Black and White Photography - Leica Akademie Webinar

[Music] and here we go another webinar on a on a Wednesday night isn't it somebody type in something in the chat if they can hear me okay should be all working there's gonna I'm gonna be monitoring the chat a little bit yeah I've got Paul verse lares said okay Keith a lady said okay so there's 77 people already joined us which is awesome and as I said in the chat a few minutes ago there's a lot of familiar faces so welcome to those two and people who haven't joined us welcome to you even more so tonight we're going to be talking about what's behind me on the wall and I've just got a new a new background for you rather than that little classroom which was the like two Academy in Germany I've decided to put relevant pictures on my wall so I've carefully framed those prints and hung them on the wall behind me and if you believe that you'll believe anything that's photoshop magic anyway um plot on that one's Michael Kenna Ansel Adams and the one on the end if I just rotate that blocking of you is a regard to your restaurant and I'll be talking about those pictures as we go through the talk um black and white is my favorite genre I would say but it's my least commercial genre so I do this before I do by black and white work purely for the fun of it and I'm going to try and inspire you to if you're not already shooting in black and white or at least shooting in color and converting to black and white at least to consider it I'm going to show you some of my pictures first but then I'm going to show you some inspirational pictures I'm doing my stuff first so that they look better compared to the ones that come after we do the other way around you'll see then I'm going to do a little bit of background into how the black and white process works to do with different proportions of the different colors and how a black and white a color - black and white conversion works and then when we've done that I'm going to just show you two pictures in Lightroom and just show you the the settings that I've used I'll step you through it to go to black and white and show you how to adjust the tone separately from one another so that'll be right at the end so question from ado are you going to share later the recording absolutely all of our wedding all of our webinars are shared on our YouTube channel usually within three or four days a little bit busy at the moment with some of the projects so I'll do it as soon as I possibly can but yes they're all recorded and they're all the previous ones are there - if you want to get back to watch them alright let me just share this if I can get the right screen to share let me just bring I want to bring up my video and then I'm going to share that screen and with a bit of luck you should see a gray screen and now if I click that [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so that's the sort of things that I personally like to shoot and I'm just going to share the just kill that and go to another screen which will be that one there and share that which is there yeah that's you should should be able to see my white slide with the like Academy logo on it hopefully everybody concede that and I'm just going to go through some of these Peaks you know not the pigs I just showed you that's just to get sort of warm you all up a little bit just gonna go through a couple of these images here and I'm just gonna throw this at you okay so this is a bit of an outlier I showed some people this when I did a black and white course in Melbourne mmm will it be last year and how it's amazing how time flies I would say that if I asked if I put a poll up on the screen and I don't have one but if I was to ask the question roughly what year this picture was taken I mean you can have a stab at it in the chat if you like just give me a within four or five years would be good but you can have a rough idea of that picture and when it this vintage anybody want to have a crack of that you can just type it in to 1950 1971 1959 is 17 1968 1964 1968 it's 1957 yeah yeah late 60s early 70s Vietnam War actually no it's not it was taken last year but you were fooled by the style of the shot not only the subject but also the look because it looks gritty and film like that's because it was shot on film it was shot on a like a m3 it was shot on a film set and if you look very very carefully just here you can see a dolly track from a camera this is a movie called Danger Close which was around late last year who was premiered and these stills were shot by my good friend Tim Page who you may know was a Vietnam War photographer and he shot all the movie stills for this movie on his original camera using the same film try X and processed in the same way and to get that authentic look for the behind-the-scenes shots so I just want to throw that out and the point I'm making is that black and white has this nostalgic historical organic feel about it particularly when you actually do shoot on film okay so it's it's got that connection to bygone days but it's also hugely creative in a contemporary sense and we'll come to that in a sec this image will be familiar to most of you I would imagine and if it's not you need to go and look up Ansel Adams this is the photograph that I actually have this on I've got there's two pictures I'll share tonight that are both hanging on the wall of my office above my desk this is one of them I'll tell you the one in a seconds coming up this imaged when I was starting in photography in the early eighties this image epitomized everything I wanted to do in photography epic sublime textured dramatic all of those things and in black and white I went and bought a Hasselblad camera back in the day a film camera because that was at the time the best medium format camera money could buy didn't make any difference I still couldn't do this probably because I lived in Manchester not Yosemite that may have had something to do with it but this image was the inspiration for my career and as I say I have this hanging over my head in my office as inspiration I think it's absolutely astonishing now I'm going to just these are old black-and-white pictures mostly except for a couple which are contemporary I'll point those out in a sec but mostly black and white images are black and white because that's all people have back in the day so there wasn't a choice of shooting color or black and white way way way back and I usually do a little quiz on these when I'm doing it in person but I'm just going to whiz through and just point them out because one thing I would suggest you do if you've either got a notepad handy or just something to jot some names down because most of the people I will be talking about this evening are absolutely worth your while checking out their body of work because they will serve as inspiration to you and I'm a big believer in having your creative juices stirred by people who've done good work particularly based work because the the entry-level to high-end art books is very very high you know publishers don't spend hundreds of thousands of dollars printing a beautiful big book in extra rich black and black you know ink and everything when the work isn't considered to be really excellent so just whizzing through most PM not going to do a little quiz like i say re cartier-bresson so the master of street photography this is robert capa from d-day this is Elliott Erwitt one of his amazing dog add to his dog his book about dogs which I've got a copy of in very humorous Matthew Brady from the second blessing the American Civil War this is surely this is Shackleton leaving Elephant Island in Antarctica contemporary image almost contemporary image this is Mapplethorpe's from Mapplethorpe quite sure how you pronounce it this is lewis hine allegedly now there was some controversy over this picture you've probably seen it before it's published all over the place it's attributed to Lewis Hine but I did have a conversation with a photographer recently and a parent listened out about who took this picture this is Edward Steichen who is one of the first of the rock star photographers who sets the fashion set the pace in New York this is George Roger who founded along with Armand Cartier Bresson and Robert Capa the magnum photo agency this is oh my goodness my mind has blanked out on this one come on I'm just testing you a mum who knows this one I'll move on because my memory of my memory picks up Ansel Adams down here this is Nick Brandt highly recommend looking at Nick ramps work as well Dorothea lands thank you very much Robin wood for that brain fade and this last this last two here this is Richard a burden Donna shingly beautiful work incredibly sensual his black and white work and this one here which you will have seen before his Alfred Eisenstaedt this is V G a day in New York I think so that's 1945 so it's just a there's some other at the background the history but I want to show you some inspirational pictures and these people are people you should look up and check out in detail and study this is the other image of Ansel Adams I have on the wall of my office this image on my screen in front of me this is a Wacom Cintiq screen which is a pretty good screen it does not do justice to the richness of a physical print and I've only got the poster the high quality poster of this I do not have an original print of it like could never afford one of those it looks beautiful here but they even in the poster I've got with extra layers of black ink it's got that luster to it it's quite luminous and there's something about black and white luminosity which is really hard to define but you know it when you see it and I honestly can't tell you exactly what it is about these images which gives him that luminosity he kind of end up with these you know when you see it it's a really tricky one so Ansel Adams so these are some historical images I'll show you some contemporary ones in a sec Karsh the master they past master of portraiture and I've actually found somebody else who is up to this standard and I'll show you his work in a sec he may have heard him you may not have done but Kosh photographed all the celebrities and you can see when I mention rich black and white and this is what I like about black and white the rich tonalities there's a inky blacks and there's beautiful tones those smooth tones that's what I appreciate in good black and white work so these are all shot on film of course because that's what everybody was shooting back in the day contemporary Michael Kenna you may have come across his work shot on film beautiful body of work he works out of the UK I think and his work is quite exquisite I'm not that familiar with his body of work but I do know the name as being one of the well most well respected black and white operators of well certainly the 20th century and and so on so lovely lovely but this is a sort of picture that's heading into modern digital territory isn't it with those super long exposures and you know using strong nd filters and getting the clouds to blur but still amazingly graphic and of course the other thing about it it's a completely real shot it's just happens to be in black and white and just happens to be a long exposure but it's that subject I believe existed at that time in that place so you've got that veracity in the shot still it's not so abstract that you you've lose any sense of connection to it you believe that there's a shot that that place exists so Michael Caine has a good one to check out John Sexton is another beautiful operator he'd I think he teaches workshops in black-and-white printing or he's certainly used to and again he's in that realm of the Ansel Adams of this world when has a great sensibility for tones and black and white is all about tones whether you have a high key image like the top right-hand one or a low key image like the top left-hand one or something in between it's all about the tonality because remember you're throwing away the colour and all that you've got left is shape texture and tone the colour which can be considered a distraction is is all that you're left with and that's what you've got to work with and that's hard to see sometimes this guy Platt on I don't know if anybody has come across him before if anybody's heard of him you might want to make a comment because I kind of knew the name but there was a documentary on I think it's on Netflix there's a series on art and you know like art like architecture and those sorts of things and they featured this guy and he has photographed everybody he's a great guy lives in the States and he does the most astonishing black-and-white work he's currently working shot on film he shoots on like an m6 when he's doing 35 mil style work and there is probably not a single well-known person on the planet he's not photographed I mean we're talking you know Putin we're talking about Obama we're talking a Schwarzenegger as an actor we're talking all of these people in the documentary he was photographing : Powell you know the millipede bed the entire American army back in the Iraq invasion days or so on him he's a really heavy way people beautiful work one interesting thing about his work and he breaks a lot of rules is he photographs people really close with a relatively wide angle lens and you can see Obama's quite extended in his nose and his ears of small he gets right in he gets that sense of personality but have a look at his work there's a book he did called service which was a documentary project about servicemen current American servicemen and their lives and it is just beautiful work it's the sort of thing that makes you want to go and photograph a project in that sort of detail it's just glorious so check him out that's all he just calls himself plot on as his second name I believe but every once what everyone calls him it's very cool having one name isn't it now who's gonna who's gonna hazard a guess as to who this who's this photograph is from anybody gonna hazard a guess at this one yep okay so Paul Vallas felt ID Belisarius got it first to go first done first guy that's all gone Sebastiao Salgado in my mind he is the greatest practitioner of photography in the world at the moment by far he shoots only in black and white digital and it was film before that but everything ends up in black and white and his book Genesis which I lucky to have a copy of is my it's my inspiration for but if I'm feeling a bit sort of lacking in inspiration I will sit down with this book and you open it and it creaks it's huge it's like 500 pages of beautiful printing massive thing and it's full of absolutely uplifting pictures like these these are from Antarctica and if you if you only have to buy one book on photography I would suggest that book would be the ones people places wildlife landscapes beautiful eyes beautiful printing you name it it's just for me that's it you know and this is the book I mean even look at the cover picture on it it's just glorious it really is so if that sort of stuff doesn't get your creative inspiration flowing then I don't know what will awesome yeah a lot of people got that right well done guys co-op got it right and Yardley Krang no eyein Leslie Leslie see our few other people so well done with that okay so now we're all inspired just a little bit of a commentary for me just just briefly and if you want to make some comments on this please feel free I mentioned before this nostalgia this historical aspect so what is it about black and white that inspires people what what is cool about it why do when you do a black and white picture on your phone you get a lot more likes on it it's just seems to be more more appreciated I think people are so used to color that anything that breaks that mold breaks that norm is gonna stand out from the rest it's also fundamentally abstract because it's not if we don't see in black and white we don't think in black and white it's abstracting the color from the real world and what you're left behind is is as I say texture shape and form and tone those three things so you're distilling down the essence of what's in front of you and throwing away what sometimes can be very distracting and that's the color in the subject there's so many images that you shoot where the color is really not helping because you know what skin tones look like you know what blue sky looks like you know what green grass looks like you don't really need to be shown the green grass maybe a tone of gray is sufficient so you can hint at the scene the colors in the scene because we've all assumed so there's that aspect to it so shape and texture only but the last point on this slide is that I think most important one if you those of us who remember photography back even not that long ago maybe 70s 80s you know lust last century you would get your color role of Instamatic film you would take it to the chemist and I think even before then Kodak had this slogan you take the photo we do the rest and what they wanted to do is make the whole thing very simple which is great because up to that point it was really difficult to take photographs he had him a big camera and do your own process in the darkroom and they wanted to what's the word democratize the whole thing which is ironic considering how many people's get taken today you take the photo we do the rest and what that meant was you drop off your little capsule of film at the chemist and you come back in a few days and you've got those little prints and little sexual you had no input into how those images were printed okay oh it was all automated so color photography to me has this association with mechanized and repeatable when you process black and white in the darkroom and you do it in the wet trays every single print is different it has to be you can't possibly make exactly the same print twice and when a print was reproduced it would be made into a plate and then it would be reproduced in some other process okay but the actual print itself was an original which was unique and that aspect of it I think he's still hanging around that sort of that richness that value of the medium still has is still connected to that so it's a hand thing and even when you do black and white conversions yourself to do it well and I'll show you how to do it to do it well you've got to use your hands and your brain you can't just automate it because if you do it looks a bit average surprising enough so it's still got that artisanal feel about it if that makes sense so I hope you'll agree with that if anybody's got any comments on that I'd love to hear them you can you can type in observations if you like into the Q&A and I might share a few of those if they're if they pertinent and pithy and so on so let me just get to a little bit about like a white photography now you knew I'd show you a like a camera sooner or later almost all cameras that are sold today with the exception of two cameras shooting color that's actually not quite true there is it because actually all cameras shooting black and white but the color is added by little color filters on the pixels I'll show you a diagram in them in a minute so you're actually only measuring grayscale values and then you're actually fudging the color which is interesting even though it looks amazingly detailed it's actually a fudge the like a monochrome it's the only small camera on the market there is another medium format camera that does an achromatic back but it's quote I don't know exactly the price but it's sort of $50,000 or something it's very very specialist piece of kit the monochrome is the only other camera on the market which only shoots black and white so if you don't want color this is the camera for you but you got to commit to it obviously so every other camera captures color in some way and the way it works is this so let's compare like a m10 for having to have right here and I don't have a monochrome here but they look very similar if you look at this little diagram these are the photo sites so they're in the m10 as 24 million of those there's an array of six thousand by four thousand on top of each of those and this is very simplified very very simplified in the like a sense that these little color filters are actually domes they're micro lenses because the lens sits very very close to the sensor surface with a wide-angle lens the angle of the light coming out of the lens onto the sensor can be quite a quite tight height angle okay so it has to gather that light in rather than the light coming in a straight line is coming this angle so they're covered a little micro lenses but nevertheless each of those photo sites is filtered for a red blue or green value and you may notice that there's two green for the blue in the red and that's because and I've got some little diagrams in a sec our vision system in the brain and the eye more or less they're kind of connected very base of the ways it's more sensitive to green them to blue or to red that's that's our primary sensing color or wavelength of light so to emulate that the sensor measures the brightness of the green here the brightness of the red here and the brightness of the blue here and those filters eliminate the other colors so it only lets through the blue light the red light the green light so what's happening is each of those photo sites is building up a brightness value of one color only but not three colors only one color okay now with a black and white camera like the monochrome you don't need this so each of these little photo sites is measuring the brightness and that's what black and white is grayscale is purely the luminance or the luminosity and there is a difference between those words and I'm not sure I can explain it exactly but you get the idea the brightness of that particular tone and one of the one of the challenges in going from color to black and white is what grayscale value does that particular color convert to as a go bit darker and it's also very subjective and I'll show you a couple of graphs in a graphics in a minute which will make it clearer but this is how the monochrome works no color filters and this is how all other cameras work some sort of filter system before anybody picks me up on it there is one other sensor style guide the fovea on sensor which never really caught on but it is actually very effective and they have a different structure in the sensor where you actually have the layers like film the red blue green layers it's a different paradigm it does very very good it does very good results in very limited circumstances so I don't want to dwell on that but fundamentally a barrier array is what you get now the big problem is that the blue filter absorbs about three-quarters of the light so you go it drops it back to 25% of the original value so you lose two stops that means that your sensor hoster is limited by that so the sensor is two stops less sensor than it could be so when you use something on the monochrome your sensor is immediately effectively two stops more sensitive to light so you can shoot at two steps higher ISO and get the same or slightly even less noise and even better because it's raw from the camera each pixel is measuring a brightness value it looks very film like in terms of any noise that you get is Kight organic-looking funnily enough and the tonality is very film like so it's a it's a different beast entirely you cannot convert an image to black and white to exactly match what the monochrome gets you can get good it may both can be good but there can't be the same okay so just going to color critic color theory for you I don't want to get too geeky on you because and that would be quite possible at whoops those of you who know me know I can get quite geeky when I want to but I want to introduce the idea of the RGB color channel model which is way the way most software works and when we go into Lightroom this will become important this is a photograph from 1911 by sergei preclude in Gorsky who very clever guy he worked out that if you photograph the same thing three times with three different cutting filters red blue green filter you would get three negatives like this one two and three and if you combine them and printed them with color inks get a color picture how amazing is that nineteen eleven okay now it's pretty obvious to me which filter was on the camera with this shot and which camera which filter was on the camera with this one so I'm gonna ask you which color filter was used for this middle- anybody want to have a stab at that I have to think about it but you have to look at the turnout at sea okay David Bishop says blue knew so that's eliminated one few people have said red yellow is a little closer come on you're missing the obvious one yellow you don't know no Orange no green come on guys so the red filter makes the blue go dark look you see how dark his coat is here and here the blue filter makes his coat look lighter the one that makes it look muddy and a bit dull is always the green filter it's really interesting and in as a broad rule you'll find that the the green captures all the detail the red captures the contrast and the blue is kind of what whoops sorry is what's left over the blue Channel is the least useful but you still be the key thing here is you've got to mix them together to get a color image or mix them together to get a black a white image by blending them okay you wouldn't necessarily pick that one as better than that one or that one you might decide that you need something between and that's why in Photoshop we get this idea of the red green and blue channels and if you've got an image like this with red blue and green 100% brightness you can see that's a pure white all red no blue no green this is the green channel is all green and no blue and no red and so on so we're working in by splitting the image into three different sections that values the grayscale values of blue the grayscale values agree in the grayscale values of red and it's a mixture of those three which give us this illusion of color now this is the worst slide gets better from here believing but I just want to introduce this color model to it because it's very important when we start doing black and white conversions in Lightroom okay with we've just talked about the RGB model and you probably see in your RGB bit values in Lightroom as percentages or in values between 1 and 256 in Photoshop or something like that very hard to adjust the color the brightness and the saturation set correctly when you're using the RGB model there are lots of different what are called color appearance models and it gets really complicated when really quickly but there's fundamentally for which we need to be concerned with and I'll just I'm not going to mention the two I'll just tell you what they are there's RGB there's HSL which is this one there's also CMYK and la B but the other two is a conversation real-time h SL is hue saturation and brightness and if you imagine your colors in a wheel so this is your color wheel that artists use nothing too clever about that and the color is deter is actually expressed in degrees so 60 is yellow 120 years green so that's 120 degrees from there to there red to green 120 degrees from there to there green to blue and 120 from there to there blue to red and these are the mixtures in between and this is light we're talking about not pigments paints don't work like this yeah this is as a subtracted modulus is an additive model works differently so that's your color that's your hue that's the H in HSL the hue red is a hue but you've also got lightness how light is that color you've also got how saturated is that color so it's hue saturation and lightness anything that's defined by three numbers is three-dimensional so you can consider it to be a shape of volume and you end up with this sort of spinning top shape so White's at the top in the middle black is at the bottom in the middle in through the center like a spindle is gray from white to black and then from the center out is the saturation you may wonder why I'm telling you this well the thing is you can adjust these values independently of one another so I can make the Blues darker without making the Greens dark at the same time and this is critical when it comes to a black and white process so I'm just gonna leave that at that point I just want to explain that color can be described it can be converted into number in many different ways and that's a color model RGB is one HSL is the other one and that is where this is how we use the software Lightroom or Photoshop to convert to black and white back in 1810 Goethe as in the poet and the writer Goode who was one of these polymaths who was interested in all sorts of different things he realized that the different colors of the rainbow could be subjectively viewed as brighter than one another even if they were equally intense and he had a stab at quantifying that and he's got it wrong but it was the fact that he had a stab at it which is quite interesting so if you imagine these are values out of ten I think you'll agree that the yellow is the brightest subjectively I don't mean measuring it or using numbers just you look at it and it's brighter like the blue is clearly the darkest even though he says it's a lighter than the magenta I would argue that the green should be over here and the blue should be at the end now the interesting thing is that back in 1980 at 90 1810 people were thinking about these sorts of things the way it really works is this and this is your srgb standard and I put the I've left the colors in the same sequence but the point here is that the green is considerably subjectively brighter than the blue by a lot and so 2171 8 is the srgb standard for the relative brightnesses of those three colors so this is the way we experience those colors so when we go to black and white we need to remember this because we may want to make sure that the greens maintain their subjective brightness and if we equalize them all we end up with just mud that's what happens when you desaturate a picture when you do a grayscale conversion in Photoshop now I know a lot of people in fact I probably most people these days that I'm certainly communicating with these organized don't use Photoshop directly they will use Lightroom or capture one Pro or something and some of the more advanced people will be dabbling in Photoshop this all converse neatly into Photoshop but I'm going to use Lightroom for my demonstration because it's much more approachable but if you were in Photoshop and if you wanted to do a grayscale conversion and you just did it on auto Photoshop would take 30% of the red values 60% to the green values and 10% the blue values so that 10 60 30 ratio is pretty well locked into photo shops black-and-white conversions and that's not what you want to do if we did that we'd get a vanilla conversion but we want to do better than that this is why you don't desaturate because each of these color patches is the same it's they're the different hues but they're the same brightness hundred-percent and they're the same saturation a hundred percent that's the numbers and this goes to show why the numbers don't tell you the whole story so if i desaturate I remove the hue oh yeah I remove the hue but I leave the brightness the same so you end up with no disc difference between these patches if you do a black and white conversion well can you see how they jump from here to here and from here to here is subjectively similar to that transition here and that transition here here's a good one the blue to the magenta that change from there to there is subjectively similar to that so what we're doing here is we're maintaining color contrast it's very very important when you do black and white conversions that you maintain the color contrast and I'll show you a couple of examples so here we go this is a picture from Mongolia that I took a few years ago now and the reason I put this one in is yeah it's a nice picture I like it but it allows me to make a point about color contrast so if you look in this image we've got a yellow wall here in the show you've got a yellow wall here that's quite bright and we've got a blue wall here that's quite bright that dividing line here is only defined by the change of color but it's not defined by the change brightness because if we look at a vanilla black and white conversion that edge has vanished can you see but if we do a occur the right black and white conversion you see how we've maintained the relative brightnesses of the yellow and the blue we've maintained that color contrast here these are choices that you can make in Lightroom with the black and white conversion tool so you can adjust a picture if it looks like this to exaggerate that change of tone and it keeps the shape that much cleaner this image to me looks quite muddy this one here has got some more all to it and is all it's been done is we've Maine we've darkened the blues and we've lightened the yellows or we kept the yellows the same this is why we have to use that HSL color model so we can darken a color without darkening another color so you can be very specific about what you adjust and I'll show you how to do that in a sec if you wonder why I'm looking to the side I'm just making sure that we haven't got any questions to answer so we're and I'm looking at my screen in front of me what's why I'm looking down alright so another good example this is from Indonesia the top one is just generic and it keeps the skin tones roughly the same but can you see how it blends into his hat whereas the bottom one has got a lot more impact now I did ask the question in physical workshops before with this image which people prefer most people prefer that the bottom one but some people prefer the top one because they said it was a bit more realistic I think probably the bottom one's a little bit to emphasize so somewhere in the middle but the thing is skin is red chocolate is red and fire engines are red but they are different brightnesses and saturations so chocolate is a very dark unsaturated red skin tones are a very light unsaturated red and fire engines are a very bright saturated red but they're the same hue so by changing the hue in this picture the oranges in particular I can make his skin go lighter or darker to add impact to the picture that's the only reason I'm doing it two separate tones out but I can do it without changing the neutral tones of his hat or if you see here the different tones in this scarf which is very magenta I could control those differently okay not going to show you how to do all of this but in Photoshop there's at least 11 different ways of doing black-and-white conversions I'm just putting that up there just to get to show you just how how you could overthink this it's not complicated just looks complicated but Lightroom has a really cool tool which allows it do is very very easily with great control and that's what I propose to show you next so just to recap with two more images depending this is one of those little color color charts this is got one here this is what I was it will fold in color chart square tag Macbeth color counts which you can photograph to have you can see that to test our cameras and do all sorts of things and they make good subjects for these sorts of explanations because this is the original this is Photoshop mode grayscale which is a very vanilla way of converting to black and white and can you see how this orange and this teal equal-opportunity color it's this blue color an unsaturated blue there's a big jump from here to here and yet with this grayscale conversion those are very similar tones but when you use the black and white conversion with a red filter setting in Photoshop can you see how it's massively exaggerated that difference there probably too much but this image here is got is quite rich in its broad tones whereas this one is a little bit muddy so it's all mid-tones doesn't have much highlight or shadow and that gives you an idea of how much we can control the overall tonality of our pictures by doing the right adjustments so I'm going to use this picture as an example this is a little Church in Iceland we took an academy group there a few movie must be three years ago now and it actually came up quite well I thought but it also has red blue and green colors in it so it allows me to use it as a nice little demonstration image so let me see question from Jocelyn Edwards further up wherever we got that on is that in chat okay I got it just Lena asked in chat and it's black and white photography more effective with a strong subject matter or do you think black and white can make the subject matter stronger that's a really good question there's this little joke in photography circles that if you can't you don't know what to do with the picture and you can't work the colors and it's just not working converted to black and white or to look awesome and there's some truth in that because what's happening is that you are being confused by the colors in the picture and they're not adding to the picture and it may be that there's too many colors or the colors are not they're just not adding to the image throw them away and try that so to answer the question it's a definite maybe it's black and white more affect you with a strong subject matter I think they both those points work you can absolutely make a subject stronger in black and white after the fact but if you've got a strong subject to begin with that certainly can't hurt so it could go either way and it would very much depend on what you were photographing I think it's a mistake to try and force pictures too much and there is an expression for that which I won't please repeat in polite circles it's polishing things but sometimes you've just got to give up and move on but certainly black and white can rescue an image and I would also make the point that it's very hard to see in black and white and to actually judge at the time of shooting where you want the shot to go and if we got time at the end I might I can show you how you can put your camera into black and white mode so that when you look through the electronic viewfinder of gonna sell to or something you see in black and white it's a big help okay let me just Keith do you deliberately try and find subject matter that is primarily red green and blue in shooting black white no I don't what I'm looking for is rich tones broadly I don't really care what the color is okay I'm looking and I'm specifically looking for strong shapes and strong textures and I'm almost trying to ignore the colors so I'm not looking for the red blue green images the reason I mention that is because it allowed this image allows me to actually strayed the technique better but I would certainly not be looking for images like that I'm looking for strong shapes strong textures and good light and I'm trying to not look at the color at all another question from cars Diller how does the color conversion work with the monochrome is it the straight desaturation model there is no color in the monochrome at all you don't get to convert it already black and white and that's a strength and a weakness because you you worst what you get out of the camera is amazing it doesn't give you the control that I'm about to show you what you can do though is you can put color filters onto the front of the lens so if I put a red filter onto the front of the lens here it makes the images more contrasty and it reduces the blues and it lightens the Reds you can do it with blue filter green filter orange filter red filter and so on but you're what you get is your fixed you can't change it later okay Theo as would you edit black-and-white film or the monochrome in any different way yiii in a very limited sense yes I found with images from the monochrome that's just I haven't done any film processing for such a long time and that is a whole different kettle of fish because you can process film in many many different ways to get more contrast less contrast and all sorts of things but talking about the monochrome I would generally limit my post-processing to contrast and clarity adjustments obviously can't change the color so you're really limited into just pure tonal adjustments nothing more than that so it's it's pretty good straight out of the box the results that you get that's why you use the camera because it's just like shooting film you get one particular black-and-white look and that look happens to be really good if you don't like it then you can change it with the color filter and if you don't like that well maybe you're better off shooting color and doing a conversion later on okay let me press on because what are we doing we're doing a no we good for time we're good we're good so I'm just going to come out of this screen and I'm going to flick to hopefully I'm still sharing and you can see my Lightroom screen here that should look quite good okay I just had a yes from the other room which is good I'm being monitored so this is that image I just showed you and I'm just going to go back to the I'm going to reset it to show you what it looked like originally so there's a couple of things that have been done and I'll just gonna step through this first of all there's a car park and a flagpole that just magically pop back into view I've I've decided with this shot that I want to go with purely that really graphic shape of the church the clouds are dramatic this is um a 60 second exposure using a very strong ND filter on the like ASL using the 18 millimeter super Elm are super wide angle lens so that's why in the original shot it's got that leaning of a backwards thing now the green is a very very dull green there's no real shape little bit of texture in that grass no what the blue sky looks like is blue okay so I'm trying to distill down what it is about this image which makes it look more dramatic so to go back a step that is I've managed to brighten up the church darken the grass and darken the blue of the sky but I've not done it by using the brushes if you wanted to darken the grass you know you might grab a little brush and whoops or big brush and you might try a lot of people when they're beginning they do try to do this they tried to paint round things and it's you you honor hiding to nothing with that because you can't possibly not in Lightroom now in Photoshop you could mask us out but there's a much better way of doing it what I'm trying to do with this shot is I'm trying to control the relationship between the brightness of the blue the brightness of the green and the brightness of the the whites and also the Reds I can divide my picture up into three different ways one way is very simple the top the bottom the middle like a local adjustment that's what brushes do so you know there's an area there's an area I can divide it into highlights mid-tones and shadows that's another way of dividing it the third way of dividing the picture up is by color so in Lightroom you have the ability to use the HSL color model to change the brightness of the different colors independently see you never you don't use a brush because the things that are green will darken anyway it's like that they they mask themselves so let me just show you how that works I'm just going to go back to I've got my reset here I'm not going to do the retouching I'm just going to do the black and white bit actually what I will do I'll do that let me just go back to color I'm just going to reset and I'll do the whole thing I'll do the whole thing let's let's let's do that reset okay so I won't convert the verticals that will take too long the way it works is essentially this you will you will go to the black and white conversion tool here which is the basic panel so this is color if I go to black and white this has now done that 30 60 10 % narak conversion so it's taken 30 percent of the red 10 percent of the blues and 60 percent of the Greens adding up to a hundred percent and it's pretty bland as I hope you can see on your screen it hasn't really doesn't give me the impression I'm looking for which is the church is leaping out of the page on me if you if I go back to color for a sec and I just scroll down here you see HSL that's that hue saturation lightness model I was talking about and staying in color for a minute if I open that up can you see I've got hue saturation luminance or lightness and within these eight sliders here I can adjust well let me just show you luminance blue look I changing the lightness of the blue only if I want to change the grass it's not actually green by the way it's yellow if I move the green slider it will change a little bit but not a lot look if I change the yellow slider much more so I actually need a combination of the two so what I'm doing is I'm darkening the colors independently of each other then when a conversion is made to greyscale those colors become proportionately darker as a grayscale value so rather than go adjust the colors and go back to black or white all you got to do is click the black and white and that changes that panel to black and white and all we've got left is just the luminance because we can't change the hue or the saturation because we've actually just thrown that out in the window so now watch what happens with the Blues look you see how the clouds are starting to pop out beautifully and the yellows and a little bit agreeing and can you see what's going on here I'm now almost at the point where we started and now I can change the Reds which is the roof of the church I'm just going to magnify that up and there's the Reds look so I could darken that down I don't want to go too far I want to maintain that texture you might want it lighter you might want it darker but I think that something like that is looking pretty good that's not far off where we started which is here I've gone a bit further I think with my adjustments so I probably darkened off those greens and those yellows a little bit more and gone really abstract I want to keep a little tiny bit of texture I don't want just a black area here just a black blob that that's never gonna work you have to have something in there but you can really just fiddle around with this to your heart's content but I would also make want to make the point that there's a price that you pay for this anything any any time you're you're stretching the tones in a digital image stretching or darkening or lightening whatever you will eventually run into a limit and and one limit you will find with this if I can force it to do it yeah there can you see that white line around the outside of the the roof there is because if you imagine the pixels in fact I can show you in I go hugely into here go back to color for a sec back to color red to blue at some point the pixel has to transition through gray and there's a gray transition blurred area there now that's neither red nor blue so if you darken the blue too much I'll just do that now you will reveal that gray look and you can see this yeah I don't if you can see that on your screens but that's cannot really noisy unfortunately the in digital cameras the blue channel is the noisiest Channel this is just it just is it's kind of the junk channel so if you exaggerate your blues too much by darken them you will at some point come into some sorts of artifacting some sort of digital noise so you've got to be a little bit careful with it there are some photos much more advanced photoshop techniques which do talk about in my face-to-face class because we have six hours talk about it but you have to have quite a knowledge of photoshop for to make sense where you can actually go further with these adjustments without running into noise but it's it's it's a bit obscure so all I'm really saying here is just be a little bit careful that you don't push these sliders around too far and just make sure that you're not getting awkward little halos and you can even see now I've got that little edge there now that's massively magnified if I go to back to one to one it should be pretty much invisible and it will look just like a sharpening line so it should be okay I just want to make that point something else I would also like to show you which makes this whole thing a lot easier is if I just go back to the fit I told you that the grass is more yellow than green well it's actually a bit of both isn't it I've got to use both sliders how do you know which one to use well you can slide the slider to see what happens because this is lightroom you can't break anything okay you can always reset everything and if you want to by the way reset all of these back to zero if you just double click on the word black-and-white it will reset them all to zero so very handy little learned way of working but can you see this little tiny spot here which is not labeled thank you Adobe if I hover my mouse over it it should come up with black and white mix by dragging in the photo so this is where I sit one of those little tools that you can drag off and you see I've got a different cursor now what happens now is that if I click anywhere in the image it samples the underlying color behind the black and white and adjusts by clicking and dragging up and down so what I'm doing here with these greens is I'm clicking my mouse button holding it down and dragging up and down and it'll vanish but watch the sliders of them I'm dragging up and I'm dragging down I'm dragging up and I'm dragging down so it's sampling those colors but more accurately than my I can do so then the blues up and down up and down and now whip and then the Reds up and down up and down there is much much easier than sliding the sliders because you can also look at the image why is he doing it who cares what the sliders are doing it's what the picture looks like that's the important thing and it's not I mean these numbers are meaningless they're just relative values that you know 20-watt I don't care is is it enough does it look good that's the key so that's a really cool way to work okey okey any more questions nope and okay so for the last five minutes I'm just gonna go to another picture which is this one here this is a picture I took in Myanmar last year it was last year I've been twice so it was one of the trips in the low when the previous year as well and we visited this gentleman twice so I've got two sets of pictures of him this is another this is me trying to head into that Salgado style of rich black and white with people I mean I'm not getting close but still I'm happy with the picture if I reset this you might be surprised to see how the tones changed dramatically and can you see how he just doesn't stand out anywhere near as much as it did before that's because I've done a couple of things and I'll show you the settings that I've used first of all it's got a vignette around the outside which darkens the edges and holds your eye in the shot second thing I've done is I've used the brush and this is one of the unusual this is one of the few times I use brushes because I couldn't really do this anywhere any other way if you are familiar with Lightroom I select a brush and you see there's a little under my little finger that there's a little spot and if I hover my mouse over it it reveals the area of the adjustment and I can activate it by clicking on it so I've now activated this pin and you can see how I've taken down the highlights look not the exposure because that darkens everything equally I've taken down the highlights which keeps the contrast but stops that distraction in the background and then in the black-and-white all I've done it's pretty much the same as before I've oh I did the one thing one thing I've done before I do the black and white these sliders I've darkened the whole picture down as well so if I go back to my basic panel look okay I haven't done that one yet I'll do it now i'ma darken it down then back to the black and white and I'm going to counter my darkening of the whole picture by lightening the oranges and the Reds because his robe is a deep magenta red color so I don't you see what I've done here look I move these back see the oranges are popping up and the overall picture is quite dull now but now I can lighten it and reveal his skin tones and I can reveal his robe look at his robe I just magnified that as the skin tones the orange and the fact that it's warm light landing on him so this was lit with artificial light so it's actually like a spotlight and then the red of his robe is being affected by that of course I could have used it using the targeted adjustment tool but just for the purposes of this I'll do it that way and now you've got a situation where he stands out much much much better than he did before and I haven't I've only used the brush briefly just to remove these highlights here everything else I did was purely tonal adjustments in black and white okay so I hope that you can see how unbelievably powerful this adjustment is in Lightroom change to black and white in the basic module and then you're changing the relative grayscale values of the colors so you're choosing what particular value of red that color changes to now the downside is that these are global adjustments so you have to adjust all of the reds in the picture equally or all of the Blues if you want to be more sophisticated and change it to different parts of the picture you would have to use Photoshop and layer masks and things like that it's completely possible but Photoshop doesn't offer those tools now um I would like to offer the year the opportunity to ask some questions we've gone through the hour and then the last 15 minutes we normally I normally field questions so more than happy to do that so if anybody wants to type in any questions I will see them here Leslie C I hope I'm saying your name right C are Nick what are your personal views about split toning in black and white photographs okay good question and I do that and I will show you how I do that in fact if you look here in Lightroom you'll see this is a split tone photograph so well spotted this is the spec toning tool and if I turn it off and there's a little on these panels there's a little on/off button in the top left hand corner and can you see how it's going it's it should be reasonably mutual on your screen it's I don't know how your screen setup it's it depends it should now have gone a little bit on the orange e red side like a sepia tone this particular tool in Lightroom allows you to set a hue for the highlights and a hue for the shadows separately now you may notice that they're the same that's because I want to use this as an overall sepia tint that you can't there's no white balance to change here because it's black and white image so we can tint the picture in this way the split tone that Leslie's referring to is when you actually tint the shadows different color and the two colors are usually I use and you can write this down or watch the video later r35 which is a a warm orange not red not a yellow except it's an orange color which is just to me the rights of the sepia tone 35 and 240 which is precisely blue it's not slightly magenta blue it's not slightly cyan II blue it's exactly blue so you remember those numbers and you can make a preset as well then you change the saturation of those shadows and the hoops are good and you can balance them as well between the two so I can make the highlights warmer you can see it's only the highlights that are being warned or only the shadows or some mixture of the two and one of the classic and you can do this in color too by the way because if you have you heard of what's called the orange and teal look in movie grading very very common technique in movie grading is orange and teal teal for the shadows orange for the highlights makes it more three-dimensional and you can do that in your color pictures it's the idea is that warm colors come forward blue to recede so skin tones come out of the screen and you and shadows go back and it makes three dimensional it's an optical illusion course but it's something you could do and you can do that here so I've gone with the same hue in the shadows and the highlights because I want the whole picture to be tinted a little bit not too much I find that I've got a little preset that's sort of thirty five and ten and that gives me that slightly old-fashioned look to it so a great question thanks Leslie okay looks a bit like selenium toning rather than black white you've got over on the left hand side you do have these presets now I'm not a huge fan because they're kind of blunt instruments you I mean you really shouldn't be combining these with thee with this it's like take the picture leave it alone maybe adjust it so it looks reasonable and then do use one of the presets and as you move your mouse across you can get an idea of what they look like and you've got these creative ones as well but I would rather make my own adjustments but that's just me feel free to play with those and you can get plug-ins for this I think Nick Nick software and if I forget who owns them these days they keep being sold different people they do a what's it called yeah there's a black and white conversion thing that they do which apparently is really good I did look at it once and I found it made the Blues really noisy like I want you before I find I get the results I want this way so I'm happy with that can at Lightroom retain the black and white adjustments when you switch back to color okay let's have a look I can write so it's there's two adjustments there go back to color now they won't be there when I go to the HSL slider those will be neutral but if I go back to the black and white and then back down to here yep they're still there so Lightroom is very clever like that silver effects Thank You Simon and Radha hi Simon yes silver effects so if you want to play with that then you feel free and again I'm those of you who've heard me before now I'm not terribly keen on automated solutions a black box thing where you sort of your slide sliders around but you're not exactly sure what's going on with this you if you've understand what I've said you'll know exactly what you're doing I'm making the oranges dark I'm making the resdac that's they all must do that same same thing the only thing that the plugins can do that Lightroom can't do is add a film grade to emulate an old film like a specific that my try xhp five or something my room can't do that very well so those tones have been analyzed and the grain structures been analyzed and that you can make your picture look like that if that's what you want to do then those plugins are great personally I'm I don't do that but if I did maybe I'd look that way ok anyone is my miss some questions here we go there we go Margaret Wilson hi Margaret I think I've answered that one the sepia tone in lightroom richard smith silver effects Thank You William Vickers hi William is it true that most of kappa's detail is it true that most of Kappas d-date images were destroyed in the lab processing and that the famous somewhat fuzzy image you showed was one of the few that could be saved absolutely true maybe there has been some controversy around that in recent years I will leave that up to you to research but they the story that we were brought up with in my early days was that yes the film was rushed back to the lab and they turned the heater up in the drying cabinet and the emulsion melted off the film and there were only I think 11 usable negatives and I believe that part of the picture as to the subject matter it's another story but there has been some research done by some people saying that that story may not be entirely completely true but I don't really want to speculate on that but certainly the story you've heard is that so it was amazing mmm does anybody in Australia stock Ansel Adams originals now don't think so you'd have to ask around the art galleries you can get them from the Ansel Adams gallery in Yosemite and there's a gallery in the park where they do sell prints you won't be able to get the Ansel Adams prints because they are the ones that I was very lucky in it states once who entered Napa Valley in one of the wineries although that was the champagne mum where they met the champagne they had an exhibition there of his exhibition prints which means they're not signed they're not numbered but they were the ones which we used for his exhibitions and they are owned by the family and they are probably literally priceless you can buy signed prints in the Ansel Adams gallery in the States you'll pay somewhere upwards of $10,000 depending on which one it is and you can they sometimes pop up on eBay - and if you can trust that so but as far as I know I don't have anybody who sells them in Australia unfortunately another question by John further up if you shoot black-and-white and scanning process in Lightroom the process is completely different yes because you've only got the black and white tones to work with or you can work with this contrast and clarity and things like that because you've all you've got open remember you've thrown the color out already even only you've only captured black and white or grayscale like the monochrome camera does you at that point you have ignored the colour so past that point you can't change the things I've showed you like you couldn't do what I've showed you on in this image here okay I'm just gonna stop my share now so you can see see me hopefully you can see me there so now yes you can't do that alright I think that's everybody just going on there we go another couple here Vincent if how good are the auto settings in Lightroom or any other software my advice today will be to try and see because there's no right answer here if you have your own tastes you have your own preferences and if the auto bus were okay fine it's not a bad starting point if it doesn't work then remember you can always adjust it further you're not locked into it so give it a go and if you like it why not Jan the processing librarians could be different use kalmyk and white film okay we answer that one J hi J like M 10 images in Lightroom to create black and white versus a like a monochrome image in Lightroom is there a difference in output yes you cannot emulate the monochrome exactly you can get excellent black and white results out of an m10 you can get excellent results out of a monochrome but they will not be the same the tonality and the the granularity if it's you have to see it you have to see a print you can't even really see on the screen sometimes but there is a richness and an atonality to the monochrome which is not possible when you're capturing only a third of the color information with a Bayer filter it's just not possible so yeah I guess that you can get brilliant black and white prints LOM 10 but you can't get the same as you get out of the the monochrome it's like trying to fudge a film look you can get it looking close but it's never the same one of the main reasons there is that film is a negative and digital cameras have positive from the two are so fundamentally different that there's not much overlap but I'm certainly you can't match the monochrome to the m10 so basically can you make an m10 look like a monochrome no you'll have to buy both ok last couple of questions and then we're going to call it quits Ken Wang wants to know could you show settings for black-and-white view in SL yes of course can I my beautiful assistant bring me my like a SL please it's on my desk I'll go and copy now there it is here comes the camera thank you very much sorry there goes the dog okay now I can't show I can't dial in my little camera over my head at the moment to show you this but I'll describe it to you and let me just get my it's it's actually a little bit obscure I'll just discover you go into menus and you want it you're looking for JPEG settings now even if you're shooting raw you want the JPEG settings go to JPEG settings go to JPEG go to film style then the bottom you've got two black-and-white modes one called monochrome monochrome monochrome and one called monochrome height contrast and that's an emulation of a red filter and if you do that and you then trigger it you will see if you can see that but on the back of the camera it's black and white not color and that means that when you're looking to the viewfinder or on the back you're seeing what the camera seeing in black and white when you shoot raw plus JPEG you get a color raw file and a black and white JPEG so you can have both at the same time really really cool okay John likes that one okay lust lust - okay lost it there I gotta go in your opinion is a film print superior to a digital print for monochrome would or could you tell they're different looking at those plate platen pictures I love the fact that it's film and I love the grain in it I love the organic nature of it you can make a digital image look like that maybe that's deceitful maybe that's just a style I don't know I think this is where the artist in you has to make a decision and stand by it it's not up for me it's not for me to say if you like it you like it and that's it you know last question Larissa Cortez is like a considering conducting courses in ion it's just disappeared in Brisbane look we used to we used to do those we have had so like academies going been going four or five years and we used to do courses in Brisbane regularly in in you stead but we just had a falling off of interest and it just became an economic to do it so when we get back to our regular schedule they'll probably be still in Sydney in Melbourne however maybe we should try and see I've had that question a couple of time but we need you know six seven eight people to book in and it proved to be you know not viable so and unfortunately okay everybody um thank you so much for taking part I hope there is something there that inspires you to leap out of the door in the morning and set your camera to black and white and go and do some Salgado style images this recording will be available in the next few days if you want to get back over it again and make some notes on the photographer's work that I showed you next week we have an online workshop on which is the smaller ones which is on lenses and Composition the week after that we're doing a Q&A with Craig Sumiko who came last year street photographer fabulous guy we'll have a conversation show you his work and after that we're doing another online workshop on how to get a perfect exposure setting the camera up and interpreting the controls so those are all on the like Rick Adam II website have a look at those maybe I'll see you at those so thank you very much for your attention I will talk to you again no doubt and I'll just put up our screen of our website in case you want to see that you

Channel: Leica Camera Australia

Views: 69,765

Rating: 4.8761907 out of 5

Keywords: B+W, B&W, Black and white, monochrome, leica monochrom, leica, photography, greyscale, salgado, ansel adams, platon, karsh, michael kenna, john sexton, adobe lightroom, lightroom

Id: RIwqOxWZJe4

Length: 76min 46sec (4606 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020