This ones all about the tones.
1st effort turned out naff…
Not sure what you’d call that shade
2nd ones less naff (at least on my contrasty screen).
Maybe you could do better
23-08-13_MG_5328.CR2 (19.5 MB)
23-08-13_MG_5328.CR2.xmp (20.7 KB)
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Bonus points if you can tell who I blatantly blagged - photo & photographer
Not sure what we are doing here 
But I had fun.
Thanks for the play
Hi,
fair point, context is everything
Westons Pepper No. 30 got over $3 million at auction and I thought sure, for 3 mill I could do that. Turns out no I couldn’t.
Options, find an ugly wrinkled pepper that’ll throw deeper shadows or crank up the contrast, tone curve (other?) and force that sickly grey* to a darker black
yours turned out pretty good, will have a look at the xmp
sickly grey* again, at least on my monitor, yemv.
With DT 4.4.2
Square format with lateral blur and grain
Greetings!
That was interesting… 
I applied a pretty steep manual tone curve to get the global contrast and then tried to find a balance for the local contrast (did push the sliders a fair bit). These changes can surely also be done in filmic + DoS, but i often like the easier approach of tone curve and local contrast.
Also tried with the R, G and B slider in color calibration for the b/w conversion, but couldn’t settle for something specific.
I think, it’s a delicate task, to find just the right balance for a fine tonality. I’m also interested in other approaches.
Maybe you are on the right track here 
But after reading the first few paragraphs, it’s probably hard, to beat several years of experience in the topic.
Hi,
yeah, lighting’s not the only thing… 
Some good ideas shown there - will include some on next attempt
Hello,
Here is my proposal based on Darktable 4.5 and Sigmoid. To convert to black and white, I use the tone curve at the end of the workflow
Greetings from Brussels,
Christian
