FUNDAMENTALShttp://www.digitalcameraworld.com OCTOBER 2019 DIGITAL CAMERA^81
1
Convert to mono
To get a basic black-and-white conversion, you need to
remove colour and then enrich the tones of the photos.
In the Basic Panel, set Saturation to -100 to remove the
colour. Next, set Contrast to taste; I’ve used +60 on this
portrait shot. Contrast here creates deeper blacks and
cleaner whites, which helps give more form to the photo.
Finally, in the Tone Curve, I’ve pushed the leftmost point
up a little, then pulled a middle point back to where it started.
This means only those lower blacks are affected, retaining
most of the contrast we added.2
Set the grain strength
By starting with a more extreme Amount, you’ll be able to see
the impact of the following settings better. Reducing Amount
later will give the final look. The view at 1:1 is very different
to that at Fit level, so make sure to zoom in and out to check
how it looks. I’ve gone for 50 to start. Setting any Amount
value automatically sets Size to 25 and Roughness to 50,
to give you an initial preview of the effect. Clearly, if these
were at 0, moving the Amount slider would do nothing.3
Adjust the grain size
The next slider is Size. There’s a lot of interplay between
the sliders, but it’s really obvious between Amount and Size.
Even with a low Amount, a large Size will still be visible in the
photo. With a small Size, you’ll need a large Amount to see it.
One other thing to mention about Size is that adding a lot
reduces the sharpness of a photo, so if you’re really concerned
about sharp photos, don’t use extreme Size settings. You
can see this here at 51 (with a slight bump of Amount to 51).4
Rough it up
The opposite of rough is smooth, so if you think of Roughness
as taking away the smoothness of the photo, you’re on the right
track! Roughness adds bumps to the photo, creating pockets of
light and shade. If you have the clipping indicators on in a photo,
you might even see the red highlight warnings appear on the
photo as you increase Roughness! Here I’ve gone for a large
Roughness of 80, but I’ve tempered it by reducing Amount
a lot to 17. I’ve kept the larger Size look, choosing 49.