I haven't looked at the Pentax Photo Gallery in a very long time, but I assure you that what I print is hardly "3 tones". ;-)
I capture raw format and use Lightroom (and/or Photoshop) to render B&W. Rendering B&W is not a "Saturday a.m. experiment" if you want to be skilled at it. Regards filters, for most things, ND, grad ND and Polarizers are all that are necessary once you're doing digital capture. The traditional spectral translation adjustments afforded by Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, and Blue filters are all more than capably replaced by various techniques in image processing the color channels. Special purpose filters ... Infrared, ultraviolet, effects, etc ... are of course still needed if you are trying to capture something outside of rendering normal visible light to B&W. Something you can't do in B&W film capture using filters but is quite easy to accomplish with digital capture and image processing is selective change to the spectral translation within a single exposure. For instance, if you have one section of a photo where you want to separate tones arising from clothing but need a different filter for skin tone, you can apply one set of digital filters to one area and a different set of digital filters to the other area of the photo. The traditional selective tonal gradation adjustments performed by dodge and burn operations are also easily performed in image processing. And just like in film and wet lab B&W photography, there is a wide assortment of paper types and surfaces which affect the output image. Computer displays remain tricksy things to present photographs with ... prints are a much more stable presentation platform. Digital capture and image processing bring new levels of capability and quality to B&W photography. :-) On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 11:02 AM, Collin Brendemuehl <coll...@brendemuehl.net> wrote: > I've been looking at a lot of digital b&w work this week. > > When you digitroids do this, do you employ filters like we filmaniacs do? > I'm thinking that this might be a good Saturday a.m. experiment. > > When I look at the work on Pentax photo gallery, the B&w efforts > seem to share a common fault: 3 tones -- near-black, near-white, zone 6. > There just is not the tonal variance. > > Sincerely, > > Collin Brendemuehl > http://kerygmainstitute.org > > "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose" > -- Jim Elliott > > > > > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > PDML@pdml.net > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. > -- Godfrey godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
