colour to black and white example

[greyscale]

Just a quick offering of a b/w adjustment layer, a couple of curves layers and 1 pixel of noise painted back in at 50%. Any comments welcome.

[p3r10]

sorry to ask but are you wanting people to try and do a different technique to yours? or is this just an example of what you did?

[greyscale]

er, it's entirely up to you what you do next (I'm sure that's how the forum works).

[MiningArt]

This example was done with a black-black/white gradient map, noise removal, a bit of fine grain added back in.

[p3r10]

here is an example of a black and white adjustment, added contrast, toned down eyes

[greyscale]

Thanks for responding, I like simple techniques that produce strong results although I don't really know anything about gradient maps that's a lovely skin texture. P3r10 you're probably right to tone down the eyes, I used a separate curves layer set to soft light to brighten them but then I like bright eyes!

[p3r10]

see black and white is purely about making sure you have "black" and not a greyscale version of black, as well as contrast. I didn't use a gradient as i found it to uneven across the entire image.

[MariusX]

IMO, P3's version has got the best skin tone - being slightly darker it looks richer and stands out better against the bright sweater then Greyscale's (but there's too much detail loss in the sweater to my taste).

Everything else i like better in Grey's version (i like bright eyes to, and he's got better detail in the sweater, skin is slightly too hot though at least on the uncalibrated monitor @ my work).

MiningArt's got nice tone but the face doesn't have a snap like the other two version do.