Black and White Photo Conversion for Portrait, Beauty and Fashion

in this tutorial we're gonna be talking about various black and white conversion techniques in Adobe Photoshop [Music] hey guys Mike here you can find me on instagram at vibrant shot photo as well as online and vibrant calm so in this video I wanted to do a quick lesson on how I do my black and white conversion something I'm act asked about quite a bit and never really got around to making a separate video for it the process is relatively straightforward so no real challenges here you'll actually find that my conversion process is relatively basic without any sort of crazy stuff going on but I'll try and give you a few tips as far as you know different variations that you can experiment with for achieving a fairly dramatic look in your black and whites before we get started shameless plug just want to let you know I do have a new hair retouching course so if you're struggling with hair retouching at all be sure to check that out I'm gonna pop the link up for it here as well as in the description below let's go ahead and get started with Black Point conversion on this portrait of Emily and the reason I chose this is because I like this portrait and I think the color looks okay but I maybe perhaps it could use a little bit more drama and I feel like this particular portrait would be better served as a black and white particularly because we have some freckles here and freckles I find are a good friend to black and white conversion I find that always looks a little bit more dramatic and interesting in black and white so let's go ahead and just create a group here we're just gonna call this BW for black and white and then I don't actually use the black and white conversion layer for doing the black and white I actually use the same helper layer that I use for when I'm dodging and burning so when I'm dodging and burning I want to make everything black and white so I can see just the luminosities and for that we use a solid color adjustment layer so we're gonna do the same thing here we're gonna select solid color and we're going to go over here and pick 128 let's go ahead and have 128 all across the board for RGB if you can't select it then you can just always type the values but 128 128 128 that's what we want and then we're gonna go in here and select color so as you can see that's gonna kind of give us a black and white version without any real messing about of colors like the black and white adjustment layer does essentially when you pop up the black and white adjustment layer it sort of says you know how bright do you want the reds how bright you want the yellows blues and so on and so on this just kind of does a straight flattening of the colors and gives you a black and white representation that image so that's gonna serve as our our main conversion tool for getting a black and white and so any adjustments we do beyond that we want to make sure they drop below this adjustment layer because if you put anything above it there is no color so let's say we want to kind of put in a black and white adjustment layer now if we start messing about with these values you're gonna see that there's no effect whatsoever but as soon as we drop it below the color fill then the effect pops up so that is just something to keep in mind always have all of your adjustments below it certain ones obviously that operate on luminosities opposed to colors it doesn't matter you can put them above but it's just good practice to always put everything below so you don't ever have to think about it or worry about it so the first thing I'm gonna start with is a curves adjustment that is kind of the first place I always go when I'm doing a black and white adjustment or a black and white conversion usually I would say 75% of the time my black and white conversion boils down to this color neutralizer and a curves adjustment and that's really the only thing that I do sometimes I want something a little bit more dramatic and in this particular case that is one of those scenarios where I do want something more dramatic but we'll start with the curves adjustment so we're gonna just kind of bring this down a little bit we can see already that it looks a little bit better I think the skin was a little too bright before we're gonna turn that down a little bit now obviously I've effected the shadows as well here which I don't really want to do so I'm gonna use the blend if to just kind of get rid of that in the shadows so as we drag this we can kind of see where the effect is being taken out of and all this is really saying is that don't apply this curves adjustment anywhere where the luminosity is darker than this line so anything and here is not going to be affected by it now obviously you can see that there are some areas that are just like straight cut off and that doesn't look good there's no kind of feather or transition so for that we're just gonna hold down the option or Alt key and we're just going to split these bars over here and just kind of create a little bit of a feather for that transition and if we hit command Z we can kind of see what that does and if you know we went too far or didn't go far enough we can always go back and revisit that perhaps we did go a little bit too far so I'm gonna just kind of nudge this back here and bring that back there okay so that is kind of pulling out the effect from some of the shadows which is good and I think you know for many cases that would be more than sufficient sometimes what I'll also do is throw in a selective color adjustment layer so I'll go into here drop that below the curve and perhaps I want to add a little bit more contrast in the highlight areas so I'll select whites and then kind of bring the black point down here and again with black and white you can be a little bit more dramatic with some of this stuff you can really kind of push it a bit more than you can with in color version of the image so I think somewhere you know around minus 2 or minus 3 is fine and then going into blacks I might say you know what it's still a little too contrast in the shadow so let's just maybe bring this down one just to kind of wash it a little bit so it's not quite so contrasting again it's really your choice if you like the contrast then leave alone everybody's tastes are different so let's just kind of toggle that on and off and that's just all that's really doing and again of course we can adjust opacities in any of these cases now one thing that I find is always a good thing to check is let's turn off our black and white here and it's going to our channels and take a look at the blue Channel sometimes the blue Channel I find looks a little bit interesting and that's sort of an indicator that maybe we want to play around with a channel mixer a bit and in this case we do so I'm gonna go ahead and re-enable all of these channels and then go ahead and turn the black and white grouping on again and for now I'm going to disable the curves adjustment and the Selective color so let's go ahead and in our adjustment layers here we'll select channel mixer there you are and in the presets we'll go to black and white with blue filter so there it is and as you can see that's going to give us something that is a lot more dramatic and kind of toggling that on and off I think that looks pretty cool but again you know it's perhaps adversely affecting a few different areas so what I want to go ahead and do is once again apply a bit of blend if to that so maybe we'll cut off some of the deepest shadows here and just kind of transition that a little bit there just so that it it's not affecting the shadows too and let's go ahead and see whether we like that effect perhaps in this case we're actually we're actually better off without the blend if I think unlike in the curve the shadows actually probably had a little bit of blue to them and in that particular scenario the shadow areas are actually brighter than they would be if we took out this channel mixer so basically what the black and white filter is doing with the blue channel is it's saying you know emphasize anything that's not blue like make it kind of darker and anything that is blue is gonna be a little bit lighter for example I'll give you a demonstration of that if we go into selective color now and we go into blacks and I take out yellows you can see that the it's really kind of washing out the image because what we're doing is we're injecting a bunch of blue into there let's turn that off you can see there's a ton of blue and the channel mixer is kind of offsetting that because we're sort of brightening everything that's blue and darkening everything else so in this particular scenario by adding the blend if to the channel mixer we're saying don't apply it in the shadows the shadows had some blue so the shadows are actually getting darker instead of lighter kind of confusing but it's important to understand how that channel mixer works and of course you can experiment with some of the other channel mixer modes that we have in here so if I don't look like this you can see that presets there's you know orange filters green filters red filters and so on feel free to experiment with those now what I tend to do with the channel mixer is I never really use it at 100% if we turn off this color fill you can see right now it's still black and white right so this this color neutralizer let's just call this color remover just so that we know if we have that turned off right now there's no real difference between having it on and off but however because I want to bring down the opacity of the channel mixer it's gonna start to become important because if I bring this down to let's say 70% now we have a partially colored up image and if you really like this like crazy desaturated look then that can be a look as well but for me I want an actual black and white so as soon as I turn that back on were back to a black and white with this partially applied channel mixer effect added to it now one thing what I find with the channel mixer is that sometimes it adversely affects the hair it will really kind of cut off areas of transition particular areas a little darker and it'll sort of wash it out so in that scenario just feel free you know grab a brush and painting in black you can just sort of remove it from those areas just by masking it out so that is an option for you as well you can certainly fine-tune it more that way let's just kind of see what that does yeah so you can see that having it turned having the mass turned off it's dark and then if I turn it back on it sort of brings back some of the detail here and the lightness so that that is something that you may want to also do if you're using the channel mixer and one other thing that we can look at is the actual black and white adjustment layer itself so let's go ahead and move that underneath the channel mixer because once again the channel mixer being at 70 percent opacity it is you know applying a black and white effect to some extent is basically leaving 30 percent of the colour kind of leftover and so if we want the black and white to apply the effect that we want we needed underneath the channel mixer layer now what we're gonna do with this black and white adjustment though is we're not gonna use it in the traditional sense of actually making things black and white because right now it is it's just making the image black and white and it's actually screwing up our channel mixer if we turn this off you can see the channel mixer is now functioning again but as soon as I turn it back on the image is black and white so our channel mixer with the blue filter can't do anything because there's no blues so we're gonna go back to here and in the black and white adjustment we're going to use the luminosity blending mode which is really just going to apply it as a luminosity adjustment and what that really does is saying okay you know make my yellows brighter make my yellows darker whatever I want to do there and for example my Reds I can make my Reds darker and so once again that's kind of introducing more drama into the image and we can go ahead and go into our blend if once again see if we want to kind of clip that out from anywhere you know before we do that let's go ahead and go into our red channel here and see if we want to maybe just work on the red only because that's where really the skin tones are sort of residing so let's see how that effect looks there I have no idea because I haven't actually tried this yet I rarely go into these but that's actually that's kind of cool too so we can do something like that and of course you can do it on the gray as well but is really targeting the skin so that's really kind of getting pumped up and dramatic and of course now we can scale this back into something that is not quite as overdone perhaps at 65% or so let's go ahead and turn our selective color adjustment back on and that's kind of neat as well so that is that's maybe where I'd leave it perhaps it's a little bit dark if it's dark now what you can do is you can actually bring a curve in here and perhaps lighten it up a little bit so let's go ahead and just kind of see what we want to do with that you know perhaps somewhere in around there is good now for me that's probably still a little overdone so I'd probably scale back on a combination of the channel mixer in the block and wipe I mean we could group these together and call them something like intense and then maybe reduce the opacity overall for that to 90% and that's maybe where I would stop for this particular image like I said 75% of the time I just do the color remover and a curves adjustment to darken and that's really all there is to it but sometimes you want something a little more dramatic and that's sort of the process I take for that now one thing you need to be aware of when you're using the channel mixer and that black and white adjustment layer is that you will really kind of bring up any sort of imperfections in the luminosity there's a skin like if I for example turn this off you can see that the skin looks fine even if we darken it down here this is the brightening layer this is our darkening layer so even with that you can see the skin looks perfectly fine but as soon as we introduce this channel mixer it's really kind of highlighting any sort of imperfections in the skin so any of you know luminosity shifts they're really gonna pop out even more so what you may want to do in this case is if you're planning on going that route you may want to throw an extra dodge and burn stack in here in the Black Point conversion and just do a little extra dodging and burning the reason I wouldn't apply that dodging and burning to your base stack for the color image is that without that turned on the color image may kind of have some dodging and burning that's done unnecessarily and it's it might actually adversely affected so that dodging burning should be specific to just your black and white conversion with this channel mixer applied I wouldn't do it on your kind of base dodge and burn stack so that's just kind of a little tip there if you want something that just looks a little more raw you don't have to do the extra dodging and burning I'm just kind of mentioning it to you that you know juicing up the image that way really just brings out even more and more shifts in luminosities within the skin so it's it's something you may need to address so that's really all I wanted to cover here those are kind of the main things that I use any sort of combination of those different techniques feel free to sort of experiment with them and see what you like what looks good for you every image will vary if it's high key low key it will kind of you know dictate what you use but feel free to experiment with all those in different combinations and see what you like so hopefully you found that helpful if you like this video make sure 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Channel: Michael Woloszynowicz

Views: 86,852

Keywords: photography, retouching, photoshop, adobe photoshop, post processing, black and white, portrait, beauty, B&W, grading, photos, images

Id: eZ5KNi3ZKR4

Length: 14min 24sec (864 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 19 2018