Better B&W by using LR and PS side by side!

i'm going to explain why you want to use both a raw editor and a pixel editor like photoshop when you do black and white regardless honestly of whether you're using blackroom we're going to focus on how i use blackroom in this but what i'm going to talk about today i'm going to try and make is broad spectrum as possible because i want people to understand the difference between these two kinds of editors because i get this question so much and i know you're probably looking at my face and saying gavin what is up with your face if you're watching this in like high definition and let me just say i was working on the car okay and yeah let's continue so let's come in first to lightroom i'm gonna switch to our dual screen mode and i want you to see you see this photo i took down here at cascadas fresno and this is a raw photo and what i want people to understand is the difference first between a raw editor and a pixel editor a writer meaning lightroom that doesn't mean you have to edit a raw photo you can edit jpegs or tiffs or psds or whatever in lightroom or things like it capture one you can maybe you're using on1 raw something like that but a raw editor is a non-destructive kind of a one layer deep editor and what it's distinguished by is rather than editing a single file you can edit a file you can add a group of files you can paste settings across files because essentially you're in here you're in here editing a photo and you're in here moving these sliders around and you're changing the photo within a catalog a raw editor is almost always going to be some kind of a catalog based system where your edits are not actually changing the photo permanently they're not actually editing the file so it can be a raw file it can be a jpeg it doesn't matter any photos i do or any preset let's say that i apply to this if i apply a preset here from silver it applies a preset and then that is where i'm at right now if i reset over here if i change a slider if i reset with a reset preset however it is i reset i'm bringing it back to the raw file but the photo the file on the hard drive never really changed it was saved within the catalog it wasn't overwriting the file in contrast when i work in a pixel editor as i call it something like photoshop something like affinity is also a pixlr there's lots of variants of this obviously the most common most of you have is photoshop but regardless of whether you're using something else a pixel editor is where you're opening one file and then you edit it and there's layers and you tend to have advanced blending effects and tools and blurs and all this kind of stuff a pixel editor generally speaking you can do much more a raw editor is kind of one layer deep we have all these sliders and if we change that slider right if i adjust the exposure slider here it increases the exposure and then if i adjust it back down it decreases the exposure whereas in a pixel editor like photoshop if i apply an exposure up layer it puts the exposure up even if i'm doing an adjustment layer and then if i add another adjustment layer it's another setting of putting the exposure down now you're kind of combining the two so you have this kind of step-by-step layer vertical process in a pixel editor raw editor you have kind of one develop process now i realize in capture one and some others there is some degree of layers and you can stack up but you're still kind of losing this one level deep slider based control and so even though some raw editors do have some layer control it's nothing like you have in a true pixel editor like photoshop like affinity or something like that so where do these come together let's not ramble too long how does this tie together if i'm in here and i have this image and let's go back to the raw file the raw file this is out of my sony it's a bit flat i could do lots of things but let's say i'm going for a black and white so i'm going to do something like contrast blacks okay it looks great let's adjust my exposure a little bit and it looks great maybe i could put vignettes or grains or whatever well okay but now i say i want to do something more and so i'm going to go over into photoshop i'm going to click control or command e in the case of lightroom and if using capture one or something like that you may have your shortcuts set a little different now i have this photo in photoshop and all it did is it rendered out what i had here in lightroom okay so now i'm in photoshop same image but it's rendered if you look down at the layers here see i just have a background layer all right so what happens if i start doing things now to this if i go in here and i run the black room master tool the black room master tool is what builds all these layers it converts to black and white and it gives us all this control and zones and it gives us the live map so we can review those tones that interacts with loomis i'm going to be doing another video by the way on interacting loomist with black room and really mastering tone control using those two side by side as well but today's video is lightroom side by side with photoshop or in this case black room just so i can automate the process everything i'm doing here in black room and in lightroom you could do manually it's not dependent on using silver for presets or black room presets but i'm trying to show you not only how to better use these tools because most of you that watch my channel use my tools in some form or another but i'm also trying to help you understand the difference between the raw edit and the pixel edit now we're in here and you look and see i have all these layers and i'm building up and if i run actions within black room it's stacking new layers up i can add curves i can do all kinds of things here's the problem with this process with taking that image that i made in lightroom to photoshop all i'm really manipulating at this point is the tone and so you can see i can manipulate the tone i can add effects but when i add things like the color filters they're not doing anything because there's no color information of course if i start adding curves or if i add effects if i add hdr mods things like that they are going to affect the image and it's going to be great because black room still works somebody messaged me recently and said well can i use the like like a monochrome camera with black room and as you can see obviously you can if you bring a monochrome image into black room you can still do a ton of stuff and make really profound edits more so then you're probably going to be able to do in lightroom because you can do more without color channels in a pixel editor like photoshop but let's just close this for a minute and go back to lightroom okay so here's the same image back in lightroom what i've done and what i think is best for a workflow is if you're editing in lightroom and you've got this image and let's say i've added a preset maybe i've adjusted exposure maybe i've tweaked with shadows and highlights and blacks and whites and i've got a look that i like in lightroom but now i want to go into photoshop i want to edit more i want to use black room in this case okay what am i going to do well the easiest thing to do is to leave the black and white space so you can see up here right now in this case i'm in adobe standard black and white from this preset i could go back to adobe color adobe standard for example and it would switch the color space back to color i've made it easier for silver users let's actually undo that so here we are in our black and white what you can do is in silver 4.3 there's actually a mod preset specifically to restore your color information now if you look let's undo that look over here at the settings and let's apply a different preset that affects a few more things right so here's a preset that's affecting all kinds of stuff a silver skin preset if i reset it's going to zero everything but if i click this restore color for black room photoshop or affinity or whatever you're using right it's going to leave my tone information alone all my curves my shadow and highlights it's only going to reset that color channel information and why because now any gradients that i've done any vignettes what this is going to do and you can totally do it manually or make your own preset i've just put this in for our silver users to make it easier this is going to reset your color information and your grain because if you're going to black room a lot of there's grain tools in there you can certainly come back into lightroom and add green tools but what this is doing is giving you a clean color image that retains all those tone edits now i can control or command e and go into blackroom and i have the benefit now of using both lightroom and photoshop and again this applies if you're using capture one or affinity except for you're not using blackroom you might be using silver in capture one and the 4.3 update has the same preset for silver in capture one to restore color information but obviously at this time we don't have black room for affinity because it affinity can't do all the same things photoshop can now we're here with the color information but not the raw photo that's just straight and flat i've been able to retain the edits i did in lightroom the tone edits and whatever i applied from the silver presets so now i'm not wasting the energy silver is workflow right if we go back to here i can apply a look to this and a lot of times what i'll do is i'll remove the color information open in photoshop and then undo the preset i just applied here in lightroom why because now when i when i edit in photoshop and save i'll have my raw file with my lightroom black and white edit and i'll have my psd or my tiff file from photoshop that was exported with my black room black and white edit and of course my raw file will be raw i can reset it i can go back to wherever i want but it actually allows me to see my black and white edit in lightroom versus my black and white edit in photoshop i can come in here and i can say well let's do something like earth porn and kind of do a dynamic landscape look okay so it's brought all the information that i was using already in photoshop in lightroom excuse me and now i can edit it in black ring and i can go in here i can say it's a little bit too intense let's dial back the sine curve layer and what else let's go here let's actually adjust the base mix a little bit but we have all the control over all these so any plates that we're using anything we're adding in lightroom let me turn down the ice plate a little bit the dream plate is pretty good honestly everything's pretty good but i'm going to turn down the base mods because it's a little bit too dynamic i want those whites just a little bit and i'm going to go right here i'm going to set the master mix of black room to 100 and i'm going to do full tonal range so we have full blacks to full lights in our zones on the map tweak okay so now i have this really nice contrasty black and white i am going to click up here and merge all of these to one layer which will save me space to save it and so you can see my black room edit here's here's what we came from from lightroom here's my black room edit and i'm going to save that but not before i just come in here with a burn tool right up here i'm going to take the burn tool and i'm just going to do a little bit of manual burning and dodging of the mid tones a nice big soft brush here i'm using the alt key to control the brush size i'm just going to burn the upper and side areas just a touch so our focus is really coming into the center of this image now i'm going to save it and this is the beauty of how we can use both here is my photoshop edit right here you can see it says edit tiff right down there at the bottom and here is my raw edit from lightroom now obviously i have a lot more contrast i have a lot more punch in my photoshop edit now that i've edited i'm going to crop i usually wait till the very end to crop because i might want to change my mind later so i'll actually edit the full image and then i'll come back in and crop afterwards and look at that we have this nice image and there we are so what we've done is we did an edit in silver four in lightroom and the beauty of this is we can edit our entire session right the beauty of the ride coming back to our original topic the difference between the raw editor and the pixel editor if i like this i could say hey let's let's copy my settings shift ctrl c everything's selected that i want copy and now i can copy these over to any group of images i could copy it to this portrait i could copy it to other variants of this i could copy this to anything i wanted and so the beauty of the raw editor is batch it's efficiency i can just flip between one image and the next image in my catalog i can paste settings i can mix settings i can tweak them i can add presets the raw editor is better for efficiency and speed and that's where silver for and really all our preset packs come in is they make tinkering with all the sliders to get exactly what you want way faster it's not that you couldn't do things manually but a preset helps you do it faster it helps you have more visualizations in a short period of time and ultimately helps you edit better and know better what's happening with your sliders i find that when people use presets they actually start to know lightroom or capture one better because they're seeing the sliders move they start to engage better i think with how it works let's go silver autumn out on this one and this is just a portrait image right i got a pretty good black and white conversion but let's do the restore color you can see it's kind of weird because that preset adjusted white balance and all that kind of stuff it's leaving all that alone so it's leaving all the tweaks we did to the color information with the exception of the color channels directly but any white balance anything like that is being retained it's restoring it to neutral color channels now i can come in the black room with this port street portrait here and i can come in run black room and it's going to use all those color channels for all the magic that blackroom does like classic color filters like the mix intensity i can turn that up or down to get a different level of result and how it's blending the light like well let's actually just go in delete the red 25 filter that i added and just run the silver screen which is a nice portrait combo founder effect in black room this is running a whole bunch of actions together and allowing me to mix it up but it's kind of intense so i'm going to turn the master mix of everything i've added down to 50 and i'm going to tweak with my tones a little bit i'm going to go into my city girl curve that was already applied from that and manually bring my blacks down a little bit and my mid-tones so i have a little bit more of a contrasty image but you get the idea i can come in here in lightroom edit a photo edit a batch of photos edit a wedding at a portrait session and then i can come in and say oh no this is my good image this is my best is the one i want to print i can just do the restore color preset or you can do this manually obviously bring it into photoshop here edit it in black room and then when i'm done i have both side by side i can have my black and white edit from lightroom or my color restored version and i can have my photoshop edit so i think the way that i would think of this is two different levels of editing lightroom is my initial edit it's my batch edit it's where i experiment quickly and instantly with visualizations because i can come in and i can just browse over presets blackroom is fast but i can't do this i can't just instantly get all this feedback mix channels in different ways and get different looks different tones different dynamic ranges different filmics until i get the feel i want in an image lightroom or a raw editor like it in the same kind of genre like capture one is the king when it comes to batch editing and just doing creative things fast but then when i want to take my best image in and do more i take it into photoshop and in my experience the best way to take that into photoshop and really do advanced black and white edits in photoshop is just restore your color information using the color restore restore those channels open in photoshop edit save it out now you got your photoshop edit but all the images you've edited around that rapidly and efficiently using presets are still there i don't take every image into photoshop if i'm doing a wedding or a photo session remember pixel edit one of the time slow edits raw edit batch editing fluid workflow control quick changes original files photoshop affinity pixel edits right you can you can actually open camera raw from within photoshop in fact you can use the presets like silver inside photoshop but it's still slower you're using camera at that point like a filter and i hope that i conveyed this and talked about it right i hope this is useful to you in understanding the differences not only in when to use silver for and when to use black room but also when to use lightroom and when to use photoshop but they're a pixel editor and a raw editor are completely different animals but both incredibly useful and you shouldn't choose one as image makers you should know both because they're both different kinds of tools and even though sometimes you might get to relatively the same point they can give you different levels of refinement as well as the organization factor all my images are organized within lightroom or capture one that's the raw editor aspect the catalog aspect that allows us to have more control but then my finite edits can be fluidly done and seamlessly taken over to photoshop to lumis to blackroom to alchemist edited saved right back into my catalog in lightroom and i know exactly where i need to be okay guys i hope you found this useful i'm going to go for now i don't want this to go long but let me know if you have any questions in the comments shoot me an email and of course head over to simofx.com if you want to check out the products that we've been talking about today thanks all peace

Channel: Seim

Views: 440

Keywords: gavin seim photography tips photographic school zones system, luminosity masking, photo tips, photos hands on, getting it in camera

Id: GE9GswWBVH4

Length: 17min 36sec (1056 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 25 2021