Curmudgeon Loc: SE Arizona

I'll try that

Jim-Pops Loc: Granbury, Texas

In my past I sold commercial printing. In my early years we did a lot of one and two color printing that produced B&W photos and duotone photos. Many times we would loose detail if over exposing the film and we would say the blacks are plugged. In your example I think it looks line over exposed film work. IMO.

When I make B&W photos from color digital images I too use NIK Silver Efex 95% of the time. On rare occasions it just won't give me a good results. Usually the problem is the color photo doesn't have enough separation between colors. I tried to edit your picture with NIK Silver Efex and failed at several attempts. I then tried to do it using photoshops B&W layer and failed again. I finally tried one last attempt using luminosity masks. I use my Free v 1.3 luminosity mask from Greg Benz. It automatically makes 20 various channels from the color image showing up under channels section. It separates the channels into groups, Lights, Darks, Midtones, Light Midtones, and Dark Midtones. I used one of the 'Light" ones, then inverted it to create a new B&W image.

Once I brought the channel into my layers I copied it and opened Camera Raw, upped Highlights, upped whites, darkened blacks and increased texture. all the slider moved were very small.

(Download)

peekaboo

I think the B & W is to dark and I think it needs a little lightened

Curmudgeon Loc: SE Arizona

Beautiful, I really like that. Shows how much I have to learn. I just seem to have a too heavy hand at this point

Curmudgeon Loc: SE Arizona

Thanks Peekaboo

Cwilson341 Loc: Central Florida

I like the detail and contrast in the subject. The dark sky sort of makes a vignette to draw focus to the cactus.

Curmudgeon Loc: SE Arizona

Thanks for looking and commenting Carol