A recent image shot in Liverpool where you can rent one of these electric scooters. I envisioned this monochrome image when shooting. I used drawn and parametric masks to get contrast between the scooter and background.
I am yet to master doing BW conversions in DT.
DSC00002.ARW.xmp (15.3 KB)
I have been wondering about techniques to make good B&W conversions from color raws. Is there a tutorial, anywhere (for darktable)?
In Gimp Iike to use the rgb curves to simulate the use of color contrast filters before desaturating the image. Here I have used rgb curves in DT to simulate a cyan green filter before turning to monochrome.
Sorry, no tutorial here. I’m the learning by doing guy. My philosophy on BW is a constant search for contrast.
Quite a nice job.
Hundreds on youtube
I am a “learn by reading” guy. Old fashioned, I know. But to me, the advantage of reading is that if I want to understand something better, I just look back and re-read. With video, you have to rewind and search, rewind and search. To me, that is painful.
Yes I can absolutely understand that. For most things I see it like you. Things I learned by reading tend to stay much longer in my brain.
My big realization is that, when starting with a color image, you can do all sorts of damage to the color prior to inflicting the monochrome operator to do interesting things with the tonality. It also helps if your monochrome tool has a channel mixer…
There’s more to grayscale conversion than meets the eye!
Scroll to the right to see all the variants and scroll down to see all the color source images.
Here’s what I did. For some background, our brains tend to see walls as perfectly horizontal, even on hills. So after I worked on it, I made the wall straight.
Sorry, I can’t find the .xmp file. I used a red filter to make the scooter stand out from the wall. A parametric mask to separate it from the wall and a bit of vignetting…
Another attempt in darktable. I took Glenn’s advice and did not do anything with the colors before taking out all of the color. I do think it looks better than my first try, but I can’t say that everything else was done identically. In fact, it certainly was not.
Oooh, my advice is reverse of this. Crank up the color with a nasty HSL saturation tool, monochrome that, see what you get… 
Hi Tim
The best tutorials I have found are from Boris Hajdukovic Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@s7habo), episodes 48, 49 and 50.
I understand you do not like to follow videos, but these are really very good.
Best regards,
So I am not alone. I too learn best from reading.
@Popanz I looked at and worked through the history steps of your edit. What I learnt from that is to apply monochrome early in the edit but then play with various color options including color calibration module and color zones later. This method lets you see in real time how the conversion will be impacted. It is also another example of why the history stack and the pipeline need to be different. Thanks for the edit and the XMP file.
I think Boris actually advocates to edit the photo as normal and then decide how to convert it. I suspect there are several nuances to the way people are going to decide to do their conversions…
