Lightroom has a good black & white editor. By adjusting its various colour channels you can tweak the tonal range of a greyscale image and make it look like you photographed it in black & white using the orange contrast filter.

Step 1: Remove the colour

First click on the B&W button to remove colour

Step 2: Darken the sky

Scroll down to the HSL / Color / B&W section on the right. You will see a list of 8 colour sliders. The main one that affects buildings is orange, but you may find some of the others do stuff when you slide them too.

In this pictures it's mostly stone or the small patch of sky. Lets darken the sky first. As it's blue, simply slide the blue slider to the left and watch the sky go almost black. We don't want it too dark so a -20 setting is fine.

Step 3: Adjust tonal contrast

Now adjust the orange filter to change contrast of the stone. This has a similar affect to shooting  through an orange filter with black & white film. If you drag it right you will see everything lightens up, drag it left and thngs become darker but also more contrasty. We will drag to about the left setting -40. The yellow slider affects the lighter aspects of the building and these we will lighten by dragging the lider to +30.

Step 4: Overall contrast change

Now scroll up to the Tone curve and lets set an S shape curve which results in more contrast. You will find you use this on most digital shots to bosst contrast. Take the highlights slider to +50 and Lights to +20 and dark to +20 and drag the shadows to the left to about -40. You can now see a much more striking image with defined contrast detail in shadows but with much more depth.

Step 5: Save to snapshot

Save this snapshot Develop > New Snapshot and call it mono conversion. You can then do what you want with the image in Lightroom and return to this snapshot state at any time by clicking on the saved snapshot on the left hand panel.


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