BEST Way to Convert Photos to BLACK & WHITE with Luminar AI (Beta)

luminar ai has a lot of tools and capabilities within it and one of the ones that we want to explore is how luminar ai works with black and white photos now there is a black and white conversion tool in there you can just push a button and you get an automatic black and white but that's not the end of the journey for black and white photography there are a few tweaks that we need to do and that's what we're going to take a look at in this video hi my name is william beam i'm a photographer in central florida and i would love to show you more about luminar ai in this video we're going to take a look at a couple of portraits we're going to take a look at a couple of travel photos and we'll see what it takes to do some black and white version in luminar ai so why don't we go ahead and we'll start up with one of these photos all right what you're looking at is a close-up of actually one of my favorite buildings this is in las vegas i think it's called the lou rouevo center for brain health i could be wrong about that i think it's a frank gehry architecture but it's just a very fanciful looking building you can see a lot of curves and what i like about it is that it just has this metallic exterior it has a lot of angles and curves and also contrast so that's what we want to try and bring out so let's go ahead and click on edit one of the first things i always like to do is just check on my composition i like a 16x9 crop and you can see i had one on here before the reason i like the 16x9 crop is it just gets me a little bit closer to my subject it also gets rid of some of the stuff that i really don't need so if you can see up here outside of the crop frame there's a bit of sky and if we had something going on up there that was interesting i might have left it in with luminar ai you could easily do a sky replacement and put something in there but in this case since we're going to go ahead and do a black and white i'm going to leave it at the 16x9 and we'll stay a little close in so here's my goal i want to obviously i want to make this black and white i also want to make a high contrast photo so let's start off with the black and white conversion we're going to select convert to it says bmw so convert to black and white and there you go it's you've got a monochrome or grayscale whatever you want to call it but it doesn't have any it doesn't have any draw or appeal to it yet one of the first things you can do is you can start looking at luminance values of different colors to try and enhance a uh tone based upon a color or decrease it so in this case i'm going to look at my cyans my blues and my magentas and i'm bringing those colors up and you notice that there's an immediate difference in how the contrast of this photo looks so the the sky i'm going to leave that kind of looking almost white and i wanted to get more contrast right here so let's take a quick look this is where we were at the beginning and this is where we've gone to so that's good enough for me now if you click on saturation it's going to bring colors back in so if i bring the blue back in you'll notice how it's got that blue tint over here the sky turns a little bit blue i don't want that i want this to be you know pretty much a pure monochrome so that starts our black and white conversion i would say start with your luminance values look at the colors that may be in there if you're looking at a person you're probably going to be looking at reds and yellows to see how that affects skin tones and obviously sometimes blue can affect skin tones but we'll save that for another story now i want to add some details on here mostly i'm i'm going to ignore this for right now because i'm going to take care of some of that i'm going to add some sharpening and me come down to sharpen mask i don't want to sharpen every little thing i want my sharpening mask kind of high because really all i want to do is sharpen these edges now i'm going to do something you probably wouldn't expect i'm going to come over here to the portrait tab and i'm going to click on high key because the the look i want is actually a bit of a high key look and i kind of want black and white i want a bright colored image so i'm going to bring this up a bit and as i bring it up even further you can see how it's kind of really it's brightening up the background but also these metal tiles i'm i'm going to assume that's aluminum are really changing and i'm kind of like the look that i'm getting there now you could also play with a dynamic high key and just change what you're affecting i think the idea for for me is high contrast so i'm going to keep this down i'm going to bring up the standard high key and then i'm going to play with my blacks i think i'm going to bring those down because i still really want some dark spaces i want these edges to be black so and we'll take a look here i'm going to bring off the glow i don't really want that but i do want some contrast and let's go ahead and take a look again at our before and after this is our original photo might you know with the exception of the crop and this is what we have right now so i'm looking for a geometric shape in kind of a high contrast look for this particular photo i'm just looking around we could do something with the optics you know we could make sure that we've checked these boxes to you know correct any distortions in this particular architecture this is the whole building is uh distortion to me but that just kind of gives you a chance to take care of any pin cushion or barrel issues that you have remove some chromatic aberrations i think it's a good thing to look at when you're working on your photographs and i'm going to call this one done right here now also keep in mind if you want to you can come down here to the bottom with this template you can click the button here to save this as a template if you like it you can lower this little slider here to change the opacity but my whole intent for this photo was kind of a high key high contrast look and we could keep on going but i've met my goal so i'm going to stop right there and this one we're looking at yet another architectural type of photo from epcot at walt disney world so let me go ahead and click on edit and since we're already on a professional tab i'm going to go ahead and click these buttons for the optics and just let that correct itself a little bit then we'll go over to the essentials tab i'll click on composition and again i have a 16x9 crop as you can see and what i'm looking for here is i don't want to lose the top of spaceship earth but down here at the bottom it's very dark it's hard to see i there's a base for this fountain and i don't want to lose that because we're going to do a little bit of work with that so we're going to keep this crop and let's just see there may be a little bit of adjustment we can do it seems like it might be slightly lopsided yeah this base i think was just a little bit off so i went ahead and changed the angle on that to give a little bit of correction there's a number of places where we could start but again since primarily what we're looking at is black and white i'm going to go ahead and select black and white we're going to convert to black and white and notice like the colors are very cool on top and very warm on the bottom and that's affecting our highlights and shadows so if i pull down the red as it gets darker i really want to push up these red colors and the yellow colors because i'm trying to get more brightness out of this now on the top we have blue and purple color so if we come over here and push those up a little bit it gets brighter there and on the magenta we can see it kind of fills in there a little bit this is all done to taste you may want some more shadow in some places and highlights and others but that's what i wanted out of my conversion so let's go down to look at the details again i want to do quite a bit of sharpening over here and i want to bring up the mask so i'm kind of sharpening the edges i may come back and do something with the details but i've got another idea i'm going to come back over here to the portrait tab and do the same thing i'm going to select high key i'm going to bring this up to about 50 percent pull down the glow i'm going to push up the standard high key and now the dynamic high key and i'm going to open up the blacks just a little bit and what i'm looking for is i wanted to open up the shadows in these trees and over here you almost couldn't see these before and i also wanted to give just a little bit more here to the front so you can kind of season that texture what i don't like is the fact that it's given too much of too much of a bright boost to spaceship earth so i'm going to come over here to this little button and i'm going to paint a mask now you could probably do this with a radial mask but what i want to do is erase everything that is happening here inside of spaceship earth and there we go it's not a perfect mask but also it doesn't have to be so let's turn this off we were there and you can see how dark it is over here in this area and even these trees that you can make out there weren't very much and you can't see much right over here but when we turn this back on what i've done is i've used high key to kind of bring out and open up some shadows here and just give you an idea of what's going on down here and then i masked it out over spaceship earth so i didn't have too much of a high key there basically what i'm saying is there are a number of ways that you can use different tools to reach what you want to you can use masking i could have done a radial mask on spaceship earth since it's round i could have used the light tool to kind of open up the shadows over here but i thought it was interesting to try and do something with the high key tool just to show that there are other options and quite honestly i think this method is faster and gives me more control than some of the other methods that are out there so let's take a quick look at pro and i want to look at super contrast because what i'm looking at now is the detail that i want to put here in spaceship earth and i may end up doing another mask in order to make sure it's there but let's start off with our midtone contrast and i'm going to play with the balance to see what i like and i kind of like the balance over here so i like what i've got with the detail and the contrast there check out the highlights contrast and again i don't want so much but i'm going to play with the highlights balance i don't think that makes a significant difference as far as the balance i'm going to leave that where it is then i want to take a look at the shadows so i'm particularly looking at the trees and this base and that really brighten things up here i'm going to pull this balance down and push it up and all i'm doing is saying what happens when i move these sliders it's not like i've i typically know in advance but i'm not sure if i really like this with the shadows contrast or not let me pull this down i actually kind of like it without the shadows contrast so i'm going to leave that alone let's come back to the essentials tab and details and i'm going to just boost up medium details a little bit i liked what it did when we were at the super contrast and i like it here as well and i can do some masking over here for details protection i don't think it's going to make that much of a difference for me on this particular photo but this is what i'm looking for i want these geographic kind of shapes i want to have contrast between the bright parts and the dark parts just to give some idea of depth and dimension that this is a spherical surface in other words it's just not a flat picture and that's really all i'm looking for the trees over here are just to kind of fill out a bit of space i don't want to brighten up this part because that's not my subject and i'm going to call this one done all right so this is the concert photo and there's a couple of things i'm looking at here you can see there's a curtain behind him there's a little bit of a red tint in there and also there's a bit of a pattern and you can see that we've got warm lighting on him and it's very bright here on the keyboard and even on this surface on the keyboard so i kind of want to control that a little bit and let's go ahead and hit edit i'm happy with my composition i am going to take a look at the optics and click these just to see if anything changes and then we're going to come back over here to essentials we're going to click black and white and convert to black and white okay so it's kind of a flat black and white image you can still see the pattern over there i want to see what this happens with the skin tones as i move the reds and yellows around so usually i start off kind of pulling things down but what i'm looking at is you see how it's affecting the brightness on his face in this particular one since that's where i want to go i want a bit of brightness on his skin tones but we're going to play with the blues and you see how as i slide that up it really brightens up this area on the keyboard so i'm probably going to pull that down i don't want to have too much light over here when i'm trying to direct your attention to the expression on his face also if you take a closer look in here let's zoom in this was taken in low light areas so there's quite a bit of grain here i was using a high iso so i think what i'm going to do is a little bit of de-noise on him as well so let's go back down to hit the screen and we'll come down here to denoise and this works exceptionally well i usually start at 50 to see if that's enough and pretty much it is i'll do a little bit of color denoise because i always use these in combination i may not need that much denoise because i'm trying not to lose details but i think yeah i think on this one i'm going to leave it at 50. alright so i still have a little bit of the pattern back here i think i'm going to come back over to black and white and i brought the red up to help his skin [Music] i liked it i liked what i got back here in the background if i pulled the red down i didn't have anything disturbing me there so i may do something else to try and lighten up his face so i'm actually going to leave the red down right here and if i want to light up his face the first thing i think of is go to portrait and face and then we'll add just a little bit of face light and i'm bringing that up probably about 25. now i don't want to do slim face uh the man is who he is i'm not trying to make a sexy portrait here but i'm probably also going to go take a look at skin and i don't want to fix his skin but i want to see if the shine removal does anything for me i'm just kind of dancing around here to see what the results are on on here and i think that's probably a bit too much i'm going to come back down here maybe about 60 and just pull some of the shine off of his face all right so the next thing that i'm thinking of is he's kind of in this little space i just want to make sure that we're drawing attention to him and i think what i'll do is i'll come over here to this local masking and we will add a mask we're going to make a gradient mask and i want to change the exposure just to darken it a little bit over on this side there we go probably a little bit too much let me bring this back over here all i really want to do is it's i'm not quite doing a vignette but i just kind of wanted to darken up that side over there i think i might have this and that works for me so let's take a quick look at before and we had that warm light and you know the the to me the background was just a little bit of a distraction i wanted to turn this down and isolate it kind of like it was on a black background and just you know let him and his emotion kind of fill things in i might still go ahead and do one more mask do a basic one on this one i'm going to paint and i just kind of want to paint it on the front of his face and add just a little bit of light and open up the exposure a little bit we might do the same thing with opening up the shadows let's see how that works and it's just a little kiss of light right on the front of him because i want you looking at him so yeah i think that'll work out nicely all right so this one is a portrait i've had this one for years but let's go ahead and see what we can do there's a number of things that we want to fix we want to fix this shine over here we're probably going to want to use the portrait skin enhancer over here and maybe we'll see how it works down here like on our chest and our arm i've got this uh this is basically a c-stand over here that's in the light so we can clone that out but i'm not going to worry about that for the photograph and let's take a look and see what happens when we edit so let me start over here with our composition ai and i'm going to change this to 16 by 9. and again the reason i do the 16 to 9 is because i like it no other reason like that now we've got a lot of space over here kind of like having that up there let me go back i'm going to change my mind i'm going to go back to the original and we're just going to make this a little bit smaller so we cut out that c-stand and i'm gonna go with that for my composition so let's see what we can do to kind of clean up her texture before we convert this into a black and white so we're gonna go over to the portrait tab and we'll start with the face and i don't think we need face line matter of fact i like this uh shadow over here that was the whole purpose of lighting the way we did this is kind of like a 45 degree down with a deep octa box so let's go back over here to skin and i'm gonna bring up the amount to 50 i'm also going to bring up the shine and click uh defect removal i want to bring up skin a little bit more there may be some things that we still need to go through and clean up manually but it hasn't a very good job there as far as the defects removal it's gotten most of it the shine removal i'm still not sure about because i'm not going to i don't want this to look fake up here and you see this little highlight over here and this has kind of changed a little bit i'm probably going to bring this back down about 77. i don't mind highlights what i'm trying to do is eliminate the specularity and i just don't want to have something unnatural over here so let me go ahead and take a look in just a little bit closer and i think i'm happy with that so we're not going to use high key on this one we're not going to do any body uh changes on here but what i'm going to do is i'm going to go over to professional i'm going to go to the clone and stamp tool and i'm going to zoom in back to where we were the tool kind of zoomed us out the first thing i need to do is click to set the source i'm going to click right over here that brush is way too big you want to have your brush just slightly larger than the area that you're going to be fixing the thing is i want to make sure that the area that i'm sampling is a good clean area and you can see there's some little spots over here from where things are sampling i might want to re-sample at a time so let me go back and do that and see that's getting me just a little bit too bright of a spot so this is the real trick between sampling whether it's over here to the to her um left side to our right side or over here there's gradation coming on with the lighting so if you don't sample from the right area you're going to end up with little spots like this let me go ahead and undo those and to do that we can come down here and click this little clock and you'll see the history and we just kind of step our way back then hit the clock when you're done and let's move down here and get rid of that little spot right there just a couple of little spots that the defects tab didn't get for us i'm gonna come over here on her arm as well and i don't plan on doing everything i mean you don't want to take away all the texture when you're doing your skin smoothing you just want to get any obvious spots kind of out of the way let's back off and i'm happy with that so let's go back over here to our essentials tab i'm going to go back to fit the screen click on black and white and convert to black and white right off the bat i'm digging that let's see what happens we play with our our skin tones are usually with the reds and yellows so i'm going to pull back a little bit on the red a little on the yellow let's brighten it up and some and i'm liking what i brighten up with the yellow i think the red is giving me a little bit too much so i want to pull the reds back just a bit so this is like 9 or 10 over here i'm liking that so let's go over to our details every photo needs a little bit of sharpening again i'm going to do a sharpening mask over here so that was the idea just to kind of let you see how black and white conversions can work you still need to use your other tools to clear up any issues or problems that you have sometimes it might be a local adjustment mask sometimes it might be working with color uh to like we saw with the luminous values on black and white to go in there and pull some values down and bring some up because you're looking at the tones of the photograph in black and white and those color values are going to affect and impact the tone that's why i like to work in a workflow of texture tone and color so by that i mean that texture i'm going to be cleaning up maybe some skin tone i might be doing my cropping tone could be the black and white conversion itself and then adjusting the color values for that if this were a color photo the last thing i would want to do is work on the color because color changes can affect your tone and texture so you want to see what's being changed as you're making those adjustments hey if you like this video 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Channel: William Beem Photography

Views: 2,068

Keywords: luminar ai black & white, luminar ai, photo editing, post processing, black and white photography, photo editor, luminar ai new features, when is luminar ai coming out, luminar ai portrait, travel photography post processing, portrait post processing, architecture photography editing, william beem photography

Id: L6019nohDU8

Length: 23min 16sec (1396 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2020