# New to B&W



## goooner (Sep 26, 2016)

As the title suggests I've not done a lot of B&W. I'm starting to play with Silver efex pro. I would appreciate some C&C on this shot. I might have over cooked it a tad.

PS could someone explain to me how a 30MB colour RAW file, becomes a 140MB B&W tiff, makes no sense to my simple mind...


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## john.margetts (Sep 26, 2016)

Lots of dust bunnies!

That aside, I like the redition.

Tiffs store layers and associated info which can boost the file size if those are a part of your editing.


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## goooner (Sep 26, 2016)

john.margetts said:


> Lots of dust bunnies!
> 
> That aside, I like the redition.
> 
> Tiffs store layers and associated info which can boost the file size if those are a part of your editing.



Thank you, I've removed a couple of the dust spots, they were not noticeable in the colour version. I directly opened the image in Silver efex pro, from LR, fiddled with the sliders and saved as tif. Will see if the other file formats are any better, but I would prefer a lossless format.


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## john.margetts (Sep 26, 2016)

Unless you want to re-edit layers, flatten the first mage before saving. Personally, i always save as PSD. I am not sure about file size but they don't seem to be too big.


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## JonA_CT (Sep 26, 2016)

Depending on which filters you use in Silver FX pro, they add "grain" or dust specks or the like to mimic the film development process, so it's possible the dust might be from that.


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## KenC (Sep 26, 2016)

Nice tonal range and generally a solid technical effort, but it seems a little flat in terms of its effect on me.  It could be that it seems unbalanced with only the smaller and darker trees on the right side, or perhaps because the bridge is the interesting element in this, anything else interferes.


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## goooner (Sep 27, 2016)

john.margetts said:


> Unless you want to re-edit layers, flatten the first mage before saving. Personally, i always save as PSD. I am not sure about file size but they don't seem to be too big.


Hmmm, I will have to check what I did. I will have to see if I can flatten the tif before saving it. It was literally the 1st time I used this plug in.


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## goooner (Sep 27, 2016)

JonA_CT said:


> Depending on which filters you use in Silver FX pro, they add "grain" or dust specks or the like to mimic the film development process, so it's possible the dust might be from that.


Thanks for the tip, I think they were real dust spots. I did not use any filters (knowingly), and neither did I use one of the film simulations, I clicked through a few but decided against it.


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## goooner (Sep 27, 2016)

KenC said:


> Nice tonal range and generally a solid technical effort, but it seems a little flat in terms of its effect on me.  It could be that it seems unbalanced with only the smaller and darker trees on the right side, or perhaps because the bridge is the interesting element in this, anything else interferes.



Thanks for looking, I almost had one foot in the river, so the only way to get the tree out of the frame would be to crop. Will have  to see how that turns out. 

Another option would be to go early morning and shoot from the left side of the bridge (at sun rise, not sunset). I also forgot my polarizing filter, would have helped with the sky, and the glare from the bridge.


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## Alexr25 (Sep 27, 2016)

goooner said:


> I directly opened the image in Silver efex pro, from LR, fiddled with the sliders and saved as tif.


If all of your processing is done in LR why do you bother to save as tif? Why not just save a virtual copy of the processed image, that way you are only saving the edits and don't make another copy of the image file.


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## goooner (Sep 27, 2016)

Alexr25 said:


> goooner said:
> 
> 
> > I directly opened the image in Silver efex pro, from LR, fiddled with the sliders and saved as tif.
> ...



Well I might be missing something, but when I use one of the NIK collection plug ins it always creates a copy, which I then have to save as a JPEG, TIFF or PNG.


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## Alexr25 (Sep 27, 2016)

Its ok, I'm the one who's missing something. I didn't realize that LR had to exported an image file into NIK, probably why I gave up on NIK and went back to doing B&W conversions directly in LR.


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## JonA_CT (Sep 27, 2016)

Alexr25 said:


> Its ok, I'm the one who's missing something. I didn't realize that LR had to exported an image file into NIK, probably why I gave up on NIK and went back to doing B&W conversions directly in LR.



Yeah, NIK works a lot better in Photoshop, especially if you want to do multiple things with it (i.e. Presharpen, Viveza, then Dfine), because you can just add a new layer each time you do so. LR wants to create a new file for each of those changes (plus, you remove/undo filters or adjust opacity).


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