I'm looking for a great way to do Black and Whites. I find when i do them skin tones end up looking kind of muddy and the pictures look kind of dead looking. I usually use the RAW dialogue, drop the saturation then play with contrast, shadows, recovery etc....
just wondering if anyone has a better way of doing them?
Try out this tutorial B&W Conversion. It describes several straightforward methods to convert to B/W. If you are using CS4, you can also use the b/w filter and choose the color of filter to give you the look you are after.
hey Kelli... virtual photographer looks pretty awesome... but is there a mac version? or a program just like it for mac that you or anyone else knows of?
Not sure that you're interested in buying a program/plugin, but Silver Efex Pro is so awesome for B&W. I use it exclusively ever since I got it. Super fast, very easy, completely intuitive.
hey Kelli... virtual photographer looks pretty awesome... but is there a mac version? or a program just like it for mac that you or anyone else knows of?
Sorry, I'm on a PC so I never looked. But it appears there is no mac version. They claimed back in our own forums in 2004 that they were looking into a mac version, but I see nothing has yet to come of it. From a google search, it appears people run virtual PC on their macs to use it.
If you use Photoshop, the channel mixer is a good way of doing the conversion. I use PaintShop pro, which does not have a good channel mixer, so I use either Topaz Detail or this plugin to do my B/W stuff:
