Digital BW, The Print

I'm new to posting here. Hope this is the right place to open this thread.

I've been using Adobe's Light Room beta since it became available. Also, quite naturally 
making comparisons with Aperture. Both quite promising apps for the professional, digital 
photographer the merits of which are probably best explored somewhere other than this 
forum. HOWEVER... significant to this black & white forum is an under-emphasized 
conversion tool available in LightRoom called the Grayscale Mixer. In my opinion as a black 
& white photographer, the Grayscale Mixer alone is justification for buying this software. 
When I began "playing" with it I approached it with more than modest scepticism. How 
surprised I was to eventually tap into its incredible power. I've explored and tried nearly 
every approach to converting digital color to black & white. My personal choices to date 
are the channel mixer in Photoshop, the calibrate tab in Bridge and a plug-in called 
Convert toBW Pro. I am so impressed with the Grayscale Mixer that I may begin to use it 
exclusively for all my conversions. It seems to give me the best of all my previous choices. 
It allows for finite control of scale and saturation of color channels; provides instant 
previews and is most intuitive. Needless to say it is used on RAW files. And, after spending 
nearly 40 years in a darkroom, using this tool seems to recall the "old" rush of 
watching your tests come up in the tray. Aditionally, there is an "auto" toggle in the 
Grayscale Mixer which, like many other "auto" options, I was inclined to ignore. DON'T 
IGNORE IT! Use it as a starting place and then tweak from there. Here's why: And I quote 
Michael Reichmann: 

"There is an important control at the upper left of the dialog box titled Auto. Here is what 
its purpose is, as described to me by the engineers at Adobe. A conventional Grayscale 
conversion such as you would get in Photoshop using the Mode menu, or even via some 
more complex techniques involving Lab and multichannel mode, or such as you would get 
by simply turning down the Saturation control in Lightroom's Develop or in ACR, just takes 
the colorimetric definition of how luminous a pixel is and uses that as the gray level. The 
results are independent of the actual colors in the image. So, if the colorimetry does not 
provide much differentiation, then the grayscale conversion will lack detail.
The Auto grayscale option in Lightroom looks for optimal settings for the grayscale mixer 
so that the line from black to white, instead of just following colorimetric definitions, 
follows a path that creates the greatest diversity of grayscale values, based on the 
distribution of colors in the image.

Translation: Auto does the best possible job of causing the maximum differentiation 
between tonalities."

Sorry about the lenghty post. It is simply the result of my excitement after using Grayscale 
Mixer and my desire to pass that along to those in this magnificent black & white forum.

Best,
King Dexter

> From: kingdex1
>
> Michael Reichmann:
>
> "There is an important control at the upper left of the dialog
> box titled Auto. Here is what
> its purpose is, as described to me by the engineers at Adobe. A
> conventional Grayscale
> conversion such as you would get in Photoshop using the Mode
> menu, or even via some
> more complex techniques involving Lab and multichannel mode, or
> such as you would get
> by simply turning down the Saturation control in Lightroom's
> Develop or in ACR, just takes
> the colorimetric definition of how luminous a pixel is and uses
> that as the gray level. The
> results are independent of the actual colors in the image. So, if
> the colorimetry does not
> provide much differentiation, then the grayscale conversion will
> lack detail.
> The Auto grayscale option in Lightroom looks for optimal settings
> for the grayscale mixer
> so that the line from black to white, instead of just following
> colorimetric definitions,
> follows a path that creates the greatest diversity of grayscale
> values, based on the
> distribution of colors in the image.

Interesting. I try to do this sort of thing with Curves, while watching the
histogram. I can't try it since the beta is Mac only, but I expect this
feature will appear in the next version of Photoshop.

--

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@...