B&W conversion CC please

[EmMcCon]

These are a few of my first stabs at B&W conversion I've got the originals here so you can show me what you'd do which I would greatly appreciate, I will also be grateful for any criticisms.

1.

P1020511 by EmMcCon, on Flickr


cat B&W_2 by EmMcCon, on Flickr

2.

P1020506_2 by EmMcCon, on Flickr


cat B&W_1 by EmMcCon, on Flickr
I don't know why I left the eye in full color I really don't

 

[WesternGuy]

For a first stab, I think these look fairly good - tell us how you did them. My only "nit pick" is the contrast, particularly the first one, I would be tempted to increase the contrast just a bit to bring out patterns in the cat's fur a bit more.

I would also clone out those two bright spots in the background of the colour image and then it won't transfer into the B&W - they are very distracting.

My 0.02¢.

Cheers,

WesternGuy

 

[Forkie]

#1. I like the background, but the main subject (the cat) doesn't have the same amount of contrast as the background. Also, you have a nice backlight running all the way down the front profile of the cat from his ears down to his chest. I would find a way to take advantage of that "cat-shaped light", by perhaps darkening the rest of the photo and highlighting that feature.

I hope you don't mind, but I had a quick go to show you what I mean:

You can see that I've taken advantage of the backlighting on his fur that I mentioned and made that familiar shape of the cat's face the main subject of the photo. Everyone is familiar with that serious look of the cat's profile, and the darkened background makes it instantly recognisable. We don't need to know where he is, the background wasn't interesting enough, but now he is all that matters in the frame.

To highlight it even further, I changed the orientation to portrait so that the shaped of his face cuts the frame almost in half.

You could go further and blacken out the background in front of him completely, but I was hesitant for fear of over doing it and making it look un-natural. Perhaps you could have a go and see if I was right?


#2. There's some cheeky selective colouring going on in his eyes! I personally don't like selective colouring (we've all done it though, at some point in our exploration of Photoshop!) and this doesn't work very well since his eyes don't have a very stand-out colour, so it barely looks any different which makes it not worth bothering. I think the conversion is pretty good in this photo but the composition itself doesn't really lend itself to black & white.


I hope that makes sense and helps a bit, or at least gives you some ideas of how you can manipulate a photo to show what you want the viewer to see. If something in the shot isn't important to the main subject or doesn't help to show it off, cut it, crop it, clone it out or find a way to get people's attention away from it and onto what you took the photo of.

The shot was of a cat. Therefore, the cat is all that matters!

 

[The_Traveler]

In the first picture, note the blown out patch on the cat's 'chest.'
I try to fix all the defects in color before conversion.

 

[bazooka]

Forkie, are you sure that's selective coloring? I don't see it.

I like the choice to convert the first shot to B&W as it really brings out the quality of light. The color simply wasn't doing anything for this shot. I like the detail in the background, but I agree that the fur in the shadow looks a bit muddy.

EDIT: Hehe, I just read his last line. I retract my question.

 

[Forkie]

Haha, I didn't see his last line either! For a minute there I thought I was either going mad, or my eyes were f******!

 

[Stanza]

Yep! You can play a little bit more with contrasts

 

[KmH]

The original would have had a stronger composition if it had been framed vertically. What metering mode did you use?
The composition could have been made even stronger by placing the cat's eye on a rule-of-thirds power point.

Since the original has a horizontal frame I opted to crop to a 1:1 (square) aspect ratio. I started by editing in ACR using the Recover slider to try and retrieve some of detail in the the blown area on the cat's chest. Being a JPEG limted that effort. I opened the photo in CS5 and made a B&W adjustment layer which has 6 sliders available for adjusting the contrast in the conversion. I decreased the reds and the greens. I burned the background some and dodged a little along the cats back. I increased the mid-tone contrast and added a black border.