Black and White help!

Please tell me if this conversion is ok?

I have been looking at this pic on and off all day and cannot make up my mind.

Do their faces look grey or are my eyes going funny?





This is my second bash..............

just had a play with what you posted and it looks as if the whites have blown slightly. What I worked on was the dress shoulder strap on the girl, you can pull out a lot more detail.

AS I said I can only work on what you have posted and no doubt do a lot better working on the original.

bazza

Hi Jols ,

Hard to tell , with such a small image . Can you load the original .

All I can say is , on my monitor (Mac) your image looks better than Bazza's version , sorry Bazza

I don't think I can load it any bigger............

Thanks for your help Baz I think it looks very over sharpened.......

Jols version much better than Bazza's (sorry but that's just not great :/), but still a bit grey and flat looking. Can you e-mail me the original colour file Jols? (in RAW if you have it?), as I'd like to play about with it a bit for you if you didn't mind of course? I can see if I can get anything you like and explain what I did

xx

Otta

Every monitor will make it look different. I have an IPS monitor which is about the best you can get for photographic work. In my version I posted no sharpening was done just altered the overblown whites.

There is no way I would go back to any other monitor version and to be honest I would even go as far as saying every other monitor is rubbish compared with it.
Of course again a lot depends on the graphic card as well, here again I used a specialist video card a 1GB GTX560Ti Twin Frozen 11 40nm,420mhz gddr5, GPU880MHZ Shader 1760MHz 384core

Having done research the intel i7 2700ks1155 sandy bridge quad core3.5ghz 8mbcache,HD300 IGP 850MHZ 95W is about the very best yet again for photographic work. The intel i3 and i5 after a lot of research just isn't good enough but again ok for ordinary computer work.

For example this computer has 6 cooling fans to keep it running at peak efficiency not withstanding the 16 gig of ram which it has plus a huge hard drive.

The total setup if you could even get one in a shop (which you can't) would cost well over £4500, including large backup external hard drive and expensive speakers for my videos

I always thought my Samsung monitors were good until I got this dell ultrasharp IPS monitor. Now the quality of Samsung is ok for ordinary computer work but absolutely useless when working on photos, I have and still am reworking all my photos to what they should be.

I can't stress enough how important a purpose hand built computer is for photograpic work. You would be staggered at the amount of time spent on research and talking to several computer builders to get the best within my budget, some didn't seem to even understand my strict requirements and tried to fob me off with sub standard or unsuitable parts. I even went over budget to get better components.

Bazza

thanks Z could you pm me your e mail, I am afraid I don't do raw..... but any help greatly received.

Baz ........... your post was all way above me I either like a photo or I don't..... x x x

Jols
At the end of the day its what you or your clients happy with that counts not what I or anyone else says or thinks.

Its just that in my old age I am getting more fussy I suppose, and in a position to demand the best for non commercial use. Obviously there are many (and I was one of them) who are happy with the computers they use.

As i said in my previous post absolutely no sharpening was done its just I have the means to bring out a little more detail.

Zounds
Any photo downloaded from a site and put on a computer then sent to an on line image store and from there back onto a web site is going to deteriorate. So yes you may well be right but also be aware of the processes its gone through. The image store site may not reproduce the best either, many make photos look flat.

I think you may well agree that working on a copy of the original is really the only way to go


next step is me going senile

Bazza

Agree Baz................ The client is me ha ha ........ just a relatives wedding .

I no longer partake in the world of wedding photography, I just take photos for fun now.

And strangely the older I get the less fussy I get about some things, but grey looking black and white photos are getting my heckles up....




Uploaded my second..........any better??

Hi Jols, I don't think your original looks bad at all in terms of the faces being grey, the direct flash has made things look a little harsh, but I know it's not always possible to bounce the flash.

You could try different colour tone filters before converting to B/W, this will give you more control over how the final tones will look with regard to each other, although this may be a little time consuming.