Black and White in Lightroom Many photographers enjoy using Adobe Lightroom for post-processing their photos because Lightroom provides a simplified workflow and environment specifically designed for digital photography—the program can also produce great black and white images from RAW originals with relatively minimal effort.
Photoshop to keep complete control of my black and white creative process. However, there are times where the convenient workflow features (Lightroom makes it very easy to keep track of different versions of an image) and the simplicity of obtaining good black and white results makes me sigh with relief when I use Lightroom.
Lightroom combines the power the ACR RAW converter, additional developing tools and a great image cataloging system into a very friendly user interface.
If Lightroom is already part of your digital workflow, as it is for many photographers, then by all means you should incorporate it into your process of black and white conversion. If you are new to black and white image rendition from RAW originals, then Lightroom may be a great place for you to start with your creative monochromatic digital photography.
The trade-off is that Lightroom doesn’t provide the complete pixel-level control of Photoshop. However, there’s plenty of ability to process RAW captures into black and white. If necessary, you can edit the results in Photoshop for further work. For the most part, unless I am processing a great many photos at one time, I use
Grayscale Conversion Using Presets The easiest way to convert an image to black and white using Lightroom is to simply use the Lightroom grayscale conversion features. This can be done using the Develop module (see HSL Conversion starting on page 86) or when in the process of importing a RAW image, as shown on page 83. By way of comparison, the RAW image processed at default “As Shot” values is shown to the left.
◀ When I inspected this image before importing it, I felt it would be a good candidate for preset conversion because of the overall acceptable exposure without great ranges.
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Creative Black & White