Creative Black and White landscape Photography in Adobe Lightroom

hi everyone and welcome back I'm Alistair Ben and this is expressive photography following on from last week I want to look at processing a very colorful image in black and white in adobe lightroom i will do some comparisons with Nick just to see the type of thing and the image I'm going to be processing is a very famous location on Iceland called Kurt kerfell and I took this photograph about about 10 years ago or so and I remember when I processed it before I used Nick to process it and I'd like to try and do a better job today so we're going to be looking at Aurora's in black and white so what could possibly go wrong [Music] [Music] no the original image as you can see is quite dark it was of course the moon you can just see setting behind the clouds there on the right-hand side so it was quite dark now one of the things I've always struggled with with this image is the light pollution from the nearby town and it creates as quite an orange glow in the water and as we start to increase the exposure generally you can kind of see that there's an awful lot of warmth in these rocks and I would have to start making some fairly significant changes to try and negate that sort of orange Ness of the of the sky of the the light pollution there so when it came to processing this image for some reason I really felt that black and white was the way to go like I said this was about ten years ago and back then as you can see there's no boardwalks there was no paths I camped up here for a week on my own and only saw one other photographer in the entire week so it was a very different situation but I'd already seen a few Aurora photographs over this mountain and when I saw this one I it didn't really resonate with me and for some reason I just creatively decided to go down a black-and-white route and I'm really glad I did because the resultant image kind of raised some heads at the time just because not many people were doing black and white Aurora photographs now quite quickly here I just want to go take this in I'm just going to do a virtual copy so create a virtual copy and we'll do one in Nik we'll do another one in just Adobe Lightroom so if I right click on here and open in Silver Efex Pro the first thing you notice is that you have to convert this into a TI FF file a tiff file so that Nick can deal with it and what that means is is that you're losing the ability to kind of come in and somehow re-edit the colors once you've committed this file in Nick to a black and white you've lost further control to re-edit some of the colors now one of the things I want to discuss first is the use of the color filters back in the day when we were shooting black-and-white film we would use a color filter over the lens either red orange yellow green or blue and that would change the relative luminosity of different colors so if you used green filter on this image what that's going to do is make the green tones brighter and as you can see the whole image opens up because there's a lot of green in it there's also quite a lot of orange and as you can see now that orange wash over the over that hillside there has really come to life now the advantage of using these is first of all you can change luminosity in a way that can be quite hard to use to achieve in other manners because it's it's it's changing all the colors relative to each other whereas if you went straight into the b/w mix you'd have to be very thoughtful about how you're going to change those colors and and this is a very quick and often quite revealing way to process images so I actually quite like the orange filter here it's worth checking them all the red and the yellow and the orange are all going to be similar probably the yellow filter is giving me the that I'm most keen on now back in the day again I used to use presets quite a lot and one of the things with using presets is it saves you having to make any decisions so quite often you would scroll through and have a look at some of the the presets and something like this would always jump out which is the high structure and the reason that jumps out at you is we've known from our previous videos on the compositional consequences of everything we do is that contrast clarity detail all of these things create impact an impact basically makes us engage with the photographs more more subtle subdued processing is less impactful but it's very easy for us to get sucked in and deceived by contrast and impact all of these other ones like underexposed over expose all of these things I just don't see the point in them myself most presets are going to they're going to make big sweeping global changes to contrast and even if you see one you like personally I just don't see the point because it's not creativity so I stopped using presets and Nick quite a long time ago purely because they tend to make too many decisions for you and I wanted to have more creativity what I am going to do is I think I'll just grab the the kind of standard high contrast version and stick a filter on it like a yellow or a orange filter and I'm going to take that back into Lightroom just so we've got kind of a benchmark you know because this is kind of how I would have done it a few years ago well quite a few years ago if however I come into the the color version I want to look at this in a doorway light room using the tools that we have at our disposal and I want to see if I can do a better job these days without having to use any presets now I'm going to stay in color for a short while because I want to reestablish a different tonal relationship so I want to make a nice looking color version first and then I will bring in the black and white so I'm kind of happy enough with the way this is looking I could probably bring in gradient of some description to just start bringing in some changes in luminosity and contrast which as you will know is a big thing for me I don't mind it if the colors get quite saturated because it's going to give the cameras of data to play with and I think that's a good thing right now so generally and quite happy with that I'll just warm up that foreground or touch so generally I'm kind of reasonably happy with that this back top of there I just need to make that feel just a little bit less deter less contrasty so I'll do some black and white converting though and then we can start looking at some dodging and burning to try and pull the thing together a little bit better know the color filters that we just talked about are hidden somewhere not hidden they're here they're hidden in plain sight there's now a profile part of the basic panel that says Adobe color and you can go in and I have made favorites of some of the black-and-white presets really but the only ones I'm using are the blue green yeah orange and red filters now if I come back into the yellow filter this is a similar impact to the one that we just used in Nick and you can vary the amount in this slider up here so the more you push that then the more of an impact that that that has and now I'm seeing a little bit yes okay it's just it was that it's a compression here well it's not it's not a proper Hilo so that that exposure changed there that that sorry black and white conversion is using the yellow filter which is the same one we used in Nick now what we haven't done is applied all that gritty contrast and structure that I did in Nick Silver Efex Pro know this image to me now is too bright for a night shot I want my night photography to feel a bit more like night so I'm just going to darken that down somewhat and then I'm gonna come in and do some local adjustment work to get it looking the way I want it to look and then I'll use another gradient for the front here I think I'll open up my shadows quite a bit in the front I want the front to feel like it's at the front this is a standard thing for me these days is to is to bring depth into the photographs now at the moment the mountains looking a little bit subdued but I'm going to use a brush to do some dodging and burning I'm going to use the auto mask here because I want to make sure that the the the sky doesn't get brightened and I'm just going to increase my whites and maybe a touch of exposure and I can just paint in a little bit of dodging beer because that's going to add a good bit of three dimensionality onto the mountain there at the back and the waterfall isn't overly hot I think I am going to come in with a vignette here zero that effect again and again you'll know from my previous processing I have a tendency to kind of bring in quite a heavy vignette first of all and then take off tones using the range mask and that way we keep our brighter tones and I don't mind the darker tones getting too dark we'll pick them up a touch so we're getting there we're getting there my intention for this photograph was always to crop it down into a four by five because I didn't feel that the moon was necessarily adding anything to the photograph now like I said there's a way know that we can come back in and play around with these tones a little bit more because if I increase the yellow slider that's uh Sri re-engaging read you know adding some more luminosity to those yellow tones now we know the Aurora's green and it's we can balance that luminosity with with the yellows there there was some blue in the sky there behind cut Cavell and that's okay there so realistically i've created a version of this photograph that's somewhat less crazy contrasty if I hit the G key the one that we brought out of Nick is definitely much more explicit and if I take that down to a four by five and crop it in more or less the same place now that's very explicit very in-your-face and if I compare the two then they are very very different but the difference between the one and the right is that I did it all myself I made the luminosity decisions I made the contrast decisions it's far less gritty and kind of over a processed to a certain extent now I can hear y'all scream in which one you probably prefer I'm going to just add another gradient for the sky here and try and just bring out some of the a little bit more in the sky there we go looks a bit more starry now as with any processing what you bring to the table at any given moment is kind of where the image is going to go when you're doing videos like this it's your turn to teach and process at the same time and it's a very unusual and natural thing for me to try and do so I do prefer to process and not talk at the same time but what would larrington this is that we have a bunch of tools in Lightroom that allow us to process black and white images with Komplete Kontrol I've used Nick for many many years and the fact though that you have to buy it as part of DxO has made it kind of expensive it was free for quite a long time when it was given out by Google but basically we're in a situation now where it's another you know quite a large investment to jump into DxO especially when we're already paying for a Lightroom so I just think it's one of those things that if you have DX over then fine if you've got Nick great used it but don't over use it there's a tendency to rely too heavily on presets so what I would always say is learn how to control luminosity contrast and your color management well in Lightroom and you'll have a friend from life because this stuff doesn't go out of style so hopefully you found this useful if so click on that old subscribe button and thumbs up and that's really very kind of you thank you very much what's coming in the week during Wednesday we have the next episode of vision and light when I'll be talking to the incredible Marcel van Huston one of my favorite photographers who's been at the cutting edge of creativity for God it feels like 20 years now so Marcel and I had an amazing conversation again were old friends and it was nice to catch up with him and then next week will be a regular video coming along where we discuss our regular you know processing and creativity and expressive photography so I wish you all well I hope it's doing good thanks for watching and tune in later in the week for my chat with myself Anderson all the best now bye bye [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Expressive Photography

Views: 9,592

Keywords: Lightroom, Photography, Alister Benn, Landscape photography, how to, tutorials, composition, educate, expressive photography, barriers, vision, experience, tutorial, lesson, teach, professional, be better, at, happy, motivation, inspiration, inspire, Luminosity, Processing, Understanding light, Light, engagement, better photographs, landscape, mountains, process, meaning, emotion, personal development, contrast, Transitions, Adobe, black and white, BW mix, BW, black and white photography, Iceland. Aurora

Id: HXQHHRhor3o

Length: 18min 12sec (1092 seconds)

Published: Sun May 17 2020