Black and White: How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count The Ways.

Today's theory lesson had us looking at different ways to convert an image to black and white - which I found interesting, because who doesn't love a great black and white shot? I was, however, not thrilled to discover that the way I had been doing it was probably the worst. 

When I convert to black and white in Lightroom, I most often do this by entirely desaturating the image. I do this because most of the time it looks better than what you get if you just click "black and white", and I try to avoid the presets. I've never had much of an issue with it, except on occasion. Sometimes I wished there was a better way to do it. 

Then today, we did it using colour channels in Lightroom, and that changed everything. 

Through experimenting with this, we were asked to take one image and create two different versions of it - both black and white, but both with different moods. 

Same shot, different versions. It's truly amazing what you can do.