All the Ways to Get to Black and White from Raw | Thom Hogan

[Music] well hello and welcome to the bnh event space I'm glad you all made it here on a nice rainy drizzly day in New York City it was tough to get in on the bus this morning it was a hour and a half late getting in so is it's kind of I know some of you may have had a struggle to get in here my name is Tom Hogan I've been a photographer pretty much full-time since 2000 2001 prior to that I was the editor a backpacker magazine prior to that I had a career in Silicon Valley where I designed all these wonderful geeky things that we use including one of the first digital cameras so I had a background going back in terms of imaging and camera design the predates probably when most of you think the digital camera revolution started and that's given me kind of a special place because when everybody started to switch from film to digital they were all confused there was like a ton of new stuff to learn all kinds of different ways to do things and it was different than they've had ever ever seen before you know what happened to the darkroom now we have a digital darkroom instead of chemicals and and that's a whole other thing and some people don't really like computers so one of the things that I when I was thinking about you know doing a new event space talk was you know so how many of you want to be Ansel Adams's how many of you want to be Ansel Adams's a couple of you you know you do know he's dead so I'm not sure you really I'm not sure you still really wanna be ants 11 so you want to be like college you want to be like Ansel Adams I think is the correct terminology I started thinking about all the things that Ansel did are similar to some many of the things that I do I'm kind of anal and I'm retentive and I about control freak and I like knowing all the little teeny things that I'm dealing with and I like to build on that knowledge and then try and use discipline to use that knowledge and Ansel was doing that with film for many many years and we you know the digital stuff is tends to be kind of unorganized and I kept thinking about this and it's like who has actually stepped through the history of how we've been working with digital image imagery and black and white and so I came up with this title all the ways to get the black and white photography and I'm gonna step you through that and we're gonna start real simple and then we're gonna get more complex and more complex and more complex and more modern more modern and more modern until eventually hopefully we'll do some stuff that's kind of really interesting and along the way hopefully you'll learn something so what is it that we're actually doing here where we're taking this real world where colors the infinite number of colors they blend from one color to another color in such gradual ways that there are essentially infinite colors we're taking that and we're capturing it with just three color channels we're breaking it down into RGB and if you're going to black and white if you're gonna try and take and make black and white photos we're going even farther we're taking out the color information we're taking out all this other stuff and just gettin down to tonality everybody with me so far right we are reducing the complexity of the outside world which is really complex I mean billions and billions and colors millions and billions of details and we're trying to reduce that in one's some way way shape or form so let's talk about the color model everybody know about the color model everybody can like spout all these things off what do we have in the color model what's the most important thing in the color model it is hue that is the color so hue is the red/green/blue or if you're in the other world magenta yellow cyan those are the colors we call those hues and we can shift cues if we capture a hue that's this this is going to come up later in this talk we capture a hue that's this we can shift it this way or this way in the color model but wait a second time we're in black and white that's okay we're gonna play with colors to saturation what's saturation and how does that fit into this this is a lightly saturated yellow that's a very saturated yellow okay so we're just putting more of that yellow into that spot not making it brighter not making it darker we're just putting more of that yellow in now you notice that I haven't drawn this as a I've done this kind of is in special ways because the last thing is the thing that we're really interested in this in this talk which is the luminance how bright or how dark something is everybody still with me so we're trying to take that world that has infinite number of colors and we're really trying to reduce ourself to a fairly narrow space we're getting rid of lots of information you have to accept that if you're shooting in black and white I am losing information everybody with me that's a tricky one we lose information and that's important so why would we even go to black and white if we're losing information anybody have any ideas I'll just throw this one out for a second anybody what's a compelling reason to you to go to black and white it has a different feel okay eliminates unnecessary that I like that one you had one but less is more so eliminations situation accentuates the drama so let's talk about the things that we do and we get when we do black and white it's all about tonality that's all we have to work with really other than you know pixels we're just working in tonality so is the subject I'm taking a picture of about tonality how about a sand dune yeah I can see a lot of tonality and that the color of the sand is not necessarily important unless it's a unique color of sand but the tonality of what's happening in the sand very very important so you I'm gonna give you a list of things here that I want you to think about when you are thinking about doing black and white and tonality is right up there at the top so next we have texture that's kind of related to tonality right that you know we've got this pattern in the floor here there's texture to the carpet beyond the pattern itself if that were important the texture in the carpet black and white starts to pull that out as well as the pattern itself right whereas the color the color is a neutral color for probably obvious reasons in a video room in a present presentation room I don't want you all looking at the floor I want you all looking at me hopefully and and and listening to me but if we were if we were looking at that and say you know that carpet has a really unique texture guess what one way to document that is to go to black and white what color is a shadow it's black if your image is all about shadows black and white sounds like a pretty good place to be right street photography this is important a lot of street photography I know we talked earlier before we started the presentation there's a lot of street photographers in here a lot of what you doing is about shadow right the you know when the Sun gets down in in the in the urban Canyon is throwing light down the street the shadows start casting and you're starting to find you're starting to find places where you want a photograph because you are just so compelled by what's happening with the shadows black and white might be something that you want to investigate that because we don't generally do colored shadows now there every time somebody says we don't do or you shouldn't do or or do you only do this that's the way to become a great photographer that's known for something that nobody else is known for go out there you you want to you want your own niche shoot colored shadows become the colored shadows photographer get back guarantee you there's nobody out there doing it however we're talking about going to black and white so you you can leave now if you want to do colored shadows because of the simplification that I heard simplification a couple of times because of the simplification that that happens lines and shapes start to reveal themselves more they're not masked by other things like colors you especially see this in red rock country and in southern Utah Rock red rocks everywhere everything's red and it's different shade red they're it's different shade of red there's different shade of red there well that's tonality and it's rock it's got texture and oh by the way it sticks out like out of the sky in this dramatic fashion that's a line or shape I'm thinking I want to shoot black and white in that Kip situation maybe I shoot it in color too and maybe maybe you know that's that I make a living out of making color photographs of landscapes but in that particular location I haven't even got to all my list of things here yet and three of them are hitting when I'm in Red Rock Country it's like maybe I want to be in black and white detail sort of goes with the texture but again we're simplifying we're getting rid of the colors that might mask detail and we're just talking about the detail itself go a little faster here through the rest of the simplification we've already heard that one surreal we don't see in black and white well we do at night and then sometimes it's sort of surreal when we went when just part of our eyes are you know that we can see you and we can almost see photons as like things are moving out in the dark there's a wolf over there behind that tree I just know it because there's like pixels moving surreal it's different it's different than real black and white is different than real so if you want to do be the Salvador Dali or you want to go into more surreal kinds of things black and white maybe a place that can be helpful for that because it's different related to that it's escaping reality somebody said it earlier the feeling it just feels like black and white black and white makes me feel different about this place than coloured us I think that was really true of Ansel Adams I if you've ever studied any of his work he has a book about Ansel Adams in color and you look at those photographs and they're not terribly remarkable and then you look at his black and white work in the same place and it's remarkable but his black and white his work is remarkable somehow he got the feeling of black and white he was feeling black and white somehow I don't know how that works in the brain some people can get that some people can't I talk a lot about in composition or eyes are always going to go the bright spot on the screen and we lost one display or not no we're all back okay our eyes are always going to go to the bright spot in a image so we've got an image over here where does your eye go well and then they changed it then they change it to me so now where does your eye go well it goes to that circle right because that is the bright spot think about it go next time you see a photograph just sit there take it in and say where's my eye really going and are you having to take in the bright spots yes you are absolutely we're all driven by that black-and-whites perfect white is a bright spot so if you're into bright spots and you want to use that that's where you go if we want to convey night black and whites good for conveying night because we lose our color vision at night right so I said before black and white can be surreal but it can also be more realistic too at night it's more real if you use it during the day it's more surreal and the last thing is that we can use black and white because of the simplification to mask things and here we're going to take those last two things I'll tell you a little story you know my mom is an artist and paints sculpts does does jewelry does pretty much anything that's associated with art she's a very very good artist I bought her an iPad the big iPad with the pencil it couldn't have been more than five minutes and she's drawing out artwork on her iPad that's like incredible and she said oh now I can finally figure out how this one thing that's in my mind works and that was this picture here it's an acrylic and it used it's a night encounter anybody see the two animals there are two skunks there's one here and there's one here they are masked right because of the simplicity and the way that way the tonalities work it's a little hidden payoff in the art that you don't see when you first look at it it's like okay and so some trees and say whoa wait a second what's that a little bonus payoff that's what I mean by masking is that you can mask something and kind of hide it in plain sight if all we're talking about is the tonality just make the tonality similar and it gets basked for free not you don't see a lot of people playing that game in black and white so we had somebody who worked in black and white who is like way more famous than I'm ever going to be or I ever care to be and that was Ansel Adams and he came up with this he came up with his own system because he was trying to come up keeps coming trying to come to grips with the tonality of what he was working with capturing it correctly in the field processing it correctly in the darkroom and printing it correctly at the end of the process and trying to keep something that's supposed to that's black capture it is black process at his black printed as black something that's white captured his white process at his white printed his white and so he came up with his own system and it's well worth knowing at the bottom end we have zero zone zero is black zone one is near black notice the zone two is the first time we get to anything that seems to indicate that there's detail textured black black is black there's nothing there it's black near black still not really much there but it's not pure black it doesn't till we get to textured black that we actually get to tonality 'z that we start to read D register details in for the most part now I'm oversimplifying a system and there's people that would argue with me about that but I do want you to pay some attention to it because it does you need to think about this when you're processing your images do I have black in my image do I have white in my image what do I have in two analogies between I don't care if you use Ansel Adams zone system or you a system you come up with yourself but you have to figure out where these tonalities live and why they live where they live and that's what he did for us average dark is in zones three and four middle gray is in zone five Caucasian skin which I hope mine is is a six light-skinned which you have any light-skinned people here and we were all kind of average skins so that's great we have some dark skins that's coming up but we actually passed it with middle gray in the average dark textured white is the equivalent to textured dark or texture black it's where we still see details but we're now progressing to a very bright tonality remember what I said where does your eye go in that image that goes to those bright things up at the very top and that I'm not sure that's where the photographer there goes right to her right that's perfect and just like we have near black we have near white and then we have white so in darker and press a digital darkroom processing what is white well its absence of color but what is it in terms of a value no now its 255 in 8-bit and what is black zero okay so if you're printing on to a printer like an Epson printer inks spread so if you if you make true black zero you're gonna get bit blob of black ink where you have those zeros most really fine art black-and-white photographers you're gonna find that their definition is not 255 and zero their definition is maybe two forty five and twenty depends on what papers they're using what printers they're using depends on a lot of different variables but they've thought about where all these things fall in the final product that we don't have a blob of black we don't have zone zero blobs all over the place we have some zone zeros that just register as black where we want black and no further out so you have to think about that when you think about the zone system come up with your own way of doing things okay so let's start to get into some hands-on stuff back in 2003 I published this article which was all the ways to get to digital black and white back in 2003 of which there weren't very many desaturate lab colors it's a deletion channel mixer using the channel mixer to get to black and white and using hue/saturation layers that was pretty much it very early on so I'm gonna be using photoshop in this but it doesn't really matter whether you use Photoshop or not you can do many of these same things with a different slightly different control somewhere in capture one or Lightroom or many other products some of the layering stuff you can't do in so the products but I just wanted to go through this to show you where we've been and what we can do now right so we're going to step through a little bit of history and we're gonna do some hands-on here what I want you to watch is there's a picture up at the top and as I go between the different versions of this old way that picture is going to change in fact I'm just going to step you through here desaturate lab color delete color mixer HSL layers did you see changes in each of those right so I'm getting different results from each of those processes that was sort of an eye-opener to me way early on is that there wasn't one way to do it so let's go through each of these really quickly hopefully and see what they do and how you get there so desaturate I need to get out of here let's get over to photoshop let's come to that image there's our image as it exists out of the camera it's taken with a Fuji film a5 with the kit lens and there is detail galore in this image it's like $600 camera I'd be really happy to shoot black and white with it as you can see so how do we decide right we just pick the desaturate command and whatever we're using which in Photoshop is right there and we're done does it look great now kind of bland right why might it be kind of bland well let's pull up the histogram I want to show you something here I'm going to go back there's the color image there's the D saturated image notice anything about the histogram [Music] it came down it narrowed because it was averaging channels and that's what the output so what does a narrower histogram mean less contrast what do we want probably more contrast right we're trying to pull out all of these different zones and layers and textures so desaturate you know I know a lot of people who they just use desaturate and then they come in and they start playing with the contrast it back up and you know try and start from there it's really easy to do though right there's one command it's even keystroke dedicated to it I'm not sure why but so that was desaturate now watch the image isn't we move to method two what changed the brights got brighter there's a little more contrast the dark if you paid attention to the darkest darkest went a little more dark so this is lab color delete this was sort of the second method that we started to teach in the late 90s and eventually you know I posted in 2003 is one of the ways that you could get to black and white so how is lab color delete work well you need a product that can get to lab color so Lightroom is kind of out of out of the picture here everybody know we're lab color is here it's a mode it's right there normally we work in RGB but we're gonna work in lab color and when we go to lab color I'm going to close down my histograms here and I'm gonna open up my layers actually I want to open up my channels excuse me so those are my channels instead of RGB I have this thing called lightness and I have this thing called a and I have a thing called B lightness is luminance hey what was it we're looking for we're looking for luminance right this is why we all had it here it's like hey if we moved a lab color luminance is a channel all by itself maybe we can just go grab that luminance channel and deal with that luminance channel all we have to do is get rid of a which is one of the colors one of the color ranges and B which is the other alternative there so you come in here and you go let's see trying to remember there's something that always fights me on this yeah okay so now I can select the channel and delete it wait a second what happened to B now I have these two things alpha 1 and alpha 2 what well alpha 2 is B alpha 1 is still luminance so all we have to do at this point has come in take alpha B and we're going to nuke alpha B as well and now we have our black and white image we've gone to the limit basically we've taken out the Abyan channels and just retained the luminance channel and that's what we wanted we wanted to retain the luminance now there was more luminance in this image than then the average of the channels worked out too with desaturate so that's why we get a bright a bigger range between the darkest things in here and the brightest things in here yeah what Oh with the histogram you want to see the histogram uh of course you do after I've stepped that direction let's step forward forward forward we are all the way forward until I do that delete that channel and you want to see the histogram now you'll notice I'm not doing the keyboard shortcuts here I'm trying to make sure that you can see what it is I'm selecting all the time I've learned a long time ago that's a lot easier on students you notice the histogram is fuller it extends a little bit more over out into the brights a little bit more over into the darks it's still not a completely full histogram and we're kind of sitting you can see I can almost get my finger over that where's that sitting on black we're sitting off black somewhere so that was method number two that we used and of course what was happening so what we do we'd use a method and we go you know that wasn't good enough and it's like I had to do a whole bunch of other stuff to the image afterwards and then I don't remember what I did and it seems to be different for every image there must be a better way that's why we were sitting around trying to discover these other ways so the next next way let me get back to our original image here so we don't get confused or next way again I want you to watch this is what the one that we just did which is lab color delete that's color mixer now I want you to look at the river really close I'm going to go back and forth back to lab color delete go to the color mixer why did the river change color [Music] Randee dark no that's not the reason so let's go back over here and look at it in Photoshop what color is the river it is turquoise could I select that color and do something to that color yeah I can make that darker or lighter I could probably isolate that color from every other color in this landscape that's why we started using this method so the way you use this method and you can do this even in Lightroom to some degree but got all you light right how many of you use Lightroom hey Tony fans I'm not the biggest Lightroom a user in the world although I do use it much more into Photoshop and other other tools that give me more sophistication but you can do a relative of this in Lightroom but hold off all you Lightroom users because your world just changed recently and there's a whole nother set of stuff we're going to talk about that's even better than the way you do this in Lightroom so how many people don't use Lightroom ok whose name starts with L first name starts with L last name starts with L middle initial out did you raise your hand you don't use Lightroom excellent you're now like a user I told you there's gonna be a giveaway the Kiki ping keep paying attention okay so how do we do channel mixer in Photoshop it's funny there is something called I wonder what that's called it's called channel mixer and when you select it we now get this dialog that allows us to mix and change colors so remember when I was talking about hue saturation and lightness so hue is changing colors right so one of the things that we could do with this dialogue if we wanted to is start changing colors but we want to do something else we want to come down into this corner here and we want to click monochrome blowing now I want you to look at these three sliders we have underlying the data a red channel a blue Channel and a green Channel and they add up to a hundred percent of what we were doing and if you look really closely right down here at the bottom right right there you see my cursor it says a hundred percent well you know what would happen if we gave it more red well we're at one hundred thirty-four percent that's not good less of that and maybe less blue until we hit a hundred percent again so we're outputting the same amount that we started with it's hard for me too let's do minus six is what we want [Applause] that's not bad is it for the longest time early in this century the first decade for the longest time this was sort of the go-to way that we got the black-and-white and it still can be for you if you want to there's a lot of flexibility here and you can get in and start playing with colors you know there's red in the shot there's turquoise in this shot so we should be able to play with those channels and get contrast between the red and the turquoise the red being the rock the turquoise being in the water this was the way we did it some of us used tools that had more channels than just RGB that allowed us to get in and like look at cyan and other things but generally speaking this was the way most most of us did black and white for a long long time I was even doing this before we got to writing about it on the web did I tell you how many who knows when I started my website sorry that's too late 96 is close 97 is when I started the website it actually first started publishing regularly in 98 1994 was when I first started doing nikon support on the web through a news group so who said that you said that you are going you are going to Japan and your feet are going to be so nice because you're going to the new Otani hotel and they've just given you these wonderful little slippers that you can use casually around your room to keep your feet nice and warm and fuzzy okay so you didn't ask me a couple of questions here like can we look at the histogram yeah we can how's our histogram looking now it's looking a little better even better than it was before and if I played with the channels a lot I could probably get a histogram in exactly the way I wanted to get the colors exactly the way I want it but we're not doing too bad we're we're okay on the Ansel Adams scale we started out at a two we maybe got to a three and a half we're probably five six so now right where we're we're moving all the way up we're gonna get to an Ansel Adams ten at some point right I hope at least I hope you agree with me on that like you you all agree I said we started that too right yeah okay okay so so the only thing I have to do is prove we can get to ten excellent okay so that's number three we're not going to take questions until the very end I you know it's just going to slow me down and you do not want to slow me down I can guarantee you you do not want to slow me down I only have 25 slides and 25 slides takes me how long Tony turn at bark Fran how many long does it take me to do 25 slides yeah three four hours maybe five hours if I really get going and if you really wind me up like four days so we don't want to stop me here but I do want to answer your question I will answer questions at the end so make a good note of what your question is now we need to come back to where we were we're at channel mixer anybody know Russell Brown know the name Russell Brown yeah a couple people so care to say who he is he's a Photoshop evangelist he said Adobe evangelist yeah he is he is a creative force of will he he like you know they had a feature to Photoshop and he's trying to figure out how to use it how do I like just tear it to pieces put it back together a different way and get a result that nobody ever expects well this next method is a Russell Brown method and I believe I believe he first talked about this in 2003-2004 and I've got a mic that it's been so long since I've done this I'm gonna have to look at my own notes here just to make sure I remember what to do so again watch the top color mixer HSL subl but I think arguably a little bit better so what the hell is he doing hue/saturation layers oh dear anybody like need to leave the room for a few minutes while we talk about layers layer layers are the bane of the digital darkroom is like everybody's time you start talking about layers it's like people's brains start freezing up and and they can't conceive of what's going on but so we're gonna get into layers we're gonna make two HSL layers we're gonna move them and the first one going to dab dab dab dab dab dab dab Jim you know and maybe maybe I better take a picture of this so I remember what it is I'm supposed to do here it's been so long since I've done some of these things and I do notice that I'm not using speaker notes so this is my only hint of what is it what it is I'm going to do so what we're gonna do is we're gonna try to be let's see Russell Brown is tall and skinny my pants are falling down he's tall and skinny and he's quite a character so I don't think I can live up to that you're just gonna have to deal with me as I am let's go back to our image and this time we have to do the dreaded thing we have to look at our layers so I've opened my layer panel hidden question so bonus round why is my layers panel on the left hand side what I did move it that is that is technically technically that is the reason why it's on the left side but what motivated me to move it to the left side the rivers on the right the tools are on the left all the stuff is on the left so if you leave your layers panel on the right hand side and you leave your tools on the left hand side what do you end up doing you are going back and forth across your image all the time with your mouse or your tablet or your pen or whatever it is that you're using to control the cursor you're just doing all this extra action now my right arm was starting to get a little more strong than my left arm because of all of this and I decided that it's much much better to just do smaller actions so I moved everything over to the left and then I collapsed it unless I need it and you can see how much screen space that that gave me right is that I just have three thin do you think thin things on the left-hand side that allow me to get out to almost everything that I need to do other than menu stuff and it's all right there together I'm not mousing around all over the place at all so when I first did this my desk was so messy that if I tried to move my mouse all the way over to the right side to get to the layers panel I knock something off on the floor and then when I try and come back to the tools I'd knock something off on the floor or the other way so there there are reasons to do that now what is it I'm supposed to do tell me wrists are brown totally muscle-bound what am I supposed to do I need a hue/saturation layer so I need to come down here and I need to pick a hue/saturation layer excellent there's one what do I do with it wrestle well Russell says I need to build do blend mode color blend mode color blend mode there's the blend mode color am I doing this right or do have the latest backward it doesn't make any difference we can always flop the layers I need another one of those no their hue saturation layer it's sitting up there on top and I need the saturation to be zero here's the properties for it hey we're at black and white Wow yeah I don't know it's layers layers are freaky in Photoshop they do really weird things to you now what do I do next mr. Russell Brown dr. Russell Brown excuse me we moved the hue slider on the first layer so we go down to this layer which is in a color blend mode and now we move our sliders however we want to do that actually I want to come in and just move reds brighten up the Reds I want to come in do the yellows maybe take the yellows a little towards green I want to come in and I want to take the cyan x' that River that River remember that River we can make it we should be able to come in it's not really a cyan oh oh there we go we cuz we can start to adjust it in with color we can start to adjust it with saturation but it's not really sad it's not really that let's try blue it's not really blue either so I'm having a hard time finding the right spot there is this little control right down here that allows me to be more refined at the color that I pick so I could my target is I want to get this color and I want to take that darker I just wanted to come off the rock but again what's our can trash look like does their contrast look good no contrast doesn't look bad right so let's look at our histogram I couldn't sample it I mean there's there's a lot I don't want to get too deep into this because these are the old ways of doing black and white I just want to I want to make sure that you know where we've come from that we come from really simplistic ways and we kept looking for ways to get to the underlying color to use it to adjust the black and white tonalities that's basically what this whole spiel at this point is all about we kept coming up with more sophisticated ways to change the underlying colored values to change the black and white tonality that's what we were up to okay let's back out of this thing dip dip dude the nice thing about this version is I can just take that and nuke it yeah yeah yeah magnetic delete that layer AG nag nag and we're back to where we were you know close my properties tag so that's our image can we do better than that what do you think okay everybody wants me to do better than that anybody want me to do worse than that okay good because I I can do worse but I don't think that's the right direction we want to go okay I've coming back let's come in and move to our next step the newer ways so sometime around the d3 era middle of last decade lately but in the last decade we started getting these dedicated black-and-white tools one of the ones you probably all know about is Nick Silver Efex Pro that was one of the first ones that caught everybody's attention sky ylim had one when they were when back when they were called makan they're not fun anymore they're Lum they had one called tonality topaz came out with one that called was called black and white effects and if you remember correctly exposure the whole reason for Expo alien skin exposure was that it did film emulations a black and white film emulations you know I like shooting in try X well do they have try X yeah interesting so then all these newer ways have kind of came about the same way they all have some sort of way to browse presets and then they have some way to modify lower level details in the presets so like I said silver effects Pro probably was the first of these and it was the first one that had something called structure if you go back and remember that ten twelve things that I put up there why we wanted to be in black and white one of them was texture another one was detail and structure is right there allowing you to control texture and detail is it's a tool that allows you to crank that up or take that down excellent we want one of this it also had control points so I could actually pick the river or something else and say just apply this change to one area oh I'm not having to do the entire image in one big fell swoop like I used to that's kind of nice it was very easy to layer so you could have your original stuff that you had worked on down in your layers and you just say silver effects throw it please select that one and now I've got a black and white layer sitting on top of all the work that I've already done so I could already be doing some things to the image and then convert it to black and white so that was great another nice thing about it currently it's still free a bad thing about it currently it doesn't work with Photoshop CC 2018 as you will probably see if you're interested in the neck date of the silver effects Pro you can get it at Nik collection ni k collection DxO com that's where it lives today it's supposed to be updated in June next month so that it can work with Photoshop 2018 and the latest stuff from Adobe and I'm going to actually go and drop in here and let's see what it does to our image right that should be interesting here's our image where it is Silver Efex Pro Live tawny filter is excellent Shh don't don't help him out make him make make him have to he just got up a plane from the Galapagos last night it is cold in here it's raining and he doesn't see any animals other than me and so he's like falling asleep and getting a little grumpy we have to we have to keep him awake over there because he needs to do part of the last presentation so Nick Nick collection silver silver effects pro boom or Santa it did it boom that directed at that boom there we go I'm gonna take that should have done this before let's take this window up so it's full screen like I said almost all of these newer ways notice I haven't said newest all these newer ways have a browser that allows you to pick something can anybody see the on the left side is there something that looks better than what we've got already well there's certainly some stuff with more contrast there's this high contrast harsh oh yeah that's harsh there's high contrast smooth well that's kind of interesting that feels like late Ansel Adams where he was like really man I've got to get black in this print except the middle mid-tones don't feel Ansel Adam ish but the the dark feels Ansel Adam ish towards the end of his life he was really boy he would I have looked at a bunch of prints over his lifetime of the Denali wonder lake shot I have one of the later prints on my living room wall and he went from okay has some nice tonality oh it's giving contrast here oh it's getting contrast here man that white is locking you in the black sir song can you Oh gotcha you just snuck up on it it took them a while to figure out how to print it so this has some of those elements to it look at that River though the nice thing is that all this stuff on the right hand side if we pick that as our point we can come over here on the right hand side remember I said structure we could add more structure or take a structure out we can bring the brightness up Oh take the contrast down mm-hmm we can amplify whites we can amplify blacks so there's a lot of underlying control here where you can start to pick in bits and pieces but there's also color control if you really wanted to get there I'm not going to go into that because we'll get to that a little later with some of the other products you can protect shadows you can protect highlights you can bring shadows up I can take shadows highlights down we getting closer now I'm not saying this is the best way to do it this image in Nick silver effects Pro I'm just demonstrating that there's so many tools here that we have so much control over all the different things that we can do within the product that's not bad that's a pretty contrast a little thing now if you're using Photoshop 2018 and you click OK oh you can go you dirty rat yeah crash he tried oh it tried yeah hopefully they fix that they fix that in the Judah now you're using an older version of Photoshop anoro is older version of Lightroom you won't have that problem at all and this is still a really good product and it's free that's reason why I mention it so you can still do all this stuff didn't recover both my images that's interesting okay I want to do another thing here that I didn't do before I should have done this earlier we've been kind of fighting that okay so that's silver effects pro the next one that I'm going to talk about of these newer ways to get to black and white is sky limb tonality this is actually one of my favorites another thing that a lot of these newer ways have is besides having a preset they have categories of presets right so you notice that there's portrait street photography and you know you Street guys are right there outdoor that sounds pretty good the funny thing is I as I browse through that that outdoor was not the women I picked for this image there's lots of choices lots of control it's part of a bigger set there's a whole set of products that it's part of its back only unfortunately and it's 50 bucks just for this product some of the Skyrim stuff is tonality I don't think is is it correct me if I'm wrong go to sky limb comm s sky Lum lu m / tonality and that's how you would get that product now so what does that look like and we're gonna do something interesting here except I lost my other image so we're going to have to get that back at some point so Tony where did the last one live filters excellent I'm trying to keep him awake he I mean I need him awake in about two and a half hours so I I've got to keep him awake somehow sotin Ali lives there and we'll start that up and for some reason on this one I kind of liked fashion magazine with some changes I don't know know why I mean high contrast we can get back to the kind of where we were you know using silver effects Pro but you know you can browse around through this product let's do there outdoors ones Andy's dream that's a little too bright for me Silver Sands I don't want silver Hill Capitan no not doing it for me like I said you know the people that make some of these things the presets you know they have ideas of what they're just trying to make all these presets look different then literally you know I want to show that I have 50 presets and they all look different and then they come up with fancy names for them don't ever get into the I can only use outdoor presets on outdoor shots don't ever do that to yourself like I said I thought the one I finally found that I liked the best on this image was a portrait one this is grainy film and that's not bad that kind of film feels a little bit film white and again just like before we have all of these controls I mean lots and lots of controls including the ability to get in to the colors themselves and change things that are happening with say what was that cyan look at that River look at that River that was so much easier than the way we used to have to do it I mean I'd spend hours and hours trying to get to that day a river like that to pull out from the Red Rock and it's like it's just a slider that's why these newer methods are preferred over the older methods you might be thinking to yourself the newest methods must be really great right hold that thought okay so you get an idea here and I'm not going to actually apply it here we're you're just going to come back out because I have something else to talk about here and we have to talk about it at some point what the hell is split toning anybody want to take a whack at that one way in the back where you can apply different out different colored finality to shadows/highlights mid-range that sounds really good to me it sound good to you the rest of you yeah where is the damn tool that y'all take highlights make them warmer take shadows make them cooler where does that live not really exactly I mean it's there it is there it's kind of confusing it does some other things to you as you pitch as you move the slider it's like why is it doing that to me so why am I doing this after talking about sky limb tonality it is the quickest easiest most direct and and I get it way of doing split toning tonality that I found so let's go see if we can find her again where did she go when we crashed we lost her so let's go find her Deepti images what the hell image was she she was probably this one let's see if it's true hey it is and let's open that image and let's bring her up a little bigger and let's go and I am on my fun which is really sky ylim and we're going to bring in tonality and I'm going to look for a portrait mode and find something I like cold heart oh gee impressive fashion magazine I always wanted to shoot for fashion magazine let's use fashion magazine although it's taking the background a little dark for me that's nice we can still see the background so how do we do split toning in tonality you could a split toning seems seems pretty straightforward to me right and highlights what do we want to do with the highlights well I want to make them warmer put a little more saturation into those highlights notice how subtle it's doing I mean I can really Zonk it up here but I'm moving the slider quite a bit here and getting very but this is one of the things I really like about this for split toning is that there's a lot of subtlety to all this and how we're doing it so I can get it and now that's a little too much that's a little yeah so I'll spend an hour sitting there moving a slider you know back and forth you know two centimetres to millimetres okay so that's the highlights what about the shadows well we want them to go cooler and we can put a little more again notice how subtle this is I'm dragging a lot of stuff in here but all I'm doing is just very slowly and subtly pulling those two tonality 's apart from each other so one is just ever so slightly cool we're staying very black-and-white that's the thing I like about this is that we're not putting obvious sepia tones in or obvious cyanotype tones or you know things that look like color or just sneaky sneakily entering and making something warmer and making something colder so she pulls off the background just a little bit easier and you know some of you may want more than that and we can do that let's let's come in here and throw more saturation into the warms here's the other interesting thing what's that slider say it says balance Oh what the heck might that be I did something up here I did something down here balancing them so we can push more towards the highlights we can push more towards the shadows so there's a lot of flexibility in a very direct tool that has subtlety and I can't say that about Adobe Lightroom unfortunately you can do the same thing in Adobe Lightroom you'll be fiddling a lot longer okay we'll cancel out of that and we'll go back to our presentation taupe is black and white effects it has some unique choices that's one of the things you know I own all of these things because they all do something a little unique from the other and it's Mac and PC it's 60 bucks it's at topaz labs comm /b wfx I'm not going to go deep into into that show you the things that are unique but it has some very unique choices including cartooning alien skin exposure anybody use exposure nobody anybody know about exposure a couple of you not many they look like we need another giveaway people are starting to fade this will get you a 15% discount on photo mechanic he uses photo mechanic exposure started out as film emulations and they eventually grew into a complete raw converter editor kind of product so it now has lots of stuff to it that it didn't have before before it was mostly just choosing some presets alien skin comm slash exposure and I'm really thankful that they all made these real easy URLs for me yeah well let's say it's like yeah URLs http:www.youtube.com/watch v a lot of Ilford anybody here shoot with kodak films a bunch of people there what else we got well we got a ton of these films so this is fuji film a krause which is their current black-and-white film film and if we come in one-to-one she disappears and we look really really carefully look at her hair and her face it feels like there's grain in her face like we would see with film that there's there's texture that is is not her face per se it's something something to do with the capture method but look at her hair it's perfectly still fine they've done a magnificent job in all of their emulations it's one of the reasons why I like them and again you can come back in and change a lot of these parameters if you don't like the parameters they've selected but they're emulations are about as good as anybody's emulations I've seen a film there's a lot of really bad emulations of film out there yeah it's Fuji Velvia and it's like no that's not Fuji Velvia it doesn't drop to black dramatically it doesn't put magenta in the sky it doesn't do all the things that Velvia did these guys get it these guys know it really looked at the films and looked at the properties that the film's imparted to subjects and they tried to put that into their product and it's one of the reasons why I really like it every now and then you get asked by a client or something that you know I have that here here's here's a magazine picture taken in 1980 we really like it to look like that's like holy crap what do they shoot that in is like that looks like Kodak something well you know bring it in here and see if I can match that sure enough excellent so that's the reason why I think it's a product that you can't ignore even though it's a rather expensive product if you really into this black and white stuff and you're like fighting against other black and white photographers they know how to make their stuff look like try X and like me a pan and all these other stuff do you because if you don't you know you're gonna be struggling in somebody who really knows what they're doing okay moving on moving on oh so let's convert an icon use they're all Nikon users raise their hand I saw you with a camera before I you have just become a Sony user I'm so sorry yeah there's one company that likes me now one company that doesn't like me now yeah Nikon hey invite me to something like cando no I'm just kidding there I paid my own way to condo unlike a lot of the other press folks that went out to condo okay so we had finally arrived at today anybody notice anything about what happened recently with Adobe's products profiles oh my god what's a profile what's a preset a preset is a preset you can see the sliders on the UI no preset is what you slid the sliders to and then saved a profile is coming up that's your starting place a preset is you ended up at an ending place and you liked that ending place so you saved it and now you can come back to that ending place with any of your other images that's sort of the difference between the two okay this affects both Lightroom and ACR they both have the same thing in them now all Adobe products have converted over to this at this point those of you who are still sitting on Adobe Photoshop cs6 anybody's still using cs6 yeah there's a few of you including Tony all of us are now moving into stuff that you can't do whether or not that's something you want to do is a whole other story and whether or not you're happy with the where you're at or not is a whole nother story but adobe has moved on those of us who are still living in the Adobe world had to move on with them you notice that some of my software breaks with the new stuff so we have new profiles and we have this thing called the profile browser if we click on a profile up at the top of our image we now get this profile browser you notice what's at the bottom we got black and white stuff now hey doesn't that sort of look like the newer way pick from a bunch of presets and then maybe adjust things everybody's moving to the same spot and then we'll mention that again in a couple of minutes so we have new profiles all these profiles are let based what do we got here what do we got we're gonna go for something small this time just a pan and it's a pen that you can use with your tablet if it's a Apple tablet it's going to complain all the time because this says Microsoft Surface on this side anyhow so I want you to raise your hand if you can answer this question don't blurt it out raise your hand what does LUT stand for I saw these two hands go up first and yours last you get a pin lookup table what's a lookup table we know what we know what it stands for but we don't know what it does yes translating from one thing for another so we have a color we have a data definition here which is hue saturation and luminance and we look up in a table what we should output now that's a gross oversimplification is a really gross oversimplification because there's plenty of other things that can go on has anybody ever heard about the double hue shift cannon users raise your hand Fujifilm users raise your hand your cameras in JPEGs don't do double huge shifts hey you learn something what does that mean remember the color wheel hues that means they in the case of cannon many of the Canon cameras they take red and move it slightly towards yellow they take green and move it slightly towards yellow those colors are moving closer together and they're both getting yellow normally when we make color changes like all you Nikon users when you go into a picture control and you change hue you're spinning the whole table 15 degrees that way or 15 degrees that way all colors change relative the same to each other Nikon doesn't tend to do double hue shift sorts of things they tend to try and just stay with the hues as they define them well let's allow you to do all kinds of tricks like that I mean wonderful wonderful wonderful little tricks if you'd like to create your own luck and I'm sure you do I'm positive everybody here is going to want to create their own lot at some point go to 3d lut creator comm there are tools that allow even somebody who's not really sure what they're doing to create the tables that you can use in Adobe that's important profiles are a starting point for all of your changes that you're going to make when you Debose aook and when you when you finish converting your image it's a starting point don't like Adobe starting point make your own you can do it now it was harder to do before we used to use profiles to try and profile cameras in light and bring all that information and then it's kind of a geeky thing to do but it works nuts are another way to do it they can be user created there's an SDK if you're interested in it it's at Adobe comm slash Photoshop slash digital - negative dot HTML third parties are already creating let's and in terms of this talk there's a set of profiles created by contrast e-comm called mono stamp and matte Kozlowski has already created some profiles so at mat ke comm slash profiles he's got black and white profiles as well that you can load in and that adds to all this stuff that you have to choose from over here it's going to happen you're going to be overwhelmed with all the possibilities of your starting place it would be nice if we were overwhelmed with the fact that Nikon and Canon and Fujifilm and Sony and all the other camera companies actually gave us accurate lets that they created with these tools that you could use but they have all these people that you know they employ that have expertise they could do it far faster than we could but it's going to happen you're gonna see it on DP review in other places people are gonna start hey I just did an a7 3 letter I just did a d8 50 let guess what got a new starting place do we like that a lot of people thinking about that for a minute do we like that choice is good absolutely I agree with that okay so we haven't quite got here yet let's look at what that looks like in Photoshop so I am going to close her and not save her and I am going to open her back up yeah I believe she's this image here I'm not going to wait for so there we are in Adobe you notice that I have touched this image before I made some changes to it right but the stuff that we're talking about here the profiles they all live right up here says so that right there at the top profile Adobe color and then there's this little four boxes click that you're browsing profiles okay so we can come down to the black and white profiles and guess what they're live now I've made some other changes in here which are affecting some of these black and white ones but we can come in and pick any of these as our starting points generally speaking I'd say before you don't you don't do what I just did which is already have an image that you've already worked on profiles work best when you're starting from scratch not when you've already made a bunch of adjustments I'd I'd I'm not going to do it here because I need to use this image again for other talks but I would say zero out everything and then choose your profile the profile that works but we have lots of choices right out of the box Adobe gave us plenty of choice some of them are pretty good some of them are okay some of them are Adobe what are you thinking that's sort of like all the other choices that we've gotten from all the other companies right some of them are really good some of them are okay some of them are yeah I'm never gonna use that can I delete it no okay one thing about profiles here is that if you want something that you're going to be able to find easily in the future make it one of your favorites that is a tip if you don't make it a favorite it's going to get buried as you add more and more profiles to your system and it's going to be harder and harder and harder to find so the things that your your go to profiles make them a favorite okay we are doing pretty good for some reason I'm going faster than usual that can't possibly be right so let's talk about the newest ways we just talked about the new way that just came out from Adobe everybody's headed for the same spot Adobe capture one on one sky ylim topaz DxO they're all headed for the same spot which is I do everything I do everything from profiles or presets or whatever we call our profiles our presets so it's a pick and choose thing and I bring up my image in product ABCDE or e and I pick and choose from the thing that looks best as a starting place and now I make adjustments to it and they all are going to that same spot so how do you make a choice between all those products anybody what play with it that's a good that's a good way to start is that the leaf's gives you some information right you know to some degree it's the same thing as with cameras and lenses right what really what really resonates with you means some people like the terminology used by one product better than another product some people like you know certain kinds of sliders and certain kinds of tools others like other kinds of tools now I happen to like the sky lamb luminar stuff because it does have a very simple layering system to it that most people can understand they're layering photoshop's layering confuses a lot of people sky limbs layering is the opposites almost too simple for some of us so we're gonna get a bunch of stuff that like all starts to gravitate towards this middle I don't know who's gonna win that it does mean I mean how many people have you complained when Adobe went to CC come on fess up how many of you thought that was oh my god I didn't want them to do that a lot of you right well it doesn't mean you're going to have the choice to be able to pick other tools that are it equivalent to what Adobe's putting out and we're getting closer and closer to true equivalence so be careful what you wish for you're going to get a lot of that but they all do the same thing that I just demonstrated in Adobe which is we start from a base point that we pick maybe we add presets that we created to our base point then we go in and we start adjusting individual controls and oh by the way there's some way to either Pete in two areas or do graduated across areas they all have the same thing so the newest way is going to be confusing in one sense in that and they can't all survive I don't think I mean they're gonna be two or three major players by the time all of this flesh is out and the bets would be on capture one and on Adobe with one of these other players probably surviving as well it's a tough world out there so one thing I haven't talked about is what did we do in the field yeah I'm talking about all this digital darkroom stuff you remember Ansel Adams about three books right what the exposure the negative and the print we've sort of been talking about the the negative in the print mostly is negative what about the exposure what do we do okay so there's some things you can do there are monochrome cameras the first one I thought that was actually pretty damn good was the kodak dcs 760 it's a 6 megapixel camera based on an f5 body and it had really really nice-looking output is the first time that I felt that you could actually go out there and shoot and come back with something starting in black and white that looked like what I wanted to work with in the digital darkroom that it didn't have bad flaws in any way shape or form you can get a company called max max its max max calm if you're interested to convert some cameras not they can't do it with all cameras they can do it with a d810 they'll they'll charge you 6,500 bucks for a d810 that's been converted to black and white so how do they do that chemicals the future is chemicals no what they do is they basically remove the Bayer and the micro lens layers off the sensor so all we've exposed down to the photo sites and it's a really tricky time-consuming expensive thing that requires you can't do it at home unless you like want to kill people because of the chemicals that are involved they're really really nasty but they will do it for you you can do it and it's really pretty spectacular you can buy a like you can go out here into the sales area and you can go buy a like a m-mike monochrome nice camera eight thousand dollars for the body also does a really nice job if you have a lot of money you have a lot of money don't you mark Fran is not nodding her head if you have a lot of money you can buy a dedicated black and white one hundred megapixel back for a medium format camera there's tend to be special order because they only make a few of those sensors at a time and they're wicked expensive but it is probably if Ansel Adams were around you know the big black and white guys boy I bet you they had one I bet that's what they would have because it's just exquisite and so why do you want a black and white camera that top image I have taken a Bayer sensor and just shown you the green pixels the bottom I have taken it and I have sliced off the Bayer layer to show you all the pixels notice anything or luminance data comes mostly from the green pixels we fill in a little extra more data by by interpreting the red and the blue pixels as if they were illuminance and try and figure out what the luminance value actually should be there but it's not accurate you don't get that resolution so the very first reason why you shoot in monochrome is resolution you get more resolution probably at least 50% some people think it's more given the same 24 megapixel sensor some people think it's more than 50% but I'd say it's about 50% more resolution you get more photons we took all that filter off there's no filter it's not going through a color filter to get a color guess what you have a base ISO of 600 or 800 or something like that that's both a plus and a minus if your landscape photographer trying to take a picture of waterfall you used to need an 8 stop neutral density filter and now you need a 16 stop digital density filter yeah that's a that's a minus the plus is that if you're doing street photography oh my god you have clean iso 800 generally speaking off monochrome cameras I mean clean the kind of cleanliness that we all expected the base ISO of our cameras so there is a reason to do monochrome cameras but we generally don't we my suggestion is you just shoot with your camera you you've all got cameras right just shoot with what you've got however make a change to your camera settings when you're shooting something that you think is going to be done in black and white down the stream so if your Canon shooter you're going to go to picture style and you're gonna choose monochrome if you are a Fuji film and you're gonna go to film simulation and you guys choose monochrome a Crow's if you're a Nikon shooter you're going to go set picture control and you're going to choose monochrome and you may choose some other options in monochrome color filtration if you are a Sony shooter you're going to create to go to pick creative style and pick black and white all these cameras can shoot JPEG black and whites now if you're shooting in RAW they're still capturing the original color data [Music] hello goodbye okay so you're still capturing the raw data just as you'd normally would when you bring that image into Photoshop or Lightroom or whatever using to do your conversion what you're going to find is that you still have a color image but when you were in the field evaluating what you were shooting what did you see you saw the embedded JPEG from the raw file on the back of the camera and you can evaluate what are those things tonality texture masking all those things that I mentioned at the very very beginning you can start to evaluate them in the field I don't know how Ansel Adams did it it's not like he held a filter up in front of his face and it turned the world black and white and said oh yeah look at Denali I got a really nice shape there I mean he could just see that with his eyes but I'll tell you if you're gonna work in black and white if you think you want to work in black and white at all just set your camera you don't you're not capturing JPEGs you're still shooting raw you haven't lost any data you haven't lost the ability to use that image as a color image but you are able to pull that image up on the back of the camera and see the tonality and that's important because we're gonna we're simplifying right we need to know how much we simplified and whether we simplified the right way and that's the only way that you're going to be able to do that either shoot with a black and white camera in the first place or shoot black and white embed a JPEG so you can evaluate the black and white okay before we get to this I'm going to dip in a little bit more you're not gonna believe where that picture came from I should've to Franta this morning's just like what the that's the original that produced that I mean look at all this texture and detail that's in it I mean and we're on a crude projection system that's going through a bunch of conversion here that there's wonderful wonderful things going on in the sky and the tree and the rock all those things I talked about shape lines texture mood feeling it's all happening in this image right it's a color image taken in 2006 with the Fujifilm Ness Pro 5 I think 6 megapixel color camera and again you're not gonna believe the image this actually came from but we'll get to that in a second I did wanna I did want to touch on a couple of things here ok so you're using one of the newer tools or the newest tools to do your black and white I hope I've convinced you of at least that much not to do it simple crude ways but to use one of the better tools that we have now have available to us but there's three things that I wanted to kind of touch on one is HDR one is saving as DNG I'm not going to really get into that because Adobe changed something I'm still trying to work out one twist to it but I'll publish that when I do and the other is burning and dodging there's a lot of burning and dodging on this image all the same stuff that we did in the darkroom so I'm not doing it with my hands anymore well I am doing it with my hands because I'm doing it with you know my finger moving back and forth across the trackpad or or running a mouse so let's exit out of here let's come over to photoshop a new Photoshop you can be nice to me today Photoshop I hope so Tony's learned that every time I talk to Photoshop Photoshop does better it's like oh Photoshop I love you so much can you do a nice content-aware fill for me today and magically it does the right content over our film but only if I talk to Photoshop so I'm gonna do a little talking to Photoshop here today and and hopefully it's listening to me so anybody recognize that photograph that is the photograph six megapixels underexposed yeah don't throw away your images in fact if a friend said this this morning at breakfast was was I think I'm throwing away too many images yeah it's amazing sometimes what you can pull out of stuff so what do you think is gonna happen when you open this I'm not even sure if it oh yeah no we're gonna start right from scratch so what am I gonna do based upon everything I've said so far go into profiles yeah that's one way shall we try it yeah what do we think is gonna happen yeah you just never know Doby be really nice to me today that's that's starting to pull out some detail not as much as I need you notice how every one of these is changing what I have to work with and so I'm looking though that's not what I want to work with blue filter green filter yellow filter orange filter red filter well I saw something there's a lot there but the sky is a problem there's a lot there this guy's problem there this guy's really a problem up there but the tree is pretty nice well you know it's between this one and one of the other ones I'm just gonna go ahead and pick one close the profiles and that's going to be our starting place damn am I gonna be able to get to the finished product with this ah it's feeling bad it's feeling bad look at that histogram it goes all the way across what in the hell am I gonna do well we know we have to do something with the sky right we got to bring that down somehow we know we have to hit the shadows in some way shape or form I'm gonna use defringe see if that's going to help me with contrast a little bit but I'm gonna hit it with some contrast yeah just trying to get me a starting place here you know the color temperature probably is more I might get some detail back if I get the right color temperature to start with in the sky this the sky is gonna just be the killer of this image right so maybe this doesn't seem right maybe I'm going to pull my exposure down and I'll pull the shadows up for me Ikes and maybe okay tonal curve Tony Tony Tony don't know curve telling okay III knew Tony was gonna say that Tony Tony loves tonal curvy lives coming in okay Tony come on right then should have started with Tom did you hear that did everybody hear what Tony just said if you got a slider to a hundred and you're committing slider side then he probably should have started with tonal curve instead of the slider okay yes they keep changing things that is true you want to bring the right side of the highlights to left you want to bring the left side the shadows right so the simple way is simply to start with a number and I'll do 50 because we want a bunch I'm reading the two right sides the highlights and the lights down don't go don't don't go too far on me well I start something that's too far then I change the number so the question for all of you I mean we haven't gotten very far yet right we're just barely dipping it did anybody think we'd even get this far yeah this is the tricky part about black and white we're simplifying so you know sometimes simplifying helps us with the data set that's underlying there it may look underexposed but I'm gonna simplify and I want to take some stuff too black and I want to just leave it there in black so I'm not too bad but I've got to figure out a way to get all the stuff that's not black up off of black but this is one of the ways I went back came to the front page so I had literally started right now take me to half of that give me half of that on both ends because I'm going to do some other stuff and I think we may have gone too far with tonal curves but the important tip to remember what Tony said is entirely true if you find you have to take the highlight slider or the shadow slider to a hundred you're probably in the wrong spot right now you either need to be changing your exposure or your tonal curve your black level and your white level or all of the above are some of the above those things all are the first things that you should be touching thank you Tony so when I teach workshops Tony is my teaching assistant we hand stuff off back and forth all the time tony is better at Lightroom than I am and I'm better at Photoshop than he is so it's a nice complement between the two of us in terms of how we teach okay so that's a reasonable starting point we probably should you know I'm going to zero out the sharpening just for the heck of it here I can't remember how this camera acts but here's another tip about Adobe the color noise reduction on almost all the modern cameras of the camera you buy today Rd 850 Sony a7 3 Canon 5d Mark 4 and almost all the modern cameras that color noise is set to high as a default it's set at 20 or something like that usually 25 cut it in half just start with that just see now I'm talking about base ISO I mean obviously if you get up too high ISO levels you're gonna have to bring the color slider up but for base ISO almost always I find I can pull that slider down and it's important because any noise reduction does what starts to blur and anti-aliased data and the resolution so we don't want to take any detail out and especially in an image like this right we don't want to take detail out of this when I put detail in okay I wonder if I even have a profile no no there's no profile connector correction for something that old you know I still might come in here and play with a little bit of clarity and a little bit of contrast here now that we've got a better starting point I might juice myself a little bit again the nice thing and I find if I do this as a smart object which I'm not going to do right now if I did this as a smart object none of these decisions that we've just made our destructive right we can go back and revisit them later I'm not going to do that because smart object confuse too many people and then we get in two other questions away from what we're really talking about okay so there's our image sort of looks like desaturate damn i picked the wrong tool again and what am I gonna do I'm gonna actually come up here and hey where'd my some of my filters go what what happened I used an Adobe profile that's black and white and guess what it did over here in mode it got us out of our GB it put us in grayscale so if you want those filters back ya gotta convert back into RGB even though we're not doing our and we're not doing G and we're not doing B I want my filters and I'm just gonna come down in here and I'll pick tonality just for the hell of it just see what it does I might come back to a different filter I'm just curious to see what so I'm now sort of in play mode I have sort of a bass holy moly that was better you know I think we might be onto something here we can find something that's going to give us a better starting point not liking what's happening in the sky there I might have to do something different with the sky but you know I'm gonna back out of that this is the way that I'm operating in black and white is I've I've kind of got a base I've started with that base I'm kind of the base needs some work now I have to start pulling up tools and see what tools gonna give me what I want now I'm going to pull up a very interesting tool it's one of my favorites intensify it's again asked eylem plugin can you believe what just happened that was underexposed there was no detail back there whatsoever where did the hell did that come from it just suddenly magically appeared I guess I should temper my language where did the heck did it come from I mean we're getting all kinds of detail in here Wow well that's interesting and I said that you can do interesting simple layers so I'm going to create another layer I liked what it did there and I can come back and pick and say just do that much of that strong details what is strong hey yeah did you believe those pixels were actually there but look at that sky look what's happening in the sky okay I'm over exaggerating just a little bit here is that better than where we weren't did anybody think we were going to get to even that in a few clicks there's a lot better and it's not perfect it's not the way that I eventually did the image that we're moving the right direction and we're moving there pretty rapidly how many clicks have I done Tony six seven not not very many this is why the new newer and newest tools that we have available to us get us so dramatically forward in the digital darkroom than we were before anybody notice the sensor desktop here I'm just gonna go ahead and ply that now I'm going to do another thing you've probably never seen anybody do because it only happened recently in Adobe I'm gonna pick a selection tool there's a nice selection tool right there the quick selection tool I am NOT going to use the quick selection tool even though I picked it what what's with that I'm anybody ever notice this little thing that popped up here at the top can you read what it says it's a really small print it says select subject oh no way Adobe Adobe you've been doing so nicely today I know I crashed you once but please be nice to me please please select a subject what the hell it's selected the tree this is magic boy again you have to talk really really nice to Photoshop and Lightroom you have to talk really nice but it's given me a fairly good selection to start with you know faster than I could have drawn it around what that's in it's into the 2018 versions yep and and you know so one of the things that then you do is you pick the button right next to it and now we can use the tool the painting tools to fix our selection so if I wanted to do something with the tree but way I'm gonna get to a selection on that tree pretty damn fast by using the magic of Adobe with all their AI when you talk to it nicely with you guys laughing Tony's a witness Tony is a witness all the times that I've said something nice that the software seems to do nicely every time I start to like malign Adobe is like he wanted them he wanted the rock no so does everybody know how to use this tool what's the red that's the mass the things that are not selected and do you know the tools that we use to refine that those those are all the ones over here on the left hand side so we have the quick selection tool still available to us the refine edge brush that's usually useful for trees we have the brush tool itself for big areas we can lasso we can also come in and smooth out selections we can feather selections we can shift the edges of selections so there's all these massive numbers of tools you really want to be here making your final selection when you select stuff because you just have more ways to refine that selection here than you do anywhere else I don't that has nothing to do with black and white just since we're talking about newest tools and where we are with tools I wanted to make sure that everybody is aware that there's some interesting things that are poking around the edges that people haven't really found yet that are very very useful what am I gonna do to this Tony what do you think I'm gonna do to it I don't like the sky this guy's kind of bright I would tend to probably duplicate this layer and then just work on the sky and try and take the sky down while I'm working on the sky I see a little bit of noise and I see some sensor dust up here in the sky so I'd fix those two things but the thing that I really wanted to get you to was that we can very very quickly get to a really good looking image these days with the tools that we have available to us down here's the other thing a little quick tip how many of you know that you can actually go we brought this into a Dobie rock converter how many of you know that you can actually come in and use Camera Raw filter as a filter a couple of you do right this is absolutely cool so I want vignette post crop vignette that's better right simple enough to do at this stage I want to take that sky down lots of different ways I could do it but I'm just going to pick a brush and I'm gonna pick a number way way too high on the sky here pick a fairly broad brush and let's just come in here now if I had a selection a really good selector I don't want to waste that yeah everybody who demonstrates you know starts to try and make selections on the fly that are complex like this and it's just not something you can do in a demonstration very easily very quickly but I'm probably going to come in now that looks like too much right well of course it's too much I selected way too much so I could see what I was doing and I'm getting I've got color from here that's where I'm getting color from I don't want that color so you know I can darken that sky down if I have the tree selected I could Stark in that sky down pretty good to the tree and I can make that pick I'm doing this all with something a tool that we've used all the time right we use it every time we pull up a raw image and I'm using at the end of a process as a filter the other thing that I do so I talked about burning and dodging so one of the things that I do with burning and dodging is that I will get me a new brush so let's do it burn let's let's that's let's let's make some this whole area on this tree trunk don't we want to bring that shape out so again I'll come up to high and I'll just start coming into the brighter spots and I let's just start touching them exactly the same way as I burn and dodge I'm just trying to find and I'm trying to exaggerate lines that take me to the right spots and that also that's too wide that also take my eye to the right spots and that's too much well that's because I started with a really high value so I could see where I was painting and now I can just pull my burning and dodging down to the level that I really want it and I do the same with thing with the blacks I would create a new brush I'm going to take the exposure down there and take it way down get a slightly smaller brush there's some black there there's some black there that's too wide for the brush maybe around that corner this backside here some there there's a long black dark line there there's a dark line there there's a dark line there there's a dark line there there's a dark line there you see what I'm doing I'm hitting all these lines that draw and lead your eyes various different ways around the image and I'm doing too much of it again intentionally and I'll just pull that back so you can see the difference that it's starting to make in terms of shaping the tonality so anytime you're working with black and white you are going to get out your magic hands which is really just a filter and you're going to do some burning and dodging you're gonna do it you're gonna think exactly the same way that you used to think in the darkroom you know I want my bring out some white to bleed the eyes in different ways and I want to use some dark to frame things and take areas down so the eye doesn't get past certain points and you're just bringing those things back and forth so once you've got to a good tree that you really like the you've-you've you've made it look exactly the way you want to the last step is always burning and dodging to bring out those last little bits and you need a smaller brush then I'm using here and you need more dexterity than I'm using here and you need more subtlety that I'm using here I'm trying to make sure that you see exactly what I'm doing it makes sense okay I don't want to go any farther with this one so I'm just going to cancel that out and we're going to get rid of this image there's one other thing that is often useful in black and white and we're going to try that to see if we can make this work so this is part of a hundred and thirty-two shot set it's a panorama four rows of stitching four exposures deep and God knows how many exposures wide I'm just going to take two images out of those hundred and thirty two images because if if I picked all 132 images you know sometime next week we'd be able to see them for the first time and sometime the week after we might be able to see the first change that I applied to them even on a fast machine yeah but I just want to show you something so I have a couple of exposures here this exposure looks like it's exposed for the top this is Devil's arch this exposure looks like it's exposed for the shadows right I talked about HDR HDR applies in black and what are we talking about tonality HDR is all about tonality x' right so don't be afraid to sit there and try HDR techniques so I'm going to open those two images and I'm going to get this exposed and looking the way I want it for the top and I'm just going to come in and pick at random something that looks pretty good for the top I like that darker sky so I'm just going to pick that for the top so all I'm all I'm looking at here is I'm working on this images this stuff up here and this stuff down here all the bright stuff and maybe take a little out of the highlights there or maybe throw a little bit of contrast in maybe pull the exposure up just a teeny bit throw in a little clarity those were all kind of subtle things you might not even seen happen there that's throwing something like that take out the color noise reduction and I bet you I do have a profile no I don't have a profile that okay I wonder what I was shooting with 17 to 50 no so that's a GX camera at 50 millimeters so I'm doing the landscape with a 50 millimeter lens 132 images worth and of course trying to shoot it fast enough so the lights not changing on me and the shadows not moving on me yeah that turned out to be more of a challenge than I thought it was going to be you know I'm looking up here I don't really have whites you know so I might I don't want to push them too far and I'm not quite down to black I don't want to push that too far either so but I'm gonna broaden out the histogram here what do you think I'm gonna do with that well I'm gonna match it with this image over here right and what am I going to expose that image for the shadows so we're gonna come down into our black and white choices and see if there's you know there's a lot of red in there and yellow I'm just going to pick that filter just for the heck of it I'm not sure if that's the right one to use or not so now I'm just looking at all this stuff right it could use a little more exposure it could use getting down so it has real black in it shadows could come up just a little bit I don't think I need to touch the highlights I'm going to throw a little clarity in there let's sharpen it up let's take the color noise reduction out and so again I'm only in this case rendering for this area here so now I'm going to take those two images and I'm going to open those images so we have a starting place I'm going to take this image select all copy it there are other ways to do this but I'm going to paste it into that image what do you think happens next we have two layers yeah heck why not just try a mask I mean I'm not even worried about HDR I'm going to do a crude mask that's revealing white reveals black conceals right got a black brush black brush I've got a big black brush I'm not too worried about our my line at the moment I just want to see how this is matching up because when you do it this way you do very much want to use a smart object and you very much do want to be able to do dis non-destructive because you might want to come back in and make changes to your original lender but and again it's really hard with a touchpad to get really precise this is why so many of us use Wacom tablets so I'm going to come back out and see if I can refine that just a little bit came too far this way here oh my lord that's looking pretty damn good for for for not really doing a good selection and not doing anything else those two images just came together pretty pretty quickly and pretty fast if I were spending time to do the right kinds of selections and other stuff I could do so much more with this image but you notice how that pull I I probably with that camera could not have held the really bright stuff against the really really dark stuff I mean all these things down like this right here is in such deep shadow compared to that being an absolute total bright light this is like this and this was addy I'm guessing this is a d200 given when I took it that camera couldn't have held that dynamic range there's just no way it could have held that dynamic range and even today you can find yourself in situations like shooting Denali with Denali and bright light and the lower area down below at Wonder Lake and deep shadow you could find yourself even with a modern camera like stretching your dynamic range so don't be afraid to try these HDR tricks you could actually process this as HDR if you wanted to but in this case I have such nice strong easy to select shadows it's probably just easier to do it this way so we are five minutes over and I want to thank you for coming to the bnh event space I hope you enjoyed it

Channel: B&H Photo Video

Views: 18,830

Keywords: b and h, b&h, bh, photo, B&H Photo, Video, BH Photo, video, bhvideos, bh photo, All, the, ways, to, get, Black, and, White, from, Raw, Thom, Hogan, thom hogan, nikon digital camera, nikon dslr

Id: Cc6mTutZRk4

Length: 117min 34sec (7054 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 11 2018