@patdavid 's article on digital B&W conversion was extremely helpful to me while processing this picture. In the past, when I went B&W with a picture, I would just use GIMP’s “desaturate” command, with whatever of the 3 options looked best.
This time around, I used Pat’s color decompose script linked in his article. Then I broke the picture down into different sections - the girl’s face, girl’s jacket, bottles on the shelf, wall and floor underneath the glass window, and the money in her hand. I flipped through the different decompositions while examining each element of the picture to figure out what particular mode looked best, then used that layer with a mask to make it to the final image.
Then I “made new layer from visible” and adjusted global tone curves. Did some dodging on select areas, and called it complete. I tried sharpening some, but that made the pic look weird because of the noise in the picture being sharpened. I’m not sure if it makes sense to hit it with noise reduction, and then sharpen, or to leave it as is. My understanding is that noise reduction is the opposite of sharpening, so you do one or the other, but not both.
I’m not trying to teach other people how to do it because I am so new at this. I’m more writing this to show appreciation for everyone’s educational material that goes into this site and articles. I struggled for months trying to find info like this before landing on Pixls.us. There are courses all over the place for Photoshop and Lightroom, but very little for open source image editing software.
Here’s another B&W conversion picture that I get a lot of comments on - the girl in a cage picture. This was long before I saw Pat’s article. I have never really liked the look of the tones in this. I will probably redo it with these new techniques in mind.
Also, I am running Gimp 2.10.2 in Kubuntu and the color decomposition script threw these two errors, but still worked good enough for me.
Execution error for ‘Color Decompose’:
Error: Procedure execution of plug-in-decompose failedPlug-in ‘Color Decompose’ left image undo in inconsistent state, closing open undo groups.
Here’s the layers window from the liquor store picture. I deleted several layers that the script produced because I was not going to use them.
