B/W Film "Atmosphere"

What do you expect exactly ? Grain ? Contrast curves matching some film profiles ?

Obviously, light room is said to have good presets, and there are plugins for photoshop.

Personally, I use digikam (digiKam - Photo Management Program | Manage your photographs as a professional with the power of Open Source) to tweak my raw images from the e-p1 and use the b&w filter options (film type, colour filter and picture tint) for the finishing touch :

Swirling water - Micro Four Thirds User Forum

(some more b&w in the picasa gallery where this picture is located).

 

Hi Sidinei,

I use Bibble Pro 5 which has a black and white option built into it with a limited feature range available, to enable the full feature to be unlocked a suggested donation of $20 will get you the key. This seeks to replicate the black and white look of various film emulsions for different developers and development times together with a limited range of printing paper types. I don't know if this is available in the Bibble Lite version or not. I've found that it produces a variety of looks to the black and white photograph produced which certainly satisfies my needs.
Bibble is available for Windows and Linux operating systems.

Barrie

 

You might also take a look at silver efx pro from niksoftware.com. They will give you 30 days free to try it out. It is the most amazing b&w system out there! It works as a plugin for light room, elements and Photoshop.

 

The bottom half of the b&w pictures from this gallery were processed at least partly with digikam :
Picasa Web Albums - m-viet - OLYMPUS E-P1

I don't believe there's a uniform turnkey solution to convert a picture into b&w. What I do is to set my camera to shoot raw + jpg and I set it to b&w, so I get a glimpse of the scene already in monochrome for composition.

Then, I get back to the raw and I use levels to stretch out contrast across the whole tonal range. After this, I use curves to draw a lazy 'S' shaped curve to build a moderate foot (for blacks), a steeper body (mid grays) and a long shoulder (whites) on the image.

Then I simply convert to b&w using defaults parameters, finely tuning curves and contrast again. I choose a filter (Red Green Yellow or Orange) as I would have done with a lens filter, and I add a touch of sharpening, either an USM or a more complicated circular sharpening (exclusive to digikam) to clean up the result and mimick a modicum of silver grain.

Last step is to chose an output tone (generally warm, mostly platinum or sometimes sepia).

Crop, border and done.

 

If you use Lightroom or photoshop or similar - download a trial copy of Silver effex Pro and play around as it is very "user friendly" - probably the nearest that you may get to what you want converting a digital image to B & W quickly
- although if you have more time you can play around with any PP software and achieve reasonable results, (better if you have a RAW file c/f with a Jpeg)

 

I've been playing around with a trial copy of DxO FilmPack, and I almost regret downloading it, because I really like it, but I don't see spending $100 on software for just that one purpose. It has profiles for 27 different B&W films. You can adjust the intensity, contrast, and amount of grain. You can even choose to use the grain profile from any of the other film simulations in the program. It's simple- kind of barebones in features, really- but very effective, I think.

 

Thanks for the kind comments. There is a project on this forum you can join called the 'Picture a Day' project. You just open a blog and commit yourself to post a picture taken every day for 90 days in a row. I realise this seems pretty coercive, but in practice it's fun and relaxed. Others doing their project at the same time comment on your pictures.

The gallery I linked to was the place I put all the pictures I made during my 90 days and a couple more. So I tried different techniques and a lot of things there. Some were pretty rushed to meet the daily deadline, and I didn't always had time to smooth everything as much as I would have liked. Nevertheless, the end result pleases me.

On top of this quick background info, I can spend hours speaking of digital b&w, but to sum it up, I don't feel restrained to produce exactly in digital what I did on film. Different medium, different strengths and weaknesses, different outcomes. I didn't specifically intended to mimic film with the utmost accuracy, but to come to 'the best' digital b&w I could. I just pointed to my pictures to show what was already possible without shelling out money on silver efx and photoshop.

Cheers,

Mauve