Fresh, new look for my B&W vision

For a long time, I've been searching for that 'perfect' B&W conversion for my images. I have always wanted a process that had contrast, fine detail,….. yet a bit of 'grunge' look to it that sort of mimics film grain. I've tried a lot of processes, but none have ever really left me satisfied.

Until a couple weeks ago. Rambling around the innernets, I stumbled across an article about B&W conversion techniques with GIMP. I thought I had exhausted all the options there but I was proven wrong.

Buried deep in the innards of GIMP is a plug-in that is a vestigal left-over from it's early developing days. Fact is, I was fully aware of it being there, but had never fully explored all the options. Under the Tool menu is a GEGL Operations…. option. (GEGL is an acronym for GEneric Graphics Language) Another window will pop up, and you can choose from about 20 rather cryptic option. I had dabbled with some of 'em, but they mostly seemed useless. For instance, "Color" merely filled the image with a chosen color. Oh, whoop-de-do! "Grey" converted most of the image to black, with random vertical bars with gray patterns in it. Fractals was sorta fun to play with, but I didn't see any practical use for my type of work. But for the most part, I quickly dismissed everything in the GEGL Operations drop-down menu choices. Most of the choices are much more readily accessible under other Menu items, and work much faster and better there.

One of the more puzzling choices was c2g. I must admit, I don't ever recall clicking on that to see what happened. Boy, I wish I had years ago.

c2g is an acronym for Color (to) Grayscale. Now, this isn't just any ordinary desaturation routine. It's more like tonemapping the colors of an image and using the results to generate the grayscale RGB for a given pixel. It’s hard to describe, and there’s precious little out there in the vast innernets world to explain it. What does exist is full of techno-babble gobbledeegoop that few understand.

Suffice it to say, this long-forgotten old-school method is quickly becoming one of my favorite B&W conversions. It’s not suited for every image, but I’m discovering it works for most of the images in my archive that I was still in search of a ‘proper process’ for.

Once you open the c2g window, there’s three sliders, labeled Radius, Samples and Iterations. I have yet to find anything online that explains their functions. Suffice it to say, the default choices (300, 4 and 10) will most likely render an image that will make you puke. It typically looks like an HDR gone terribly, horribly and totally wrong….. black shadows, halos to beat the band, and poor tonal rendering in the mid-range. But I decided to take the advice found on the site that caused me to revisit the function and try other settings.

Here’s what I found: The larger (in pixels) your image it, the more you need to increase the 3 settings. For instance, a 2000x1500 pixel might be fine at 800, 6 and 10 (respectively), but a larger image that comes from my D600 may require me to go to 1500, 12 and 15 to garner the look I’m after. So my Radius setting usually is between 800-1500 (depending on the image size), Samples is 6-12 and Iterations is set from 10-15.

A word of warning here: The process is both a total pig on your computer’s resources (meaning, you’ll likely notice everything else slows down or even halts for a while), plus it’s painstakingly s------l-----o------o------o-------o--------------w. Honestly, it can take up to 10 minutes to work it’s way through a single image.

Despite all it’s shortcomings, I’m finding it’s as close to what I have been looking for in a B&W/monochrome/desaturation process as I’ve ever seen.

I know a lot of folks look down their noses and GIMP, and some will view such an ancient, obscure and undocumented process as unworthy of their work. But that’s the beauty of photography…. If it works for me, I’m all for it!



With that, I offer up 15 images for your perusal and comments:


1


2


3


4


5


6


7


8


9


10


11


12


13


14


15



In short, given that GIMP is free, it might be worth downloading it just to try this process out!

Wow, those are great and had no idea that it was in GIMP. I might need to re-download it. Thanks Sparky

A great look to some super photos, number 1 has to be my favourite, definitely works for me as well.

I like the hand on the sax one the best. Followed closely by the small flowing brook.

I'm not disputing the results, but I'm curious, what other methods have you tried? After the long wait are these the images rendered or is there additional tweaking? If so, is it still with just those 3 sliders and is there another long wait at each change, or do you simply do add'l tonal adjustments in GIMP?

I think I spent a total of 30 seconds doing a couple of adjustments on just 2 of the images... a curves adjustment on the sewing machine, and a touch-up clone on the 440 hood pin. Other than that, this is the final result.

The conversion process starts in the top left as soon as you choose the option. When you change one of the sliders, it starts over again in the top left.

Great! Thank you. I remember that, way way back I had used Gimp for a while, but it proved to be somewhat unstable (might have been hogging the resources too much). Is this color-to-grey thing present in any version or only in recent builds?

So what other conversion tools have you tried?

DraganDL said:

Great! Thank you. I remember that, way way back I had used Gimp for a while, but it proved to be somewhat unstable (might have been hogging the resources too much). Is this color-to-grey thing present in any version or only in recent builds?

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I think it's still in 2.8. But I had issues with it, so I went back to 2.6.

GIMP just died, now I remember why I didn't invest much time in it to begin with. I think I overwhelmed the software with software operations....LOL.

Joking aside, I did find this GEGL operations interesting and will play with again. As Sparky indicated, it will peg out your computer so get ready. It pegged out the CPU, but I let it tick away and it returned to normal and looked pretty good. I was using a jpeg that was already downsized to 1000 on the long side.

There are some seriously good photographers in this group and you Sir are amongst them.
Those are very nice photos.

They look really nice and have the added benefit of using a free program. An interesting test would be to render the same photo using Silver Efex vs. GIMP and see which, if any, appeared more pleasing to the eye.

Downloaded it on a whim, installed it and took a look. I'm running the latest generation Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM and this is the slowest thing on the planet. And each and every time you want to tweak something it's the devil all over again. It's currently completely locked on a D600 file. I'm using a PSD since that's what I have (I don't work on jpegs, only export them) and I've been waiting 12 minutes.

Note to anyone trying it, turn off the Preview button until after you set all 3 sliders. Then go get a beer.

Here's what it is, really, a single image, desaturating HDR-like tone mapper. The settings have less to do with getting color tones right as they do with feel.

I'm not saying this isn't the tool for you - we all have our favorites and I'm happy you found something that works for you. But there's nothing I'm seeing here that I can't do in half the time and without any of the frustration using HDR Efex Pro 2 and Silver Efex Pro 2. Granted, they are not free, but I have them already.

GIMP will not be lasting the night on my Mac. I actually hate the fact that it pops up as a trio of floating windows with no common organizer (by default - there may be one, but having them free floating is just too out there compared to everything else).

My apologies, in advance, if this sounds like I'm raining on your parade. I'm just expressing my frustrations with the tool for others' benefit in case they thing they're doing something wrong. If you must try, I found this blog to be extremely helpful in explaining what to do, though I am puzzled that I do not have 2 of the sliders shown on their tool image.

Captured Moments » Black and White Conversion with GEGL's c2g (color2gray) in GIMP

Dave_W said:

They look really nice and have the added benefit of using a free program. An interesting test would be to render the same photo using Silver Efex vs. GIMP and see which, if any, appeared more pleasing to the eye.

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Dave, this was my intent, but as you can see, I just can't suffer the wait. At least not at the end of a day in the middle of a long week. Maybe someone with more patience. But again, it's really a combination of color tone mapping and desaturation. There's nothing I saw on the 3 images I managed to wait for that showed that it did anything special in terms of bringing out shades of grey where color differences used to be. In fact, if anything I noticed a real lack of shade difference, like a compression of sorts, which is compensated for by textural additions. Not a knock, per se, but an observation. Very stark results, which is OK, if that's what you're after. Nothing you couldn't do with the Nik Collection.

BackdoorHippie said:

.................. I actually hate the fact that it pops up as a trio of floating windows with no common organizer (by default - there may be one, but having them free floating is just too out there compared to everything else). ............

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I hope you understand that the windows can be moved to where you want them...........

Wow. Such depth in these images, nice work! I'm partial to the first image as well

480sparky said:

I hope you understand that the windows can be moved to where you want them...........

Click to expand...

Oh, I know, but they are 3 separate windows with no linkages. And when I click the Open menu item the pop-up opens in front of one frame and behind another. Real hinky. It's been that way for a long time and you'd think they'd have come up with something more consistent with every other program that has multiple frames - that bounding frame around the whole thing that also grey out the stuff behind it.

BackdoorHippie said:

Oh, I know, but they are 3 separate windows with no linkages. And when I click the Open menu item the pop-up opens in front of one frame and behind another. Real hinky. It's been that way for a long time and you'd think they'd have come up with something more consistent with every other program that has multiple frames - that bounding frame around the whole thing that also grey out the stuff behind it.

Click to expand...

Well, when you Open an image, you only need that window, don't you? You aren't choosing a brush or color or messing with the curves when you open an image. If it's behind something, just rearrange the windows.... problem solved. Next time, it will be just like you set it up.

And what do you mean by 'linkeage'? The fact that the windows are separated? Heck, that's the way I've set up Capture NX2. Main screen has the image, second screen has windows for tools, histogram, action history, thumbnails.

Great reviews and tips and it just goes to show what a free program can do. But with free you do get some frustrations. But I do recall some where that said you could link all the windows if needed. And sparky I like your set up.

It's one thing to have 2 large monitors and a desktop, it's another thing entirely when you're working on a laptop. I've uninstalled it already, but "just rearrange things" is one thing with your working frames, but it's entirely different when you choose "Open" from the file menu and half of the pop-up is hidden behind another frame from the same program. It hid the entire file list and all I saw was the blank half of the pop-up!! And on a laptop there's only so much room to navigate - I had to slide it half out of my screen to finally get to the file list.

I'd reinstall and show you what I have a problem with, but it's not worth the effort. The gist is, when I open up any other program on either my windows platform or my Mac, either by default or as an option the pieces of the program are contained within a frame. I can drag them out, but there's a semblance from the get-go that they are connected. When you first open up GIMP you get a frame on the left with tools, another frame on the right with some other stuff, and nothing else. I'd like to see at least a solid background so I know the program has at least finished loading up, but when I see my home screen, or worse yet the Firefox browser window I was on previously looming behind it you definitely get the impression that something's incomplete. Yes, you can get used to it, but like I said, it's far from clean. Same when your rendering a B&W using the method above. There's no hourglass or swirly icon to let you know it's working - it just sits there, and for a long time. If I didn't know how long it could take I would have forced a stop every time.

Again, if it works for you, great. It's free, so you get what they give you. But when everything about it screams "half-finished" to me, so I'm not taking.