Perfect Black & White

[Robert Watcher]

every once in a while I come across something that just blows my mind. This concept related to Colours converted to Black and White, was very surprising. Something I had no idea about.

Very valuable are the colour value percentages included in the video, that get you to the starting point of perfect black and white tonality as perceived by our eyes.

This is related to using Affinity Photo to convert to B&W using the Black and White Adjustment Layer. I think other programs may have settings baked in to their conversions that allow for this anomaly —- but appreciate knowing the theory of this.

 

[Robert Watcher]

I was going to see how this all applied on Affinity Photo on my desktop computer, but wondered how challenging it would be on my iPad.

This snapshot of my oldest son and his wife, from early last year, was already sitting there in Affinity Photo - so I just used it. This colour reference is the last pic here.

First pic is the standard Black & White adjustment, Second is using the Colour percentage numbers for perceived values, (saved that as a Preset called Perfect Black and White - which I haven’t done before with Photo - and then tried to find where the Preset was located), Third I also added a Brightness and Contrast Adjustment layer to tweak the tonality a little bit.

——-

I know that I had tried converting to B&W on a couple of occasions using the Black & White Adjustment, but did not like the results —— so gave up using Affinity for that. The insights in the video, will be useful