Working with beautiful colors has become second nature to most photographers. It’s digital and it’s great. No film means zero development costs.
When photographers started in the past we used B&W because we never could pay for all the development costs, and a color dark room was either not available or big bucks.
Shooting B&W is all about light and shades of gray (OK other stuff but that’s the basics). I grew up on it but digital is different and takes practice and ‘tools’ to get other than a flat monochrome.
Like most, I use Adobe Lightroom as my primary editor. Photoshop rarely because it hurts my head to dig through all the stuff. The DxO Silver Efex is my secondary software for B&W.
I have started to ‘dink’ with new systems ON1 and Topaz (for dark image noise issues). Both of these photographs were worked into a monochrome with ON1.
I had just finished these when I read an article by Leigh Kemp, a UK photographer discussing another DxO product. So I thought I would point out B&W software here.
BTW, the DxO Silver Efex is widely used by a large number of dedicated B&W fine art photographers. If you are old school the film emulator filters are ‘near’ identical to what you might get shooting 35 mm (boy will that statement get the purists up in arms).
