can be made by post processing, perhaps try Silkypix and have a look at your RAW files with this, most use a desaturate slider to make B/W but there is the issue of colour channels and how much you choose to take from each colour channel to make your BW image. Photoshop is quite powerful and there are some tutorials on the net about this.

There are some BW conversion apps that specifically exist for this purpose. Perhaps have a look at Nik software Silver Efx Pro

 

[sagar]

Pavel, Tim

Thank you very much that is indeed helpful

 

[funkaoshi]

I almost exclusively just use the B&W mode on the camera. Usually I shoot with contrast and sharpness increased by one. (Sometimes I'll up contrast by 2.) I have a GRDII. Apparently the B&W isn't as nice, but I can't say it's kept me up at night.

Examples on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=B%26W+R ... &s=rec&z=m

 

[Grus74]

Here is one tip that I saved. From this forum Sorry Wouter but I'll just copy and paste because I'm too lazy to search for the original post. Hope this is okey

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B/W by Wouter from http://www.ricohforum.com

Thank you. I use the DNG-files for the B&W conversion and my primary tool is Adobe Lightroom as well. I have set my camera to B&W so my LCD screen displays the scene in B&W too. For the B&W conversion in Lightroom I don't use the Grayscale option. Instead I drag all the sliders for Saturation in the HSL section to -100. After that I go to the Luminance section and select the Targeted Adjustment tool to adjust the luminance amount of the individual colourchannels to increase the contrast. The final step is Tone Curve. I set the sharpness to zero and export a 16 bit TIFF to Photoshop and do the sharpening there and some localized adjustment with the Curves and layermasks.
It sounds difficult maybe and timeconsuming, but within 10 minutes I process a photograph.

I already started testing Lightroom 2.0 Beta. The most important new feature is local adjustments. I like that so far, alhtough it is still a bit slow (but it is a beta).
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