The Monochrome Issue – Introduction

In spite of all the pressure exerted by the digital takeover on silver halide photography, monochrome, that most traditional of all image renderings, remains a favourite. Why should this be? Well, for starters, simple pictures are often better pictures and the abstraction of colour is a good way to start that simplification process. The ability of digital to mix up colour and mono on the same image or album spread opened up the possibility of coloured confetti on a mono background and coloured bouquets on a mono background. Although these latter two are starting to look a bit dated, (peaking perhaps with Spielberg’s Schindler’s List) there are plenty of sophisticated album page designs being created in which a dash of colour adds a focal point to the composition. Aside from this, digital also makes a pretty good fist of recreating the ancient imaging technologies such as gum bichromate, cyanotypes and lith derivatives – all without resorting to smelly, and often dangerous, chemicals. We discuss these ancient (or alternative, as they are sometimes called) technologies later – you can make up your own mind as to the ethics and politics of using ink-jet pretending to be something else. Today I look at my reference books from 5 to 20 years ago and things like lith derivatives look a little lacking in sophistication. Back then we thought we were clever if we splashed a bit of gouache or dye onto a piece of Ilford Multigrade. The formularies in these books look amazing today – “double double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble” and all that! Long lists of chemicals in which to slosh a print just to make it a slightly different colour, chemicals with handling instructions that would terrify a technician from Porton Down.

Photography Year book 1997

One of the major criticisms levelled at ink-jet output has been the lack of neutrality in the monochromes and variations in the tone colour bias along the scale from black to white. This has spawned a little industry all of its own for specialist monochrome ink sets (such as Permajet VT Blax and MonocromePro) in which the highly coloured inks are replaced with pure or near blacks. Digital monochrome printing also has its own forum (DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups. com), a very active group that averages around 50 postings per day.

Epson has not been slow to capitalise on the desire to print good monochrome and the UltraChrome K3 ink set took the process to a new level of ease, neutrality and lack of metamerism. Even so, there are those who clamour for more and there are specialist RIPs and software drivers, aimed at taking even K3 to higher levels of neutrality. At some stage of this process, the busy professional has to take a reality check and ask if the client is likely to notice these subtleties and get on with making and selling their work. Like train spotting, the Zone System and colour calibration, there are users and then there are fanatics!

We are going to start by listing all the methods of creating a finished monochrome print (see the chart). It is one of life’s mysteries that half the photographic population is, at any one time, trying to achieve perfect neutrality and the other half is Photoshopping-in colour or sloshing prints in witches’ magic brews to add colour to what is an essentially monochrome media. Oh well, it’s a free world and thankfully we have choices! Without going ri Wedding ght through the chart here, the making of monochrome breaks down initially into two streams, a colour start and a monochrome start. In truth there is no such thing as monochrome digital start, all devices capture in RGB and convert via on-board software. Detectors can be made to only capture monochrome (including infrared) but they are not available in photographers’ cameras outside of specialisations, such as surveillance and medical photography. From either of these image types you can choose to print using coloured ink, monochrome ink or lightly coloured inks. It depends upon the route you choose whether you convert to greyscale at the front end or right at the back end, in the printer driver. The conversion process from RGB to grey can be carried out in Photoshop, Camera RAW or by specialist programs such as those made by Nik Filters and Power Retouche. There are at least seven ways to do it. Everybody has their favourite way, some have what they regard as secret ways, some people don’t actually care that much – everybody seems to have a tale to tell or a magical print to wave about. When it comes to printing there are four ways to proceed. These are:

1. Full colour CMYK (plus combinations of light cyan,magenta and black, plus possibly blue, green, orange or red – it depends on your printer)
2. Use of “Black” only inks (including Light Black and Light Light Black)
3. Use of Advanced Black and White in an Epson K3 system
4. Use of variable tone and multi-black ink systems

The list does not include dodges such as running a print through the printer a number of times (yes, people do).

A Matter of Conversion

Assuming that you have a starting image that is RGB (the most likely, from a camera at least) then the following is a discussion on your options for converting to a monochrome image, ahead of printing. We were unsure at first if there were any differences between various methods and devised some tests to get our bearings – and very instructive it proved to be. Some methods produce identical results, some do not, some create artefacts, some do not – so read on!

To test the various methods we took an RGB image of a Macbeth SG chart (in Adobe RGB colour space) and duplicated it about 10 times. Each duplicate image was then converted by different methods into greyscale. To compare two methods we simply dragged one image into a layer, above the other, and turned the top layer to Difference mode. Then, any differences in the translation into grey scale, show up as variations in tone. By way of example a Grainger plot is shown in colour and then with two images, superimposed in difference mode, one converted using Mode>Grayscale and the other using Image>Desaturate. If the mono-conversions were identical we would have ended up with a black square (ie extinction) – we did not. The lower image shows a comparison between the identical results of desaturating in the Hue-Saturation-Brightness dialogue and the different results, comparing HSB-Desaturation with Mode- Convert to Grayscale.

We also noted that some methods produced discontinuous artefacts at the boundaries between the black of the Macbeth chart borders and the solid patches of colour. These are reported in each relevant section.

Overall the preliminary tests showed that there are significant differences between methods, which explains why there are so many variations between different users, each of whom may have their own preference. The lesson is that you should explore all the possibilities that are different and base your decision on the method you like the look of. The artefacts are a different issue and if you find that they show in your image then try a different method – again this will be image dependent, influenced by the relative mix of colours that you start with.

Chart

Macbeth Chart

METHODS THE DETAIL

Mode>Grayscale

This is probably the fastest and easiest method. You click on Image>Mode>Grayscale and the job is done. Depending on your preference settings you may get a warning about discarding colour information. In the background, Photoshop is alleged to be doing a Channel mix of 60% green, 30% red and 10% blue. When we performed a conversion using a Grainger chart we did not find this to be so, neither did we get proper extinction using the Macbeth chart. The jury is still out on this one, answers on a postcard please! This method did not produce any artefacts. It makes a very sound basis for creating album page backdrops as it is fast and the exact tone conversion is not so critical.

Image>Adjust>Desaturate

This method does not reproduce the Mode>Grayscale result. Whilst the conversion of the greyscale was the same, the deep blue was 22 points different, the reds were 3 points different and the green was 22 points different. The yellow-black borders displayed artefacts. Probably one to avoid.

Image>Adjust>HSB>Desaturate

This was an identical result to that above and is also probably best avoided.

Russell Brown’s Method

This is a method devised by Adobe Creative Director, Russell Brown. We have written on the subject before but repeat the advice here. With the slider values at zero it produced an identical result to both the previous methods, including the artefacts in the yellows. However its strength lies in the supreme flexibility of the conversion and the method cannot be eliminated from contention for that reason.

Examples

If you examine the composite screen grab (previous page) note that adjusting the Hue has altered the balance between the monochrome densities of the riders’ lycra suits. Recipe

1. Open RGB image
2. Make an Adjustment Layer for Hue/Sat/Brightness, but don’t do a thing, just click OK. [A]
3. Set mode of this layer to “Color”
4. Make another Adjustment Layer – Hue/Sat/Brightness.[B] Move Saturation to -100 (no colour). Close this layer
5. Double click on middle Adjustment Layer (the one set to Color Mode). Start moving the Hue slider. You can
move the Sat and Lightness a bit too.
6. Fine-tune the conversion by clicking on specific colours (eg Red) and moving Hue Slider, which will only shift
colours within the reds’ colour range.

In addition, the technique supports Layer Masks. When you are all done, flatten the image.

David William’s Method

David taught this method during his UK tour in early 2006. The tone often needs to be darkened but we deliberately did not do so in our group test. The tone depth depends upon the grey scale Dot Gain chosen when you convert to Grayscale. This is set up in your Color Preferences. In reality, you use the method by adjusting the tone depth to taste; the default will only rarely be your optimum result. The method did not create any artefacts. The method is similar but not identical to converting to Lab mode, turning off the visibility of both the a and b channels then clicking in the Lightness channel and converting to greyscale.

Here are David’s exact words:
1. Do all of your darkening/lighting/retouching and cropping (good procedure to have a colour version as a
start point).
2. Image – Mode – Lab Colour.
3. Click the D-key to default your colours to Black, Foreground – White, Background.
4. ‘Select All’ then go to ‘Channels’ dialogue box
5. Click on the ‘a’ Channel and delete its contents by hitting ‘delete’ on the keyboard. Do the same to the
‘b’ Channel. As you delete the ‘a’ the thumbnail of the image will go magenta – when you delete the ‘b’ the
thumbnail will go red. (If it’s any other colour – there’s something wrong.)
6. You will now have a greyscale image in front of you. Click on the ‘Lightness’ in Channels.
7. Adjust density if required, (it’s often a little light) then ‘Image – Mode – Grayscale’.*
8. The prompt now comes up ‘discard channels?’ – YES.
9. End procedure. (And YES, you should save this as an action. This is something you can buy – but why?...it’s
so simple to make yourself.)

* Someone’s going to want to know why greyscale and not RGB? The simple answer is you can do both. If you drag a greyscale image onto an RGB canvas – it becomes RGB. The opposite is also true.

So the question becomes, ‘Why would you do all that instead of just requesting ‘Desaturate’ or ‘Grayscale’ at the start?’ To answer that – we go back to film. If you had two camera bodies with colour in one and B&W in the other and shot the same thing – the B&W would not be simply a colourless version of the colour image.

It has a different ‘feel’ contrast and tonal range. This process replicates that effect. You can also do other magical things with the individual Red, Green and Blue Channels – but I don’t want to get into that here.

Suffice to say, if you’ve lit well – there shouldn’t be much need for the Channel-thingy

Examples

Colour Settings

Using the Adobe RAW File Converter

This is possibly the most exciting of the techniques described in this feature in that the enthusiasts out there are starting to develop routines and setting values to mimic a number of monochrome effects. In the opening dialoge box of RAW you have a slider with which to reduce the saturation to zero, thus creating a monochrome rendering. The settings at [A] (see right) are those to create a well-adjusted colour image. The clever bit is to open the Calibrate tab [B] and adjust the values to create a mimic of particular monochrome contrast filter – in this example an orange filter, using the values listed below. Red, green and blue filter effects are also tablulated. The method did not create any artefacts and has the advantage of being able to be run from Bridge as part of your workflow. You may also save out your converted file in 16-bit mode.

Macbeth Chart

Working Colour

Colours

Photoshop

Raw file monochrome settings

The Channel Mixer

The Channel Mixer gets a mixed press! Many practitioners seem to devote their time to developing methods to avoid using it. However, it has great versatility and, as the method may be readily converted into an action, it can be repeated and automated. As mentioned earlier, conversion to Grayscale takes a channel mix close to 30:60:10 for red, green and blue respectively. However we found a posting on the Digital Black and White forum from a gentleman called John Vitollo, who listed the settings in the table (right), for mimicking particular film stock. The down-side of this listing is that it pays no attention to the response of the camera chip, but it provides food for thought and further tweaking.

Traditional black and white specialists always carry coloured filters to bend the tone response of their monochrome emulsions. This might come as a surprise to newcomers to photography who have been brought up on digital. The common filters and their historical uses are as follows

Yellow – to darken skies slightly and cut through haze. Film Stock Chart
Orange – contrast of masonry and wood.
Red – even stronger than the two above, it can make deep blue skies almost black and bring huge contrast
between cumulus clouds and clear sky.
Green – All the filters above darken green to such an extent that you can end up with nearly black foliage. A green filter can be used to lighten grass and foliage. Because it reduces the emphasis of red it is often used to improve a model’s complexion in a monochrome shot. The larger manufacturers often provide different strengths of contrast filters for example Nikon always made two green filters one for portrait work the other for more general work.

The settings in the Channel Mixer which mimic the effect of contrast filters are listed in the table and should be applied to a full colour image, but with the monochrome option checked. Notice that each set of values adds up to 100% so that there is no change in the overall density. In practice you may find that the differences between the settings are quite subtle. You may also care to also boost contrast using curves to add to the Channel Mixer effect.

The arrival of digital has changed the way we tend to think about bending monochrome conversions. Use of selective colour and colour range adjustments mean that the control can be as localised as you are prepared to make it (by investing Photoshop time into the image). However, in landscape work, the ability to improve haze control with progressively less blue

Filters chart

Photo Quote: What I feel is that the picture-taking process, anyway a greater part of it, is an intuitive thing. You can't go out and logically plan a picture, but when you come back, reason then takes over and verifies or rejects whatever you've done. So that's why I say that reason and intuition are not in conflict--they strengthen each other. - Wynn Bullock