Black and White from Colour Neg

[garethmunden]

Hi everyone

I'm prepping something at the moment to be shot in Black and White. After discussions with the producer and post house I tested B&W and Colour negs and went B&W in post. Looking at the results and taking budget into account (don't have many lab options here in London) we are going with one of the colour neg stocks (8647).

I know some of you have done this before ( Roger you have I know ) So hope you can answer my questions (one at the moment, more to come) One thing I was thinking (I'll test it if I'm the right lines) what happens if I use B&W filters (Red, yellow etc) with the colour stock? Will it have the same effect as a B&W stock? (Red to darken sky etc) or the same effect happen if you work on one colour channel on the DI ?

I look forward to hearing from you all.

Gareth Munden London UK

[Roger]

I would suggest leaving any colour balancing of your B/W image for the DI process. Your colour negative will not respond in the same way as a B/W negative might and in skewing your negative toward yellow or red you might only restrict your ability to select colour in post. Just as you might turn a colour still into a B/W one in Photoshop and use your colour channels to adjust it's 'colour' contrast you will have similar control in the DI process.

[garethmunden]

Roger

Thank you so much for the reply. I was thinking to leave to post. I will go into the DI with my test stock to play at some point. I'll also look a photoshop and see what can been done.

Once again ta Roger

Gareth Munden

[jeclark2006]

Adding to a year old post...

There are several issues with what I've seen with 'black and white' presentations of films these days.

1) The use of color film and rendering the result as monochrome.
2) The lack of the daily experience of what 'black and white' is.
3) Seeing values over color.

I'm thinking mostly of the non-pro attempts, but even for me such films as "The Good German"(2006) didn't quite give me the 'feeling of B&W'. In some regard, I was reminded of the look of Ilford's XP2 using a C-41 color development process...

For item 1), many people seem to think that just desaturation and perhaps some contrast enhancement turns a color image into 'black and white'. Unfortunately this is not true. Each B&W film had/has a specific spectral response, and so, the more appropriate method of conversion would be to perform a weighted mix of R, G, B (since most imaging systems only have those three 'colors' available). I'm sure most digital processing of pro 35mm work would perform this process, but for the low budget filmmaker using a digital camera, this is probably not the 'first' thought. The several popular NLE software packages have an effect called 'channel mixer', and allows for weighted mixing of the RGB to produce the monochrome output.

For item 2)... well... unfortunately the ability for most people, myself included, the opportunity to see real B&W presentations of motion pictures is rather limited... so I'd recommend visiting an art museum and see as many still B&W images as possible to acquire a knowledge of how B&W looks.

For item 3) I first used a Wratten 90 filter, as per The Zone System, to allow me to look at a scen in a monochrome color, to allow the 'values' of the scene to predominate while mapping 'color' to the orange/yellow of the filter. This would eliminate what color produces as 'contrast' but when converted to B&W, yield an unconstrasting value of monochrome. After a while one begins to 'see' the values in a scene, and the filter can be dispensed with.