I love to recreate interesting scenes and here is gunner Kurt Knispel carrying his wounded friend and tank commander Hans Fendesack away from their burned-out Tiger II Porscheturm. I'm using a Canon P&S digital camera and converting to greyscale with MS Office Picture Manager, then adding a little green tint and upping the contrast. Am I on the right track? Any other tips?

Looks good, to me.

Hey thanks. I'm just not satisfied in comparison with real B&E vintage photos. On some, the underlaying colors are still faintly present with greyscale. I recall using actual B&W film in the old days and the effects were stunning. I've added another without the blue tint and more midtone which seems to give a pleasing effect.

I used to do a lot of black and white myself, using a Minolta Maxxum 7000. I liked to play around with Kokin (sp?) filers to get some interesting effects. Specifically I recall using green or red filters to obtain more contrast in my photos.
I'm wondering if using these old filters with the B&W function on a digital camera will work as well.

Cokin filters are still around (as are china clones) and they still work nicely. I use their gradient and nd filters when doing "sunny 16s" and while not as "close to the lense" as a screw on filter they are more flexible.

[url=http://m8.i.pbase.com/u42/mtf_foto_studies/upload/27546138.a1filt.jpg[/url]

The colored filters should work with a B/W setting on a DLSR just as well.


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As for color manipulations you could try Lightroom (there is a 30day trial version) or Lightzone (free program, former LR competitor). At least LR has additional controls and presets for "vintage" films including add-in "classic film" simulations (some free, some for sale)

OK, thanks for those tips re filters. I have a filter adapter for my Canon G15 and a "warming" filter which is light amber. I'll give that a try.

Hi,

The key problem is that B&W film, specially during WWII, was "color blind", or properly speaking, not very sensible to certain wavelengths (colors). Just search for orthochromatic (the usual one, which gave almost black for red colors, as it was red-blind. Remember the darkrooms with red bulbs?), and panchromatic films, the better one at the time of WWII.
Nowadays you get a much more balanced image, regarding sensitivity to colors, from a electronic sensor, and that´s fundamentally different. Whatever usual conversion you do, will produce "too many" gray levels, I mean too many because one of the prominent features of old pictures of lower quality film is the high contrast, or not many different gray levels.
The good news is that there are software tools that imitate this film effect, I remember years ago to have seen some "filters" or "plugins" for photoshop. I imagine it has to be relatively simple to simulate a color response diagram from any film. You may try to search the net for that kind of plugins... I am disconnected from this world since years, I can´t stretch my time more...

Kind regards
Nacho

Okay, played around a bit with the presets from Lightroom 5 (Lightzone can do similar stuff). Base was the colored picture

Slideshow

Original picture is an 18MP RAW from an EOS60D with a 50mm/f1.8 lens at f/1.8, ISO100 and 1/2000sec . Scaled down to 1920x1080, no other processing (Lens correction etc) was done.

I recommend NOT using the Image/ adjustment/ -> "Desaturate" function


instead I use the Image/ adjustment/ -> "Hue/saturation function"

That way you can edit the channel colors individually.
And make the image under-express the red like the old film.

~NBNoG

NSFW: http://chrisjohnsenphoto.tumblr.com/post/51060851617

Since those posts where made the NikCollection from Google was made available for free. They have tools to simulate old cameras, films, dirt effects etc.

http://i1194.photobucket.com/albums/aa374/khmeier/Batest-1-2_zpsmseeyezy.jpg