Colours into Tones in Black & White

It's a cold wet and miserable day in Suffolk so what better time to do an exercise using still life.

This is the original photograph:

All changes to black and white were done digitally using Photoshop>Adjustments>Black&White.

For the next image I accepted the settings given in the dialog box:

This produced a good range of tones within the image whilst retaining the form and texture of the vegetables.

I then applied the red filter without altering the individual sliders:

As can be seen this produced an image where the highlights are blown out and a lot of the detail is lost.

The blue filter produced this image:

As can be seen virtually all detail is lost.

The yellow filter offered this image:

A similar image to the red filter with blown highlights.

Finally the green filter:

An acceptable image but there is some loss of range of tone.

In this particular example the 'neutral' image produced the best conversion to a black and white image. I spent some time adjusting the individual sliders although I found that it was very much a guessing game as it was not immediately apparent which slider produced the desired result. Combinations of sliders were even more a guessing game.  There are 'plug-ins' available on the internet that produce much better conversions without a lot of trial and error.

I enjoy black and white photography but the subject matter is important as some subjects lend themselves more readily to monochrome. I am not sure that my selected still-life came into this category.