BLACK AND WHITE PHOTO EDITING WITH LIGHTROOM - My Process How To Create Great Black and White Edits

in this black-and-white photo editing tutorial I'm going to share with you some of my favorite methods for converting a color photo into a powerful and impactful black-and-white in Adobe Lightroom so let's get into it so as you can see here we're actually in part of my landscape photography library and as you can see from a few of the photos here I just love black and white and black and white conversions so today what I'm going to show you is how I convert this photo here into something more like this I much prefer the black and white and when I took the color version I had in my mind that this was going to end up as a more sort of ethereal and emotive black-and-white image like this so within this video we're going to take a look at the basic panel and how I utilize that and with black and whites the contrast clarity and dije sliders are all really powerful so we'll talk about those as well we'll also look at the actual conversion so once we're in black and white using the color sliders to convert the different tones and luminosities another really powerful tool to use is the localized adjustments and we will look at those as well so the first thing we're going to do is actually duplicate this so let's create a virtual copy and now this is what we're going to work with now the process that I did just before recording this here that we can see we may end up with something slightly different to that and that's one of the things I love about post-processing your images is that it's a kind of fluid dance of artistry you're not just replicating something that's very technical sure you're using the same processes and everything but just depending how you're feeling depending how you want to process it on that particular moment the result might be quite different I recently heard a really good quote that sort of encapsulates that ideology and that is that the rule capture that is the composition as if we're talking in musical terms the rule capture is the composition and postproduction that editing is the performance and so going from our composition the written music that doesn't change how we perform that piece how we edit it alters depending on our artistic vision on at that particular moment I really like that so first of all let's come over to the basic tab in the develop module just drop that down our color profile at the moment is Adobe color so we're going to change this to black and white and we could use Adobe monochrome or we can come down and browse for a different profile which we might find more appropriate now as you flick through these the black and whites will actually change and usually I'd really recommend having a play around with these like black and white three I actually really like this as a starting point because we've got quite an ethereal look almost like a snowy look to the trees and the sort of top right there quite like that let's see let's see let's flick through these doesn't hurt just have a look like this is quite a nice faded vintage kind of look but I like to start with quite a lot of dynamic range in my image with the whites to be pure white the blacks to be pure black so it's either black and white oh three or sticking with a monochrome well I think straight away black and white I three is doing a lot more for us if we want to fade that off or put it on we can do that we don't need to be at 100% but let's just ease this off somewhere there for now and we'll close that so that's our profile done now we're going to come down to the exposure and look at that I'm pretty happy with the way this is exposed as you'll see the histogram is pretty well represented from the blacks through to the whites but one thing we would want to do is pull those blacks down until we're creating the pure black now keep your eye on these little triangles top left top right of the histogram and as I pull this to the left what's the one in the top left that triangle suddenly becomes highlighted now what is that telling us that's telling us that we're starting to clip at lack point then we're already clipping at the white point you can either hover over to see where we're clipping alternatively you can click them or press J J turns those warnings on so we can see the red represents this is where we're clipping with a the white so if I push the whites even further that red area kind of grows if I pull the blacks down we will start to see that black clipping even further now in black and white I'm certainly not afraid to actually push some of my tones just to a pure black and some of them to a pure white I feel if you want to get a nice contrast the image you need to embrace the fact that black and white has pure black has pure white the contrast slider you would think yes we should push that to the right because we want to add contrast in our black and white but in actual fact in this instance and in many others as well I find going to the left and reducing contrast is actually beneficial for the tones because you can see as I pushed it to the left all the way just for demo purposes right now you can see that we have flattened out the Gray's flatten the curve it's the less contrast image but the dynamic range seems to be much more much I don't know what the word would be but we've got more dynamic range right and you can see more detail there so we don't need to go all the way but you can see that it is recovering some of those highlights and shadows as we go to the left so let's actually do that I'm currently happy with the black and white point so I'm going to press J again just to remove those markers and we were already well on our way to creating a nice image here usually I'll be taking my highlights to the left to sort of recover detail but in this instance because we've got this lovely foggy ethereal feel I might want to take that to the right to actually enhance that but it gained for this one I'm actually not going to address that to brighten that with that I'm going to do that with a localized adjustment very shortly now if we grab the shadows let's see what that does for us it's often worth pushing things all the way to the left and the right and you really get a sense of which areas are B affected which tones are being affected and what it's doing for them now I like the fact that as I push it to the right this area in the trees on the left hand side is brightening up but I don't like what it's doing to the rest of the image so let's double click on the arrow itself to reset it I love that little hack there we're gonna address this area which looks very dark and takes your eye there and it's a light thief if you will we're gonna address that with localised filters now what I want for this image is for our eye to be led in even more with these nice leading lines and so we want to enhance that the mottled effect that we get with brightness and shadows on the leaves I find that kind of distract from the nice soft feeling that we've got to this misty scene so we want to minimize that and we also want to lead our viewers eye this is so important with black and white and the the luminosity the brightness of the image and in which part those bright areas occur is is the guide for the viewers eye of you saying this area is important a dark area this area is less important so we'll look at that as well so I want to brighten up the end of the pathway where we're kind of taking the viewer through and I kind of want to darken or at least take away the attention from these areas at the side of the leaves I want to give the hint of leaves which is there and but just minimize that now before we get into things like the tone curve and black and white slider adjustments and all of that what we're going to do is just look at the texture clarity and D haze now often the texture that can be worth putting a little bit of texture in but if we take that to the right we can see that that really makes this image look kind of crunchy and gets rid of that soft emotive feel that we had going on so double click that get rid of it clarity again often so useful for black and whites for bringing out drama and punch to an image and you can take that so much further with a black and white than you can with a color image before it all looks a bit weird but for this instance what I'm what I'm doing is I'm looking at areas of the image not that image as a whole I really don't like what it's doing to the leaves I think that's really ugly but for instance I quite like what it's doing in terms of these vertical lines and bringing our attention to the black/white that's that's quite interesting so let's put that back to where it was and bear that in mind because we can use the localized adjustments to do that adjustment just to this walkway through here you know D haze is also quite useful for black and whites and normally that lovely noise outside was my son don't know about you guys but we're in lockdown thanks to kovat 19 at the moment so we're all in there in the house together so the kids are running past my little studio area having a grand old time while I'm I'm in here recording your video so do hope you appreciate it and if you are enjoying this please hit me with a like and a subscribe means the world to me and gives me validation for sitting here recording a video about helping you guys to hopefully learn a little more with your processing skills while I'm neglecting my my children outside right let me get back to this will smash this out and then I'm gonna have some playtime with them so the d haze slider i'm bearing in mind what this does and where and i don't like it over the whole image i mean this is really nice and interesting how its added a whole heap of contrast but i want to have more control over where that's applied so for this particular image we are just gonna add a little bit of clarity not much at all and a little bit of d haze texture I'm not even thinking I'm gonna add any texture in I feel that the leaves and the differential between the the leaves and the darkness in everything that's texture enough already we'll leave that alone now let's dive into the black and white color toning so this is this is a really useful thing that you can do if we were to go back to our original so I'm just hitting backspace sorry backslash to see our before laughter we can see that we pretty much only got two main colors going on within this and that'd be our greens green and yellows and we've also got orange yellows for this for the walkway here so sure there's like other tonality other colors going on but there are our main ones so if we come back to our black and white so I'll just hit backspace again backslash keeps it in back space backslash again and let's see if that's true if we grab the orange slider you can see that we're brightening up the walkway which I quite like so let's do that let's see what yellow is doing for us okay so yellow is actually affecting both the leaves and the walkway so it's just up to us what we want to do with that do we want to darken that down or brighten it up I might actually just darken ever so slightly and then we'll go further with the greens yeah so the greens is talking into those leaves which is which we're catching our eye before and I'm just trying to kind of mute them down just ever so slightly ever so slightly the AK was if we slam that around we can see where that's affecting so we've got quite a bit of a cure going on in the mist and fog in the background so let's use that same with the blue as well and that's quite nice so we'll boost that up and I don't expect to see too much of a change with the purple or the magenta so we'll leave those alone now for our overall black and white changes I say I'm happy with that so at this point I feel like we're well on our way with our image but let's have a look at where I ended up last time when I did this process and that's here and for me that's a much more finessed and gorgeous black and white compared to where we are currently with this one so what are the steps that we need to take to get this image here to look more like this image here well first of all let's see where we've come from so if we duplicate this by going create virtual copy and let's reset it and just turn it into a basic black and white by clicking black and white so that is Lightroom's just bog standard sort of desaturation or turn turning into a black and white and as you can see Alvar has a lot more contrast a lot more punch so now comes the fun part of playing around with localized adjustments and I absolutely love localized adjustments whether I'm applying them with the radial filter the gradient filter or the brush itself I find it is a fantastic way to dive into your image and really finesse it so the things that we're going to be doing here would be we want to brighten and create more of a sense of mist and fog and mystery heading down the pathway at this end point here I want to brighten this really dark area here because I feel that the that that is just a complete all that whole that that it's a light suck and you're I almost goes to there even though it's very very dark don't like that and I want to add contrast and interest to the walkway coming through the middle bit here so let's have a look at how we can do that before I do that I'm just going to give us a little bit more screen real estate by pressing shift and F I'm pressing the T key now just so that I can see this show selected mask overlay and what we can do is turn that on and as I draw this radial filter and let go we can see from this red area where this particular adjustment is going to take place so let's say I'm happy with that take the tick off and I'm going to increase the exposure slightly and a lot of the detail or the darkness comes in those shadows so let's boost those up a little bit and say yep we're happy with that the next thing I want to do is actually create more of a misty effect in the background so let's create a adjustment the nice big fat feathered adjustments let's create increase the feathering and if we brighten the exposure what I don't want to do is lose the details or the hint of leaves through here so rather than actually just brightening up and going that looks foggy one thing I found works really well it's actually using the dije slider in negative so you see if I go to the left and we're creating almost like a foggy look through there so go all the way you'll see far too extreme but let's let's go quite far with it the clarity is the same like if you go to the right and it's really crunchy look but mist and fog the particles in the air kind of diffract the light so if we push the clarity to the left we'll see we get a softer kind of look through there so I quite like that we could also boost the exposure ever so slightly and if we feel we're losing too much detail through here bring those highlights back by dropping them down to the left and if I just grab this handle and sort of move it out of the way and put it back you can see that we've got this kind of foggy adjustment that we can place right there now we can play with the the width of it we want a little bit of bleed as it comes comes through if I take the feathering off you'll see right at the edge exactly what it's doing so we can now start to bring that feathering back I think I don't think I actually want it at 100% I think go for something high though like eighty that's nice now I'm going to deal to the sidewalk here and the little pathway through and I want to add more contrast but the first thing I'm going to do is deal with just the vertical the pieces of wood here so I'm not going to make any adjustments what I'm going to do is just paint it on with the brush and by clicking this show selected mask overlay as I start to paint I will see exactly where this mask where the adjustments are is going to be effecting so let's do some of that paint right on there like that I'm not being super precise with this mask and I don't really feel that you have to be at this point you can use the put the bracket keys on your keyboard to increase and decrease the size of your brush as well that's a nice little hotkey to remember so as I come in just to refine just these edges I'm just reducing the size of the brush with that left arrow key and I'm gonna just erase some of the areas that I don't want so its erase some of this make that brush a little larger as well the fact that it's feathered you're not going to notice too much where this mask is and isn't around the edges like I say I'm really not too worried about that precision for this particular change I'm going to make so now we can see that we've got our mask where we want it to be if I press the O key that is the same as toggling this on and off by clicking it so oh we're just hiding that mask and now we are free to make changes we want so we might want to increase the contrast you know quite like quite like boosting the contrast there clarity will surely help us yeah that's localized changes between the blacks and the whites and that's just making that more punchy and interesting and but as you see around here it's getting a little weird the further we get into the tracks I don't want to go too far with that could always use our mask with a lighter flow just to get rid of some of that so I might just do that actually let's go back to oh and so we are now erasing bring the the flow down and we'll just do a little swipe across there there we go okay so now those changes might be quite as evident at the end of the trail there so let's press o again to hide that okay so we are boosting the contrast we're boosting the clarity and but the blacks are getting pretty heavy which is a little bit too much so let's try bringing up the shadows a little bit nice now I might also want to bring a little more attention to the pathway itself so let's create a new one of a new brush adjustment through here so let's sort of paint on here at the moment I can't see where I'm painting so I could press o to turn that on and there's a big ugly mask that I've created so let's just erase some of that click that arrays and then paint round those those bits where we've got a bit of bleed going on there we go let's paint that out and that and again I'm not worried if we've got just a little bit of overspill it's all feathered so barely noticeable let's press o again and let's see what we can do so if I were to push up the exposure all the way you can see that we're really brightening that path and or if we push it all the way to the right that can darken things but what I think we want to do here is actually bryson this just ever so slightly so it balances the brightness of the fog here so let's brighten that up slightly and again increase the clarity because I like all this this little hatched effect we've got going over the wood there and no I'm not gonna bring the blacks down and this I might just push the shadows just so that we don't go too dark around those edges control my highlights a little bit what about contrast yeah I don't want to make it too contrasty because or I would go to all this pattern down here which I don't really like and in fact what I'm going to do I don't like the darkness that we've got on the right-hand side of the path there so I'm just gonna grab another brush and just brighten that up so let's just increase the exposure slightly and paint that in I know you that is pretty down and dirty but that's okay we're just a raise a little bit from stop it here okay I'm happy with that now the great thing with these localized adjustments is you can really fine-tune things so this is too dark in my opinion this particular bit of wood there so I'm just going to drop over a little exposure boost which those shadows whether out just a wee bit happy with that I could even duplicate that same adjustment and now bring that over here to this bit here maybe increase that you can rotate your adjustments as well so what we could do is rotate it to match the angle of the path here there we go that's quite nice and yeah so I'm happy with that at the moment if we look at my original edit I did of this now we can see that around the edges it's much much darker which helps to draw our eye just to this central foggy area here so let's see if we can't do something similar here so let's go back to our original and we can see we are much much brighter than what I'd done originally so let's just see if we can drop the exposure slightly yeah that certainly helps makes it a little more intriguing I think as it gets a bit darker and moodier now I am gonna actually create a vignette around the edge but I'm not gonna use Lightroom's vignette tool I think it really does you a disservice it's good as a quick tool but you really don't have much control so what I think is a much better way to go about it is to actually grab a radial filter you drag out from the middle so we'll drop the exposure let's grab the contrast and part of this part of what we're doing now is basically saying I don't want the eye to go to this area around the outside so darkening that area is one particular tool that we've got to do that but it's just one tool so what else can we do we can reduce contrast that will also help to stop alright go in there we could reduce the clarity so we're softening those edges so I quite like that as well the haze is good but as you saw earlier it creates that lighter foggy effect which I really don't want I mean this this is kind of cool if you wanted this effect of fogginess everywhere in a very dreamlike look to your image and you can get creative with that but that's not what I'm going for here with this particular I might drop it just a little bit yeah let's do that and the whites the whites is something I really want to grab hold of and I'm gonna drop that down now what that's doing currently we've got pure white here if I turn J on again you'll see we've got pure white in the middle bit here but we've also got pure whites right up here at the top right and black and white is about guiding your viewers eye through the use of luminosity throughout the image and your eye will normally go to the brightest part of the image so do we want our viewers eye to go to the top right of the frame no we want our viewers eye to be led here so yes I could reduce the exposure which would deal to that but the best way to do is grab the whites and bring that down and all of a sudden we're graying this area here without losing detail in terms of detail of the leaves and everything we're just graying that area and our focus comes right here and I really like that so if we turn our warnings off again and I will come to our central vignette that we just did if I delete it and then I put it back on we can see that really helps and the image that we've got now is much more akin to that one that I was initially showing you that I worked on I mean they're not identical but they are very very close so one last step that we might want to make is actually straightening this image out you can see from the trees here that they are leaning to the side the wood is leaning to the side then the same here and that's because I'm kind of pointing my camera from a standing viewpoint slightly down so we've got that convergence and that's a really easy fix in Lightroom the fact that we've not got perfect architectural perpendicular lines in this image it doesn't bother me let's have a look at that before and after and see where we've come from so this is our before this is our after as a black and white let's go f2 go fullscreen and there we go and we could say that we are done here I don't think we need to do any more but through the tone curve I just want to show you this because to be honest it's one of the most powerful tools you've got your disposal when you're dealing with black and white so if we wanted to add more contrast what we can do is actually just create an s-curve which is basically taking the top right higher click a point kind of 3/4 of the way down and bring that down and let's if we turn that off and on you can see we're increasing contrast there so for black and white that can be really really powerful and really useful it's not what I'm after for this image and but I am gonna show you something else which is often really useful for if you wanted to create a faded vintage kind of look and let's bring that bottom point which represents the blacks just boost that up so if I take that all the way up you'll see what's happening we're brightening those blacks the whites aren't changing its the blacks that are being boosted and the top right you've got control of the white points if I bring that down we create gray muted effect there so depending on the distribution of the tones and you have control with your tone curve and I like to save this until the because now I can actually just really fine-tune the look I want so let's go for a kind of faded look with this one think if we bring the curve down we'll increase that kind of drama see if I bring it quite far the highlight point becomes less of the whole frame I bring it up we're more highlighted through this whole area whereas I think it's more interesting if we just pull that down and our eye just goes more to this which is quite nice but as shadows are being a little bit washed out here just flattening slightly so let's actually boost a little bit more in these in these deep tones here let's not lose our brightness so let's spring that curve point up slightly so as you can see and you may well know the right half of the curve that's talking to the highlights the left-hand side is talking to the shadows and the blacks right here on this point here so if I bring this back down to the corner you can see we've got our pure blacks back again but I'm actually just wanting to a bleep not bleach them out but just lift those slightly so let's cool that done so we could look at our before and after without the tone curve by toggling this switch here that's how before a very bleached and foggy look put that on and I think we've got a more mystery and intrigue drawing our eye to this area here now depending what kind of a perfectionist you are with your imagery you could either say I'm happy with that I feel that's a really nice black and white conversion or like me you could take things just one step further just to really finesse things and I love a particular plugin I've got which is called luminar I use luminar for so go edit with Lightroom adjustments and click Edit and luminar for starts to load up the reason I bring it into here is just purely there are some tools within luminar for which can give you a certain look that you're just not able to get through Lightroom so one of them is the structure tool I really love the AI structure so let's dive into that might not be appropriate for this because we've tried to create quite a bit of softening but if I if I just slam that slider around you'll see what it's doing I mean you might want to actually decrease the structure slightly to stu enhance that softness but I'm quite liking just reintroducing just a little bit of structure and I feel we're still creating a nice soft ethereal look and but the other tool I mean we could look at vignette for example there's no harm once you're in here just having a little play around so dramatic let's see what dramatic does for us with a black and white so you can see this is not right for this particular image but it is a fantastic addition for some black-and-whites you can really push the drama with that particular tool but leave that where it is the one I wanted to come to is actually mystical because it creates a nice softening of the image but dumb while it's actually also increasing contrast so I really love that if we do go too far with the look let's say we've put quite a bit mystical on we could even add some fog let's put some fog in there and then just mask it in let's say rush it around say the path here just so that we're getting like a bit of a foggy kind of look on the path itself as if the if the fog is low-lying and staying there and now we said do you know what we've gone too far with that we can just come into this layers tab here and just like in Photoshop where you can reduce the opacity of the layer you can do the same with luminar so this is without anything this is with everything and we can just bring that back to somewhere where we feel we're happier with it so let's say somewhere around like 70% yeah I'm happy with that and then you just click done and apply and the image will be exported as a tiff taken back into Lightroom so there we go that's back in Lightroom so if we look up what we've created within Lightroom and then what we just did now it's very subtle between the two so that's in Lightroom a little bit more crunchy and through luminar we just create enhance the contrast and also soften the image all in one so I think that's a win-win if you want to get hold of a copy of luminar by the way there is a link in the description below and you can get a discount with the code at sky 10 providing there's no other promos on at that moment well guys I'm gonna say I'm really happy with that so we've basically come from a color version here to our black and white conversion in Lightroom which in its own on its own I think was a really strong conversion very happy with that and we've just taken it just to that very next level with luminar 4 so I'm very happy with that image and hope you guys have enjoyed following along so if you've learnt something today let me know in the comment give me a bit of appreciation and taking time away from the family so share some love give me a like thumbs up and I will see you in the next video thank you very much guys have a great day bye bye

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 12,934

Keywords: Photography, Photo editing, editing, Lightroom, Photoshop, Post Processing, post production, photography editing, Adobe, Photographer, Photo education, Photography education, landscape photography, black and white, black & white, b&w, anthony turnham

Id: ni7fzOPJzb0

Length: 33min 11sec (1991 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 28 2020