I recently read a very good article on several different black and white conversion processes on Matt Greer’s Photography Blog. I had taken this picture of some reeds by the ocean that had some very dramatic looking clouds that I thought would look great in black and white so I decided to test a few of the methods he mentioned on this photo and share the results on my blog.

First here is the original photo in color. Like I said I am pretty happy with this shot but It just seemed like this photo was asking to be converted to black and white. Now to see how the conversions turned out:

(Viewing Hint: If you want to quickly cycle through the photos click on the first image then hit the arrows on the bottom of the page to go through each one.)

Channel Mixer BW Conversion Process

The first method I tried was the channel mixer method because it seemed like it would be the easiest one to try. I converted it to monochrome as the tutorial said and then played around with the red, green, and blue sliders until I was happy with the results. It came out pretty good but the image felt flat somehow. It seemed like it needed deeper blacks. Here is the image after the channel mixer black and white conversion process:

LAB BW Conversion Process

Second, I tried the LAB black and white conversion method. It says in the tutorial that this method is more for portraits but I still wanted to see how it would turn out on this image. As you can see this one has even less blacks and less contrast then the channel mixer method. Below is the result of the LAB conversion process:

Greg Gorman BW Conversion Process

Next I tried the Greg Gorman conversion process. I downloaded the Greg Gorman photoshop action from ATNCentral (you can find the action at this link) and ran it as described in Matt’s tutorial. I was pretty happy with the result. This one had deeper blacks and higher contrast that made the clouds look alot more dramatic. Here is the image after this process:

Finished BW Conversion

Since I liked how this particular image looked with the Gorman method the best I decided to play around with the curves, levels, and color fill layers until I was happy with the results. Here is the final finished result of the image after all my adjustments:

Overall for this particular image of the three methods I tried my favorite version of the photo was the BW conversion of the Greg Gorman method. I am sure for other photos I would prefer some of the other methods I tested. Hopefully this post will be of some use by letting you see firsthand what some of the different bw conversion methods look like on one image.

If you are looking to try your hand at some black and white conversions check out these and other methods on Matt Greer’s Blog post about black and white conversion.

Which version of the photo do you prefer? The original color version, the channel mixer conversion process, The LAB conversion process, or the Greg Gorman conversion process?