Improving my black and white workflow

I spent the last few days deeply inspecting my photographic workflow. I have a brand new preset for lightroom to process my BW pictures. My goal is to reduce the time spent in front of my computer, in order to spend much more time on the street with my camera.

I re-edited a few shots I published in the past, to have a clear comparison between my old preset and my new one.


OLDNEW
Lady with a Hat

OLDNEW
iPod

OLDNEW
Maybe

Have a look at the test set on Flickr and let me know if you like the change. Enjoy!


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3 responses to “Improving my black and white workflow”

  1. Daniele Avatar

    Ciao Luca! Ottimo risultato secondo me… Posso sapere dove hai trovato i preset?

  2. Luca Sartoni Avatar

    I made my own presets for lightroom. The one I’m going to use from now on is developed to better cover the dynamic range of the picture and define better the structure of details. Before I was forcing too much on noise reduction, so i decided to go softer with that. I enhanced the contrast and the whites. I was going too black, in my opinion.

    1. Daniele Avatar

      Every picture has it’s own charateristics, lights and shadows…that’s why I don’t love using presets but I do appreciated yours.

      Once an Adobe Guru gave me a tip: give 0, by default, to black value…in order to enhance the dynamic range of your pictures (raw files has by default value 5 in LR).

      So I’ve made a preset that I can use in almost every situation: convert to bw, black to 0 and a bit more clarity and sharpness. All other values (filters, curves, midtone contrast) are to be set manually, picture by picture…and it works fine!

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