A Grayscale Trap

Lichen and Rocks (Riverside county) copyright Douglas Stockdale –

While I was reacting to Tim Atherton’s digital grayscale blog, I had defensively taken the position about the full range of black to grays in a digial black & white image.  I then posted one of my digital images to try to “prove my point”.  Opps! Because I had not implemented a robust color management system yet, I did not make a good visual point.

 “So, Mr. Stockdale, just how do you like your crow served? Baked, fried or over easy?”.

The issue is not one of can a digital color image be converted to Black & White, but its the thinking behind what the intent is and how it’s executed.  (Today in an earlier email exchange with Tim, I said I would not use the term pre-visualization).  The execution also includes what you do after the image is captured and processed up to the final print.  Looking at this image Lichen and Rocks on the monitor, it did seem like it was grayscale, not a full range of black & whites.  Bad monitor, bad monitor.  I made my print and I was happy.  Then I laid the print down next to some prints where the starting material was film as well a full digital for comparison.  Now I was unhappy.  My print was a full range of grays, but only grays and then I realized my mistake.  What I will call the Grayscale Trap for digital B&W using Photoshop, regardless of version.

It goes like this: you want a full range of tones.  Thus when I made your RAW conversion, I made sure that the histogram reflected all of the available data for highlights and shadows.  Then the image was converted to B&W, subsequently adding a curves adjustment layer.  Not thinking, I made sure that the shadow slider is just touching the edges of the histogram boundary edges.

So in effect I may have a tiny, tiny little bit of real black, while everything else is a gray value.  Later when I viewed the resulting print, I have a hard time finding that little bit of black even if I have some really dark, dark grays.  As an ex-film guy, I always had issues with getting the shadows to open up a little, but now I had wonderfully open shadows.  I just forgot to make sure that there was some wonderful black blacks. 

Thus my do-over of the image Lichen and Rocks. This time, I buried the blacks into the histogram curve.

I don’t want to be ‘cheap’ with the real blacks in an image ;- )

Best regards,

Doug