Architectural Photography in Black and White

[Music] hey everybody it's stephen brooke and welcome to my youtube channel on architectural photography and composition for me black and white photography can hold its own against any other medium particularly with our modern post-production techniques our images can hold their own against any print making and etching and engraving from the past architectural photography in black and white used to be the main way that magazines reproduce architectural images let's take a quick look backwards in the 1930s magazines that uh showed architecture primarily used graphics and some black and white photography and if you can get to the library and see some architectural forum magazines you'll see a real history of our art now in the 40s and 50s architectural magazines used almost exclusively black and white images first of all color photography was difficult and was expensive to produce and expensive to retouch after the fact so again when you look at magazines like forum arts and architecture all of this work was done in black and white when you saw color it was either from a duotone or tritone process which was a color that was laid down by the printing and not that was inherent in the actual photography and early books on architectural photography were almost exclusively in black and white and quickly back then photographers would shoot black and white negatives you could control the exposure you could control the processing and you made your prints your black and white prints those were you could retouch those extensively and the black and white glossy prints were what you sent to the magazine and those were the that was the medium from which they made their engraving so the photographer had a tremendous amount of control over that how that final image was seen now with the advent of four color processing and photography you shot color and all post production ability was lost again color photography color film was really difficult and expensive to retouch and so you had to get it right in camera on that piece of film this was wonderful training so let's get back to black and white why is it so wonderful well one of the reasons is that color photography is very seductive but an interesting thing about color is you have an immediate response to it which actually tails off pretty quickly the thing about black and white is it's in obviously it's more abstract than color which means it is inherently more contemplative you are asking your viewer to bring a more personal experience to a black and white there is an emphasis on texture on volume on tonality shape shadow atmospheric uh and here for example is a pyramid of chi assessments in rome without the color this is still a powerful image because the black and white conveys all of these other aspects of of the image in the hinnom valley in jerusalem again you can feel the atmosphere and it's a strong image without any color one of the things that's really important about black and white is that it reduces the effect of contemporary intrusion when you look at this top picture at the arapaka in rome the first thing that jumps out at you is this woman's red jacket however in black and white it disappears and your eye focuses now on on the architecture rather than your eye just jumping to that red jacket this was a the parco de la musica in rome that i had to photograph for a magazine as done by renzo piano when i showed up surprise to me they were getting ready for a performance and so they laid this red carpet in here for the performance well if you look at this image in color your eye goes to this red part of the image and has a tough time if you will getting back to the architecture so what i did is i processed this in black and white and i sent them the black and white image which they ran that's why for the work that has been the most important to me in my career but books that i did that with that i invested the greatest amount of energy psychological technical whatever i did them all in black and white views of rome my views of jerusalem and the holy land my views of miami which i've just completed and seaside views of the new town i am a commercial photographer professional photographer and i do all my work in color i have to because more often than not that's what my clients are after however i always hold in the back of my mind that a lot of the work that i'm shooting in color i may later convert to black and white for other uses now that conversion process is really important and again i shoot in color so that i have the broadest gamut to work with when i actually make my conversion to color one way that people do this who just may not know the other technique first of all let me say ahead of time there are a number of ways to do this there are plugins to do this i want to show you what i have found to be the simplest and most effective way to do it with what's available in photoshop because i don't want to ask you to have to go out and buy more stuff so the first way is to go to photoshop and just change the mode to grayscale there's no real control when you do that and that's why you end up here's a colorful picture of the art deco district in miami beach and this is what happens when you convert it to black and white just going from mode to grayscale no real control and really flat results there's another way you can bring your color image and say if it's a raw file and bring it into camera raw and there's a black and white button where you can convert it to black and white first of all photoshop does this better in the actual photoshop app rather than here and the other thing is i still want to process my file my first file i want to process that in color and then bring it in and process and and convert to black and white and i will show you why when you bring it in the existing image you process it in camera raw and you process it as completely as possible and if you're new to all of this my book on architectural photography and composition gives you really good workflows that you can just follow along to get a really good process out of your camera raw file once you bring it into photoshop and you process that again as far as you can take it and save it as a completed color image now you are ready to convert that into black and white and this is how i recommend that you do it go to image adjust black and white and it gives you this whole array of all the different colors in your image and you can control each of those to however you want if you want a really dark sky just move the blue and the cyan sliders back in the left direction and your sky gets really dark and back in the days of film you used to have to use a red filter on in front of your lens to get that super dark sky and have the clouds pop out it also increased your exposure by a couple of stops and if there was wind it was a difference between having a really fixed image and something that was blurring and also back in the day people would use infrared film because the sky would appear pitch black on infrared film the problem with that is all the foliage uh had this unnatural white look to it so i didn't i never thought that that was very effective don't have to do that anymore now and then any of the reds and the greens or whatever you can control those in photoshop in image adjust black and white and you have total control in arranging those colors however you want so here again as an example here's my color image here's mode grayscale blah it's pretty flat and here image adjusts black and white and what i've done is i've made this really high contrast because that's how i like things to look you might not like things that high contrast but unlike doing mode grayscale you can control how much contrast you want to give it what colors you want to pop out and all the controls are there then after you make your black and white conversion you look at your image you may have to do some more tweaking you might have to readjust the highlights and shadows because you've taken the color out and you may have made you will have made some colors darker some colors lighter and you may have to go and burn and dodge to rebalance the tonalities the the dark areas the mid tones and the light tones you may have to burn and dodge little areas necessary and the other thing you may have to do the image might have worked a certain way in color but once you made your conversion to black and white you may have to re-crop that because elements of the image which were really important in color may not be so important and may and you maybe can get rid of them and make a stronger black and white image now some suggested images for black and white conversion first of all color images that have been completely processed if you have mistakes in your processing it's not going to get any better when you go to black and white so make sure if you're going to start with a good color image make it make it completely processed all the way through the sharpening then you make your conversion another one is images that are basically kind of monochromatic that may have you know a little bit of a weak sky or a poor sky or whatever but are otherwise of interest and in a in a previous video i had mentioned an artist jan van goyin when we talked about artists to study for landscape and what i suggested there is that for black and white photography look at the dutch painters the dutch landscape painters because for them the atmosphere itself was the subject matter because they were basically dealing with a monochromatic or near monochromatic palette mostly ochre tones umbertones mostly earth tones not not a lot of reds not a lot of blues in fact even here not many greens and it's interesting to look at how they balance their tonalities given the fact that they did not have real high contrast color to deal with so images rich with detail and texture in some instances images with only a few tonalities and really deep shadows and again go back to dakirico and see how dakirico handles deep shadows with shadows with no detail and how he makes them compositional now if you like these videos please give them a thumbs up if you're new to the channel please hit the subscribe button so you can you'll know when more videos come out so many of you have asked they've enjoyed the videos and have asked well how can we you know finance your site how can we you know help you with it i haven't asked for that and i appreciate the fact that so many of you have offered here's what you can do to help support the site if you like and get something for it go over to stevenbrookphotography.com and purchase a copy of my textbook architectural photography and composition everything that we've discussed and more is in this book um and a chance to go through and deep dive on so many of these subjects so again by the way a number of our people in our community are still doing black and white photography with a view camera and film and i think that's a righteous and sanctified thing and my hat is off to them who are still working in that medium it's wonderful thank you again for stopping by and i look forward to seeing you again soon

Channel: steven brooke

Views: 3,181

Keywords: Architecture, architectural photography, photography, camera, how to, master class, learn photography, learn photoshop, photoshop, tutorial, color correction, hue, saturation, photography class, photography tutorial, Steven Brooke, Steven Brooke Architectural Photography, landscape, real estate, how to color correct photos, B&W, Blackandwhite, Black and White photography

Id: 9MZe9R_pK38

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020