My first attempt at converting to Monochrome

This is a photo of the Tortoise Fountain at Cliveden. Here is the original...

... and here is an attempt at monochrome:

Any suggestions (other than "choose another picture")?

I converted using the RAW file, changing the saturation, then randomly playing with sliders until I liked the result.

-- BenStephenson - 23 Dec 2008

23 Dec 2008 22:00:50 BenStephenson:

Looking at it again, having just uploaded it, my first comment would be to darken the right hand side. Can't believe I didn't notice that before...

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23 Dec 2008 23:15:17 RodBird:

A good subject for mono, which is all about tonality (brightness), shape and texture.

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23 Dec 2008 23:21:59 RodBird:

There are lots of ways of converting an RGB file to B&W (Roger Norton claims he knows eleven). Desaturating a RAW file is a good one, but probably the most popular is using Channel Mixer (if you use Photoshop CS) or Convert to Monochrome (its supposedly more user-friendly incarnation in Elements).

Chris Pooley has added another here > ConvertingToBlackAndWhite

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23 Dec 2008 23:27:56 RodBird:

But TBH I don't think you could have done a lot better than you've done. It's good, with a full range of tones, but a minor point is that the eye always follows the path of water, roads, paths etc - and here it's taken quickly out of the picture.

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02 Jan 2009 21:25:58 JohnAshford:

Via Lightroom, it comes out like the pic below. This involved greyscale / sharply increase 'orange' component of the black & white / a little bit of 'clarity' = edge sharpening + mid-tone contrast.

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