When I bought my first decent camera (a very well used pre-war Leica III) there was only one route to black & white images – film. I used Ilford film, either FP3 (125 ASA) or sometimes HP4 (400 ASA). I did not do any colour photography for several years, because it was too expensive. I stopped using film in 2003 and sold all my film cameras and my enlarger. Five years ago I bought a film camera again (a Leica M6, made in 1988 or 1989), and started using film occasionally. I still use Ilford films, now FP4+ and HP5+.
I now usually use a digital camera, which gives me two more routes – take a colour image and convert it to black & white, or use a Leica Monochrom to give a black & white image (the Monochrom records only light intensity, not colour). For me, taking a colour photograph and then thinking ‘what would this look like in black & white’ is very unsatisfactory, because composition in colour is entirely different from composition in black & white. Uniform colours of same brightness could look very good, but be a boring uniform greyness in a black & white image. Contrast and architectonics are the essence of black & white photography. My conclusion is that the workflow has to be obligatory black & white i.e. I never see a colour version of the image, so I have to think always in terms of black & white composition.
This post describes how I get to the same endpoint – a black & white positive image in my computer – from the three different starting points.
Getting from film to digital positive
I have to be more thoughtful if I am using film. The exposure has to be right first time – there is no way of checking it – and each click of the shutter is far more expensive than digital – perhaps 20p just for the film. I still develop the films in Rodinal, first formulated by Momme Andresen in 1891. It is an accutance-enhancing developer, that is, it increases the apparent sharpness, but also enhances the grain, but this is not really a problem with modern films. I use a Lab-Box daylight loading tank (a modern version of the Leitz-Agfa Rodinax tank, dating from the 1930s), so I do not need a darkroom.
The film then has to be scanned. I use a Plustek OpticFilm 8200i Ai scanner with VueScan software, which will scan 35mm film at up to 7200 dpi (dots per inch). Scanning at 3600 dpi gives a 19.4 megapixel image, comparable to many digital cameras. The devil here is in the detail. Most software (including Photoshop) uses a simple linear conversion to give a positive image, which does not give the same result as a silver print made in a darkroom. The solution is to make a linear scan of the negative (i.e. a scan which records the intensity values without any processing), then use the ColorNeg plugin in Photoshop to produce a positive image – see the references at the end.
I then import the positive image into Capture One Pro (by far my favourite processing software) and treat it in exactly the same way as a native digital image.
Monochrom images
No pre-processing necessary – they are native digital black & white images.
Digital colour to digital black & white
My aim, when using a colour camera, is to achieve an obligatory black & white workflow, so I never see a colour version of the image. This took some time to perfect. I now have a black & white profile set up on all my colour cameras. The first step is to set the camera to display a black & white image in the viewfinder and on the screen – this can usually be done by setting the camera to emulate a monochrome film. The second step is to ensure that the image imported into the computer is displayed in black & white. In Capture One Pro, this is done by setting a black & white style under Adjustments in the import dialogue. There is an analogous process for importing into Lightroom.
Post-processing
The three routes all produce a black & white positive digital image, and I process them all in the same way. This is essentially a digital version of printing in the darkroom. The aim is to change the relative brightness of different areas of the image to give the desired output. In the darkroom, this is done by changing the paper grade to adjust contrast, and altering the exposure times for different areas (dodging and burning). There are exact digital equivalents of all these processes. In addition, if starting with a colour image, the grey-scale representation of colours can be changed – the equivalent of using a filter on the lens in black & white photography. I usually convert the colour image using the equivalent of a yellow filter, and then treat the image as if I was printing a black & white negative.
Where to find more information
Lab-Box daylight processing tank
Technical paper on converting negative images to positive images
ColorPerfect software for converting negative images to positive images
