Simply desaturating a photograph doesn¡¯t really represent a true black & white film photo. The film has more impact, more puch and more life. A digital photo converted to black & white just doesn¡¯t cut it, it doesn¡¯t look real.

Although it¡¯s impossible to represent digitally what the chemicals and the paper do to a black and white image (not to mention the film), we can get fairly close to something like a TRI-X 400 film once we understand what¡¯s happening with the film.

This easy post-processing tutorial gives a way to do so.

It is best used for cityscapes, dramatic scenes & photojournalism / street photography.

Before & After

1- Original

2- Desaturate & convert to Lab Colors (Image > Adjustments > Desaturate & Image > Mode > Lab colors)

3- Duplicate layer & Highpass Filter (Filter > Other > Highpass)

Radius 2 for small / web images, radius 10 for 6MP+ images.

This will increase the contrast & sharpness of edges.

4- Change Highpass layer to 20-40% opacity & to ¡°Hard Light¡± mode

5- Make a new Curve filter layer

Or if you don¡¯t know how to do this, select the desaturated layer and go (Image > Adjustment > Curves)

Ok. This curve is going to push the shadows to black and the hilights to blow out a bit. This reflects printed black & white images as they don¡¯t have much dynamic-range in those areas (the ink). Also we brighten a bit everything in between to fight the usual tone curves of digital cameras. They tend to darken a bit the images as most censor lose details in the hilights (most of digital cameras, even profesionnal, allow much more data to be captured in the shadows to reduce noise, therefor giving less dynamic-range in the hilights).

6- Final adjustments & end

Have a play with the opacity of the highpass layer and the curve. Don¡¯t overdo the highpass. Too high radius and you end up with halos around your subjects, especially in high contrast. Too much opacity on highpass will also look like a bad jpeg. Always use with moderation.

Another example:

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