not sure if my description is accurate? anyway, i've been playing around with B&W again. i have a black & white tool which i like to use that has a color wheel so you can tint the image before/as it gets converted to b&w. i have green foliage which i tend to like dark when i convert to b&w, so i shift the color wheel to blues or magentas. however, blue tends to have the most noise and this doesn't help with smooth tones in the shadows. green also has a lot more pixels in the sensor (at least mine - a 10D) so i always thought that would contribute to a higher tonal range.

what might be a better approach? maybe darking the greens separately and then converting?

There are many ways of converting to B&W. You do not mention the software you are using. That matters. Some of the B&W conversion tools in recent software are excellent and give you a lot of control.

For example, if you have Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw 4.0, you can do an excellent job of B&W conversion right there in the RAW processor. You have separate control over the conversion of several color ranges. With Lightroom, you can even "scrub" over the photograph to lighte or dark features, like grass.

The B&W tool in Photoshop CS3 also gives you a lot of control. It also allows you to scrub features in the photograph.

With earlier versions of Photoshop, you can apply some B&W filter effects. I have a free set of actions for doing that. Likewise, I have free actions for toning B&W photos.

There are also techniques that allow you to affect the conversion for color ranges. A popular technique is to pair two Hue/Saturation adjustment layers. One to affect the color conversion, the other to desaturate the photo. You can replace the layer for adjusting color with Curves, Selective Color, etc. The idea, as you suggest, is to affect the color of the greens, for example, so they convert in a pleasing way.

Cheers,

Mitch

thanks. i have not kept up a lot of the updated versions of software. the one i'm using more and more is LightZone. I generally like the way capture one 4 (formerly C1 LE) converts my raw images but then like the general feel of LightZone from there.

i think i'm leaning more towards generic terms if that's possible, in terms of working with greens blues and reds.

if blue has the most noise in it, is it possible to get good tones out of it?

if green in the most prominent in a sensor, will that really give better tones as i think it does?

as i was shooting i also wondered if there are any black and white digital cameras (not that i could afford one now)? maybe that have a high dynamic range?

thanks

With Photoshop, we used Channel Mixer for years with B&W conversion. It was typical to tone down the Blue channel precisely because it was noisier.

If you use a pair of Hue/Saturation layers to cvonvert to B&W and then look at the layer people use to adjust color, you'll find that the color image becomes a "false color" image as the yank the Hue and Saturation sliders around for the differnet color components.

The color image that you use for conversion does not have to be a true and faithful reproduction of the colors. The idea is figure out how the colors will map to tones in your B&W image.

Ever leave a B&W film filter on the camera with color film? The colors would get screwy. The adjustments you make to convert colors into grayscale tones can also look screwy as a color print. Nothing unusual about that.

Cheers,

Mitch