All Day I Dream About Photography

Photoshop Tutorial : B&W Conversion formulas

I’m by no means an Adobe Photoshop guru, on the contrary I’m a complete novice and still struggle with VERY basic manipulations like layer masking and many others.

One of my biggest problems was (and still is) black and white conversion, I’ve read about every Adobe Photoshop tutorial I could find on this subject I could find on the net and still none gave my little brain a satisfactory answer it was expecting. For THIS result do THAT for THIS result do THAT etc…
The only conclusion I was able to reach is that Channel Mixer is considered by many the best and most flexible method.

So if, like me, you are looking for straight answers and aren’t really able to do your own experiments her is a set of conversion settings that a fellow photographer “Karim” gave me just today.

I’d be really happy to know your thoughts about these channel mixer formulas for photoshop, do you agree with Karim or not. Although I did try them I really don’t have a clue if they really mimic the films as stated or not.

All you will have to do is load your picture in Adobe Photoshop, Add a channel mixer layer, click on the “monochrome” check box and type in any of the below formulas.

Agfa
Agfa 200X: 18,41,41
Agfapan 25: 25,39,36
Agfapan 100: 21,40,39
Agfapan 400: 20,41,39

Ilford
Ilford Delta 100: 21,42,37
Ilford Delta 400: 22,42,36
Ilford Delta 400 Pro: 31,36,33

Ilford FP4: 28,41,31
Ilford HP5: 23,37,40
Ilford Pan F: 33,36,31
Ilford SFX: 36,31,33
Ilford XP2 Super: 21,42,37

Kodak
Kodak Tmax 100: 24,37,39
Kodak Tmax 400: 27,36,37
Kodak Tri-X: 25,35,40

Basic Settings
Normal Contrast: 43,33,30
High Contrast: 40,34,60

Of course you can save all these as .cha files to save time of typing them in everytime

Hope it helps and if it does thanks Karim

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