B&W help

[DueyDooDah]

I have real trouble determining how to properly apply B&W processing to photos. I am never really sure how much is too little or too much. I don't have a grasp on the basics. Does anyone have a real knack for B&W that can help? Here is a photo I am working on. The original was a RAW image and I used strictly Lightroom to process the B&W effects. Any tips you can suggest would be greatly appreciated.

 

[jann1033]

not saying i have a knack for it but i like the high contrast, it might be a tiny to white around the horses front haunch. i bought a whole book on B&w but didn't notice it was 90% film but usually i use alien skin to process,then tweak it with the contrast and color channels i've used virtual photography and xero as well which are free and have a lot of preset effects. alien skin i like better( someone gave it to me but it costs a lot) because it basically imitates film and has settings where you can change the tone, grain etc.
there is a whole thing about using greyscale or destaturate then tweaking that i don't really remember since i take the easy way out with alienskin now but if i can find the article i'll post it.
occasionally i do like to put a washed out color filter on it, just as something different, i use pse5 for that
here's one link, if you scroll down it's gorman method which i think is complicated if i remember correctly
http://www.blackandwhitedigital.com/Enhance/toning-solid.html

one thing i do think is nice ... if you shoot in raw ( not sure what camera you use if this works, i have a rebelxt) in b&w you still get all the color info when you open the raw shot..sometimes i do that just to make sure i don't want something added or subtracted from the composition that might be different with b&w.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

A lot can be done to improve the appearance of a B&W picture by making color adjustments before converting it. It's sort of the equivalent of using color filters, which is quite popular for B&W film shooters. If you post the color version of the shot, maybe someone can demonstrate. Or you can do it by messing with the HSL sliders in lightroom.