B&W Black & White, monotone and sepia

Three from my regular walk.

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Above the creek


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Frogmore


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Cleavehouse Barn


Barrie
 
I love the rich B&W tonings you get Barrie. Taking your skill as a given, what is your 'secret sauce'.

Hi Bill, I've somewhat devolved my processing to some nameless boffins at Fujifilm having just taken delivery of a secondhand X-Pro2 which I'm using with my range of Voigtlander LTM rangefinder lenses. The secret is to take jpegs using the Acros film simulation algorithm built into the beast. With judicious use of the settings for filter types and tones in the shadows and highlights which can be adjusted for differing lighting conditions, for example to counter low contrast lighting which we frequently experience here in the UK the settings can be adjusted to boost the contrast of the resulting jpeg, the reverse can be applied when faced with a high contrast scene.

Reading up about it most people seem to struggle to replicate the effect obtained in the jpeg by trying to manipulate a raw file of the same scene. The closest fit seems to be the "fine art process" preset in Nik Silver Efex which gives a reasonable starting point.

My own technique is still being worked on but I open my jpegs in RawTherapee and usually find that initially applying "tone mapping" can be of benefit to open up the shadows followed by adjusting "exposure compensation" to set the white point and "black" to obviously set the black point, and generally thats about all that is required. I'm still taking raw+fine jpegs and manipulating the jpegs as above. I've then tried to replicate those results by working on some of the raw images but usually have to admit defeat. The jpegs are robust enough to take the limited post processing required and I can foresee a time when I settle for taking fine jpegs only, and having done raw processing for many years going right back to Raw Shooter Essentials I never thought I'd be saying that.

Obviously it requires a little more care at the taking stage to get ones settings correct since things are built into the jpeg which can't be altered later but I'm liking that involvement which takes me back to my starting situation in the early 1970's, all manual and some thought input required.

Barrie
 
Return to my Nikon D300 after a long long break!

24mm f2.8ai iso200 1/640 @ f8
View attachment 133054

24-120mm afd iso800 f5.6 1/15 @ 120mm + on camera flash
View attachment 133055

Thank you Bilzmale. Having retired my D300 in favour of m4/3 and Nikon Df I felt the callback. Despite its ageing sensor it performs like new. Strength of body, all controls to hand and with a newer sensor I think it would compete well with the newer cameras.
 
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