Lightroom 4: Black & Whites, Round 2

I like Black & White photographs. I often prefer prefer the Black and White to the color versions. Is it because I'm old and grew up on Black & White? I'm not sure, but I know that I often use the B&W to hide many defects. Color balance is irrelevant in B&W, you can have a huge contrast in B&W, fixes are easier in B&W…

The standard way for Lightroom to produce Black and Whites is to press on Black & White of the Basic panel. But to me, it's not Black and White, it's just “grey mush”, I don't like it.

I prefer to go the long way around. I even made my own preset out of it. Yes, I know that there are 25 Lightroom 4 Black and White presets, but I like mine better!

I always create a virtual copy and do the Black & White on the virtual copy.

1. I remove all the saturation. HSL > Saturation, and set all the colors to: -100
2. I add a fair bit of sharpening: Amount: 50, Radius: 1.0, Detail: 35, Masking: 50
3. Tone Curve: Strong contrast
4. Basic panel: Contrast: 80, Clarity: 40, Vibrance: 10, Saturation: 5

This is the end of my preset. The rest is always done by hand.

BTW, I do it in that order, then I can do to the exposure, blacks, white, shadows and highlights, but they are not part of the preset.

Once this is done, I go the HSL > Luminance and use the eye drop to change the luminance of people's skin and/or important items in the photograph. That's why I needed the virtual copy, so I can refer to the original and see how the processing goes.