For my personal tastes, I like a very rich black and white, with more on the dark end and a lower white point to achieve a creamy white instead of a digital white. This recipe is similar to using a red filter on black and white film. Blue skies become inky dark, and white exposed skies become creamy. On the Lumix S9 I’ve been able to capture images below with the recipe that follows.

This may seem too dark for some, but I enjoy the darker black and white and the recipe below raises the black point, so it’s not a pure digital black, while lowering the white point (so it’s not a digital white). The result is a black and white recipe that has creamy whites, and rich dark grey tones.

Recipe

Pictures of the menu are below. Going into Photo / Photo Style, you will need to modify the settings as shown below. To make this work I’m stacking two different LUTs:

1. Set the profile to L.mono
2. Add bw grain, set it to Low
3. For the LUTs:

• LUT 1: is a high contrast LUT of your choice (it can be color). I use the free “LBK K Tone Intense 33” which can be downloaded on THIS LINK. If you need instructions on adding a 3rd party LUT, see my instructions. This is set to 100%
• LUT 2: is the “Urban & Street” LUT free on the Lumix Lab APP. This is set to 100%

Variations

Lighter Exposures: you can change the exposure value +1. This will blow out the brights, and lift the dark regions.

Shadow Value: Increasing the shadow value to +5 will raise the dark tones to be lighter.