PROCESSING B&W PHOTOGRAPHY.
First step: Avoid image desaturation and don't use your camera's option to shoot in b&w!
One common mistake made by a lot of people, even profesional
photographers is believing that when they desature a photo in photoshop
or set their cameras to shoot in black and white they are in fact, making
a correct b&w photo, well, that is WRONG! and should be avoided,
why?. Rollover the next images:
Some of you know that black and white photography develoment is different to color photography development, in this case we can see that if treated correctly we can see an increase in contrast and in the overall brightness.
Proper processing of color images will lead you to have almost the same results as in film, so, avoid doing those 2 things from now on..
Second step: converting correctly to B&W, image comparison.
There are a lot of methods for converting correctly a colored image to black and white, my prefered method is the LAB method.
Open your photo, go to image > mode > LAB color.
Then select the channels tab, select and erase B and then select and erase Alpha 2.
Done, you can copy your image or transform it into grayscale and then RGB.
Why we did that? because its safer color wise.
Rollover the next images, all of them had -25 brightness, 25 contrast to help seeing those "imperfections".
Original file size: 2048 x 1360 pixels, detail at 600%
Original file size: 3456 x 2304 pixels, detail at 200%
Pay attention to the third one, as you can see the LAB converted image has less noise than the desaturated and the method looks less agressive, the tones are almost the same as the original.
Why even bother? Because if you are a detail freak like me then you know you want to have the best from your photos, with this method you will get rid of the color noise which pollutes your images, it won't show if you publish your images online at low resolutions but it will make the difference when you print them at larger sizes, the quality is really different.
Also, you have to have in mind that the more you process a image the more noise its going to accumulate, so, its a nice option to remove it in the first step, because it gets more complicated in the future.
Of course, it doesn't mean we are going to avoid at all cost using channels, in the first case we won't be using them but in the second case we will use them a lot.