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Looking for advice on doing Black and White

daedal

daedal

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I'm looking for any tips or advice on transforming a color movie into black and white.
Tutorials I find are kind of 1-minute easy recipe for people in a hurry... I'm sure there are best practice these tutorials are not aware of.
I have tested a couple of things readily available on Premiere but when watching the export on my monitor and then on my tv, I have wildly different results. So its kind of hard to make sure I'm doing it right. Both monitor and tv have flat settings and both are rather old.
Of course if anyone would like to have an eye on this when I'm ready to share progress, I'll share clips on my project thread. But before that, I want to make sure I'm doing it well.
 
The only thing you really need to do to make footage black and white is set the saturation to zero. But if you want it to look more like an old movie, you can add a glow effect to simulate a projector bulb shining through the image, and a subtle flicker for the frames flying past. Add grain and film damage to taste and maybe some camera shake if you want it to look really old.

I think how good the footage looks when black and white depends mostly on how it was lit when filming. I'm not sure if you can do much about that, but you can try messing around with the exposure and contrast to make the shadows starker.
Someone who knows more about filmmaking might have better advice, but if you look for some footage of a black and white movie you want to emulate you can use it to compare to your footage and see how close you can get
 
I know when you desaturate images with GIMP there are five different options:

Luminance
Luma
Lightness (HSL)
Average (HSI Intensity)
Value (HSV)

You may want to look into the differences and figure out which one is the best fit, they give a range of completely different results so the best choice may depend on your particular film. Normally when you have a black and white image you want a nice range of pure black to bright white in the image, and not all movies can convert into that visual style by default since they're often shot with color in mind.

There was a thread here maybe 6 months ago with suggestions of good candidates for black and white conversion and at the time I looked through a bunch - many films you get a lot of gray but maybe depending on which of the five methods you choose you could fix that issue.
 
In Photoshop you can turn the saturation down and it will make your image grayscale. However, because of how that control works, this doesn't pull the true values from the image.

What does work for some reason is adding a full single color layer of perfect 50/50 gray exactly halfway between true black and true white, and place the layer above the image, and set the new layer to blend mode 'Color'.

Ta-da! Finding true luma values really is possible in Photoshop, and it only took a million clicks!
 
Thanks for all the advice. What I'm hearing is try and trust your eyes!

addiesin said:
What does work for some reason is adding a full single color layer of perfect 50/50 gray exactly halfway between true black and true white, and place the layer above the image, and set the new layer to blend mode 'Color'.

Ta-da! Finding true luma values really is possible in Photoshop, and it only took a million clicks!
Click to expand...
I tried this method in Premiere and I think I can safely say it gives the exact same result as dragging the saturation slider to 0. Well in my case anyway.
But that's a nice thing to know. It's the first time I really try to adjust colors in Premiere and never noticed that all those options I know from Photoshop are basically available in there too! I guess I should have known, but when you never do these things... Thanks!

I'm still going to have to play with brightness and contrast a little bit though. I don't want a ultra artistic and dramatic B&W. My goal is to keep it natural, but there are definitely things that pop up or fade out when desaturating. Hours of fun ahead!

I'm still opened to read your advice on what to look for, or mistakes to avoid when doing BW if anyone has experience with it in general or Premiere in particular.
One thing that comes to mind right now is how to adjust when the camera moves from a position with lots of highlights to one in low lights in a single shot. I seem to loose details in either dark areas or light areas (or both if I'm not careful with adjustment).
 
I'm working on an edit, and I selected b/w in Handbrake I think.
 
The Warlord said:
I'm working on an edit, and I selected b/w in Handbrake I think.
Click to expand...
I didn't know you could do that with Handbrake, interesting to know!
I am looking at more control over the process though. I also need to keep color in some part of the movie, my guess is handbrake will b&w the whole thing, might be wrong...
Thanks anyway!
 
daedal said:
I didn't know you could do that with Handbrake, interesting to know!
I am looking at more control over the process though. I also need to keep color in some part of the movie, my guess is handbrake will b&w the whole thing, might be wrong...
Thanks anyway!
Click to expand...
Yes I think it b/w's all of it đź‘Ť
 
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