But achieving a decent black and white conversion from a colour, digital image is actually quite hard. I edit my work in Lightroom Classic and sure, there is a one click b&w conversion and there are even b&w presets specifically for portraits and landscapes and everything in between. But to me, the results are far from pleasing, the results are often just plain old 18% grey. Middle grey, to me, is NOT black and white. There should be a broad tonal range across the image, from deep blacks to crisp whites (I’m pretty sure there’s a photographer who designed a whole system around this concept, but I’m not in the zone for talking about that today). Instead, what I am going to talk about, is how through some trial and error, I’ve created a preset in Lightroom that acts a starting point for what I call “Perfect black and white”.