It has been a year since that I’ve been experiencing a “Black and White” phase. Searching on Google, there are many BW tutorials using Lightroom/ACR. Hopefully this post will teach CaptureOne users how to make great BW images using ICC profiles and the features we have in CaptureOne PRO. CaptureOne 4/5 has the following Monochromatic ICC profiles that’s located under the “Base Characteristics”:
High Contrast
Medium Contrast
Low Contrast
Panchromatic
Yellow Filter
Once I fix White Balance (WB) and Lens Correction (LC), sharpening, and noise reduction, I cycle through the monochromatic ICC profiles until I see something I like and work my way to the BW image I like. Emporio Armani images are high in contrast with some blacks clipped. Their male models are normally posed in classical masculine stance with subtle facial expression. We’ll start with this image of Kyler Willett now represented by Wilhelmina Models LA. When this image was taken, he was with the now defunct VUE Model Management.

June 18, 2008. Naturally lit. ISO 100 1/125 s f/9 28mm.
Starting with the above image, I increased the clarity to 100. The clarity tool (in both ACR and CaptureOne) is a variant of the local contrast enhancement (LCE) tool. It uses a combination of high radius low amount (Hiraloam) sharpening and deconvolution and/or USM sharpening. Don’t quote me on this. I am positive the Hiraloam is part of clarity!

Clarity @ 100. LCE. As a consequence, Kyler's chest pixels' are above 250 (not going to print well). We have to do additional edits to work around this.

Exposure -1 and assigning "Film Extra Shadow" to the curve dialog under "Base Characteristics."

Assigned "B&W" Panchromatic. For this particular naturally lit scene, Panchromatic appealed to me.
At this point, some might stop here, but I’d like to do additional tweaks and interesting things about CaptureOne PRO’s functions.
Saturation Slider

Saturation -100 lightens areas of skin or "reds."

Saturation +100. Opposite of -100. Darkens areas of skin.
Color Balance

Default position. Click anywhere on the wheel and look at your picture. When I click on the green at the edge, it darkens the image while clicking the edge (circumference) of the magentas brightens the image.
Color Editor


Result of edits in the Color Editor.
Levels and Curve

In CaptureOne 5, the individual R, G, and B can be tweaked. Here. I went into the B-curve and adjusted the midpoint to -0.45 to darken the background wall to create spatial distance adding depth. Remember that light things are closer to you and darker things are away.

Used the eye dropped tool on the lower right to define points on the image to be edited. I worked on the RGB composite. One can go into individual R, G, and B components and tweaked further.

Finished!