Black and White Landscape Power Editing Tutorial - Lightroom 2018

welcome to another tutorial and I think you're gonna love this one today we're looking at black and white conversions in particular landscape photos we're going to be taking a photo that I took over 10 years ago and processing that why 10 years ago I wanted to show that even though I'm shooting down a nikon d80 50 you know real nice high-end camera these techniques and processes are applicable no matter what camera gear you're using so this image was shot on a 10 megapixel Nikon d200 D 210 years old rubbish gone so so in this particular tutorial I'm going to walk you through step by step my process for converting a landscape photo into black-and-white and as with most of my processing it's a two-step approach first of all I look at the image globally and I look at the exposure highlights shadows blacks whites the tone curve clarity all of that stuff and I get that done on an overall global scale once I've done that I then start looking at the individual areas that need to be adjusted so in this case it's the sky around the Sun we need to bring in more contrast into those clouds make that more interesting potentially we lose some of the detail in the mountain so I want to bring some of that back and then the key focus on this particular image is just the simplicity of those three trees set on the shoreline and so I want to address how to really bring the eye into those trees [Music] so working in Adobe Lightroom cc classic so what we're gonna do here nowadays we can start off with a profile right at the top which is great we can browse for a camera matching profile which is what I like to do rather than look at the Adobe stuff if if you provided with a camera matching profile why not use it but we're looking at black and whites here so let's let's see if there's one that puts us on the right path straight away black and white number one looks like a good option black and white two looks to contrast see between the sky highlights and the trees whereas this looks more even contrast through the scene I can see the trees there that's quite nice but let's have a quick flick through see what else we like 10 looks quite nice with black and white 11 we're seeing that crushed contrast look which works for some images I prefer to work with a full range from pure white to pure black and then we can crush the contrast later in Photoshop if we really want to but if you start at this point with a black point that isn't true black you're limiting yourself from the start so let's dive in with black and white 10 black and white one actually seems to have more punch so let's go for one so here's our starting point one of the things you're going to notice is in the bottom half of this image it is much darker if we were to crop this down for example just down to this bottom half and look at our histogram here we can actually see that there's pretty much data only in the left-hand side of the histogram so we've got a scope to really increase the contrast here and push the mid gray points the highlights here which are only mid gray all the way up to white or close to white to balance out with what we've got in the top half here which is peaking at the white point so basically this is an image of two halves so what I would like to do is bring a bit of uniformity through this image or at least push the white area through here around the trees because I want to increase contrast here our attention goes to these three trees and also bring some attention through to the mountain range here so let's see what we can do first of all we want to make sure that the image looks good globally and we can do that with all of our sliders here once we've done that we're going to go in and use the adjustment brush or even the radial filters to fine-tune the image exactly how we want it so in terms of exposure we can see in the histogram that we are pretty well exposed from the darks through to the lights but I always think there's no harm in just grabbing the exposure slider and just sin seeing what your image looks like as you push things up have you still got detail through the shadows which we have down here or if we pull it down where do we start losing detail and we can see we've got detail all through the cloud here and it just blows out around the Sun there so let's start working with this image I'm happy with the exposure contrast let's see what happens as we push the contrast around if you actually reduce the contrast we actually see more detail through here but the overall image is very flat if we push it beyond we darken everything through here a little too much so I'm gonna leave the contrast kind of central maybe just push it up slightly the highlights is we bring this down we're gonna see that we are actually recovering detail through the sky but we're also losing contrast where the trees are if you watch the trees as I pull this highlight slider to the left it's reducing contrast here because all of these areas are getting darkened so again although I like what it's doing in the sky I don't really like it on the whole image so much you can leave that the shadows I actually feel like we can bring these up a fair bit to start bringing out some of the detail down here and that's not affecting our sky too much so let's bring the shadows up the white point let's have a little play with that see how that affects the image as you can see as we bring the whites up in this bottom third of the image we actually start to get a lot more interest and contrast around those trees and even in the foreground here so that could be useful to use that knowledge when we actually start isolating areas within the photo but for now let's just leave that as is sometimes as I'm working what I'd like to do is actually right-click on this area just off to the side of the photo itself and you can change the background to a white and as soon as you do that you can actually see that these Gray's that looked quite bright before actually look very muddy we can do the same and go to a black and then we can see that okay we're pretty dark along the shoreline here but overall we've still got a little room to push those blacks further yes you can see that information in a histogram and read that there but sometimes it's nice just to see it visually but on the whole I'll work off a mid gray as a base and then just have a quick look at those comparisons so coming back here we've got our black slider and as I say we can push it down a little bit we are going to start peaking the blacks if we click this little triangle icon here we can actually see where we're actually losing detail on the blacks which I personally I don't like to lose any detail really so I think I think that's acceptable we can always bring bring that information back if we were a little under on the blacks here we can bring this back up as we bring the exposure around here up later with an adjustment we're gonna start to recover those blacks the clarity slider I love the clarity slider when we're working with black and whites you do this with with color imagery and it's gonna look really stink pretty quickly but you can actually push things pretty far on a black and white image and get away with it a lot more personally I still think you never want to go to the extreme you want to kind of do this in a refined way but yeah you can certainly push that up to like 44 55 depends on your image that you're working with but you can we certainly bring in a lot more clarity on a black-and-white image and I quite like that so let's leave that around there the dije slider is can be pretty useful as well I mean if I if I push the D haze to a hundred see what it's doing around the clouds here it's pretty interesting I mean sure you won't want that over the whole image but again we can use that knowledge to refine areas of the image and I think that's where the real craft and crafting of an image can come in when you can actually specifically speak into areas so the tone curve we can use this tool to actually just tweak our image further and you know we can increase contrast with an s-curve putting a point down to the left and bring it down and bring them on to the right and bringing it up but until we have actually addressed these local issues I don't feel like I want to do too much with the tone curve hey guys my face again quick message if you're enjoying this video do me a favor hit the like button also subscribe to the channel for more videos like this peace let's come in and start working with radial filters are very powerful graduated filters are all four so really powerful I love a graduated filter to help control the sky so if we click and drag down from the sky at the moment nothing's happening because we have made no adjustments here but we can actually start to bring that exposure down so we can start to see what's happening in the sky and just bring out a little bit more intra interest interest interest interest let's get that clarity slider again we can throw things around to see how things start to behave as the clarity comes up it's just getting a little more interesting in that sky and also if you remember the D haze slider was was doing some interesting things too sometimes when you bring the clarity and the D haze up all of a sudden the initial exposure that you changed becomes all years a little bit too much so you can just bring that back slightly but I like the idea with my image of having a bright point here where the Sun is and a bright point in the bottom left so you up top right bottom left bright bright so and then interest through the mountains here so if I just drag a radial filter over here again it's doing nothing yet and I'm gonna just uh if I push that to the extreme you can see the area we're affecting and we can just start playing with that until we get those trees looking how we want them so that might be bringing up the white slightly the exposure and the shadows but I really want to push the shadows too far the highlights potentially could come down while we push the whites up and that's going to still keep a nice punchy contrast between the trees and the water reflection here and that's looking pretty good now why have I done such a big radius here why didn't I just keep it tight on the trees personally I find when things are done on a very small area and very specific you can actually start to see see what's going on with that adjustment too easily so what I like to do sometimes is just have open my navigator and sometimes there's a thumbnail view it's actually easier to see any changes you're making so let's just make navigator slightly larger there coming back to this if we look on navigator it's easy to see where this adjustment is affecting the image if I let go here you can really see it over the trees it's little too extreme but if we actually expand that slightly more it it feathers off more naturally into the environment and we can actually grab the feather as well bring that up to a hundred if we want and this change that we've made and we're putting over the trees it's blended much more seamlessly and already we're making quite an interesting black-and-white I feel like our transition from the Sun to the cloud detail through here is not particularly pleasing at the moment it's a little too abrupt around this haloing here so what I might do is just grab another radial adjustment coming out from the center of the Sun and just see if I can start working the sliders to blend that more naturally if you see I bring the clarity the opposite way this time that will actually start to smooth and blend that transition area of the Sun and that's looking pretty cool through here we're quite bright let's see see if we can't change that slightly and keep our focus and attention on the trees and the Sun here and that's quite nice but we're darkening this bit quite heavily so what we can do we could either mask that out using the range mask tools here or another simple ways just grab the grab the shadow slider and bring that up so we've still darkened this area but we haven't affected this as much let's just have a go with the range mask and see how we go if I just click on here to say where I want to it effect and that's pretty good we can we can add to that selection here and in theory we shouldn't be affecting our cloud dark cloud too much but it's it's not really too much for us to be honest if we turn that off and turn it back on again yeah it's subtle let's go with it now the last one of the last things I want to do is actually just bring some more interest through to these mountains in the background so when you come over a pre-existing filter you can't actually put another one on there so just come off of the side of it drag another one out and now we can grab the the central point to move it around click and drag drag it over the mountains and let's have a little play with the clarity cuz I really think that will help to bring some detail out if we if we push the clarity up I feel things stuck in too dark so we can bring the clarity up and then we can balance it out with the exposure to also bring a little highlight above the mountains there like that if we feel like we want to bring the shadows up we can do that too once the shadows start coming up that also lifts that the black values that we introduced by bringing up this clarity so now we can push that a little further and if we've pushed that further introduce more black we can bring the shadows up so I'm concerned about the blacks why am I not just grabbing the black slider and bringing that up well if I do that what you see happens is it actually muddies the blacks they just become a washed out gray whereas if I actually control the shadows or grab the shadow slider to bring those blacks up actually brings the detail back lifts the shadows whilst leaving a nice crisp black point unlike grabbing the black slider where it just muddies the blacks so looking good from a interesting punchy black and white point of view let's compare how we're looking on a on a pure white that's pretty cool let's compare on a black so now I'm seeing this on a black I feel like we could add more mood to this and this is where we can go back into our tone curve we can actually grab we can either directly grab the tone curve and pull it down to make this more moody and dramatic or what you can do is actually click this little icon in the top left-hand corner come on to the picture itself and wherever you click and then drag it will focus on that particular value and either take it down if you drag down or take it off up if you push up and so that's a nice way to control your image if you're not exactly sure where on the histogram the points should go just come over with this tool and then click and drag up or drag down depending on what you want to achieve so I don't want to do too much to make this too dark I think at the moment what I'd like to do is still keep these highlights pretty punchy so if we come down with this tool and just have a look in here where where abouts these highlights are falling around there if we push that up sometimes if you put too many points on the curve too close to each other things start looking a little weird so if I if that happens what I'll do is try to keep the shape of the curve generally but just pull those points away from each other so the curve is much smoother and that'll keep the transitions much smoother too if you make some changes and you're sure if you like them or not which I'm not with this you can actually turn the curves off turn the back on and see what you've created and I'm not sure that I really like what I've done so I'm going to just make a couple more changes by keeping this control point where the whites are down slightly we still control a little gradient between the hot spot here and the surrounding Gray's because you don't want it to or I don't want it just to be one big white ball in the sky so that's why I'm going to bring that down I'm going to keep that kind of central and now we can bring our darks down to bring that drama back in and then we can go something like that so if we have a quick look at our before and after we've got our before and we've got our after so from a pretty flat very old file we've created a pretty punchy black and white and if we look at it on our sorry look at it on a different background hey hey Lightroom what are you doing to the file okay um look at it on a white gray and a black just see that we're happy with the values the blacks the whites through the whole image and if we are we can say done but looking at this now I kind of feel like I want a little bit more interest and detail through here so we can't come back in and just add a little more perhaps raise raise the exposure value through here I'm not wanting to increase the exposure through the sky too much so this is a time when I could use the range mask the luminance if I grab this right hand side this is going to start saying do not affect the brighter areas and it will say just affect the darker areas dark on the left bright on the right and I'm not I'm not really in love with with what it's doing to be honest so I'm just gonna leave well enough alone and perhaps just lighten that through there feather it off quite considerably and now we've got we go from dark to just a little bit more detail through there and I quite like that if we duplicate that we can actually bring some interest into the foreground here as well so it's got some detail it's not just a black nothingness through here and just with the trees here I think I'm gonna actually just click this highlight clipping area and now I will see where I've got pure white which at the moment is nowhere down here I've got the Sun pure white but nothing down here so now I can see how far can I grab the white slider and bring it up before I start clipping just there just around that point which is a hundred and we only just start to clip so potentially we could go from here which is pretty muddy to a more poppy white the last thing that we could do to make this a little more interesting as well I kind of feel like I want the viewer to see from this bright Sun here as if the sun's almost illuminating these three trees on the landscape so what we could do is actually try and fake rays of light now I'm not saying like actual rays of light if we were going to do that really well we could do that in Photoshop not Lightroom there are ways we could do it painting it with the brush with a higher exposure brighter exposure but I'm going to do a bit of a bit of a hack really so I'm going to draw a radius radial filter out from the Sun I'm gonna put it on an angle so I'm rotating it from the Sun to the trees to match that angle I'm now going to bring it down so it's kind of making a connection from the Sun down to the trees and I might pull this down a little further if grab this handle and drag it'll drag both ends however I don't really want that so I just want to hold alt down or option on the Mac and now we when we drag it we're literally just dragging this end so I've held alt to allow me to do that so now let's boost the exposure if I do it all the way you can see exactly what we're doing here so we're literally brightening up this area through here so obviously that is way too much but with a bit of subtlety we may we may be able to do something along these lines and if we want to just adjust the angle slightly we can do that let's try feathering it I actually quite liked the the more broad stroke of light coming through so let's head hit it around 70 something like that and again that may be just a little bit too much so for fine-tuning I've just left my mouse hovered over this 0.35 here and I'm just using the up and down arrows and that just gives you a little bit more fine-tuning and refinement but let's increase the exposure and just bring the highlights down just a tiny bit shadows up so that it looks like it's bleaching out this dark a bit here potentially even what if we grab the blacks that's gonna wash out this area through the mountains here but in this case that's actually not a bad thing because it's given the sense of light coming through mist they're like short we are over cooking this slightly but we can see what's going on so now we've done that let's just bring some of these back down so we're not being as extreme with this something like that now I've been pretty crude with this adjustment but I just wanted to show you guys what's possible see here I'm just I've dropped in another little radial filter here just by the trees and all I want to do is just almost hint that the light is hitting down here on the land and let's take a look at our finished image so here you can see on the left-hand side what we started with and on the right finished black-and-white kind of punchy crunchy image so if we hit do a little before and after here's that before original image from a 10 year old 10 megapixel d200 camera with pretty limited dynamic range and we were able to push that and get a really crisp contrast II black and white out of that before and after before and after I really hope that's been of help to you looking at converting to black and white as I said what you've learnt here the principles techniques you can apply that not just to landscape photos but any photography let me know in the comments below I'd love to find out which particular techniques or methods or what you found interesting or useful and what you are going to be using in your processing thanks for watching guys and I'll catch you in another video oh and subscribe if you haven't already peace out you

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 30,680

Keywords: Black and White, Color to Black and White, Photography, Photo editing, B&W, Black & White, Landscape photo, Landscape photography, New Zealand Lanscape, New Zealand, Twizel, Mountains, Lake, Lightroom CC Classic, Lightroom 2018, 2018, Lightroom Classic CC 2018, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC 2018, Anthony Turnham, Tutorial, How To, Photo processing, Develop module, Nikon d200, Nikon d850

Id: reeCONMEEZ8

Length: 26min 52sec (1612 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 30 2018