FINE ART ARCHITECTURE PHOTOGRAPHY - Editing Tutorial - 7 Step Workflow for Black and White Mastery!

[Music] ah this morning i've just woken up and i said to myself yesterday and the day before and the day before that i am going to do a video today if it kills me and right now i feel like that's a very real possibility let me get my coffee so i'm back with my coffee i'm feeling much happier already but i can't get any work done like this so let me sort myself out and let's get down to today's video which is how to edit black and white fine art architectural photography let's do it roll the intro so why did i start the video with the just woken up rather embarrassing state i was in well stick around to the end because i've had a really interesting realization i'll share that with you but for now we're talking about fine art architectural photography editing when i started my architectural photography instagram feed it showcased a more commercial style of editing and more recently i've moved into what i prefer which is really high contrast black and white punchy graphic kind of look and if that style of architectural photography is something that appeals to you as well then go ahead follow my account but in this video i'm going to share with you my process and how i'm creating these kind of images so we're going to kick things off in lightroom and then move into doing most of the work in photoshop and if you want to crank your creativity to that absolute next level then stay with me to the end because i'll just walk you through what you can do just to really give your images just that extra wow factor so let me give you the basic concept of how this works using selections of different areas of the architecture we're going to re-sculpt the image using brightness values so we're enhancing the highlights dropping down the shadows and really giving some fantastic form to the architecture once you've got your selections made and you understand the process of how we're brightening and darkening things it's really up to you exactly how you sculpt your own personalized vision of what you want your image to be like but i really prefer a low-key look where the highlights just really stand out they're much more minimal but they stand out pop and really cool for the viewers attention so the first thing we're going to do is use lightroom to create a really great base layer from there we're going to take things into photoshop and here we're going to make selections so that we can control the brightness values of the facades of the building the third step will be our black and white conversion and then the fourth step is the fun bit where we get to use those selections we previously made along with curves where we can brighten and darken different panels and really start to sculpt the look of the image that we want the fifth part of the process just involves making global adjustments and normally that will be increasing the contrast even more but on a global scale now you can stop exactly there but i like to take things to a sixth step and that is taking it into luminar and just pushing the creative boundaries really and playing around with a lot of those ai filters that are in there because sometimes you can discover a look or a direction that you're taking the photo that you hadn't even thought of in photoshop and the very last thing that you can do is the seventh thing which is just add a light vignette just in case you've got any bright areas around the edge of the frame because your eye will always go to bright areas in the photo and that's a concept that we are using to draw people's attention into the photo if you've got those bright bits around the edge you need to control those so that's step seven and when you're done with that we're good to go although this is a photo editing tutorial and demonstration let me briefly talk to you on actually capturing the architecture itself for this type of fine art kind of look ideally you want to have a long exposure you want to be capturing movement within the clouds you want to get a lot of sky and in order to do that you'll need a tripod and an nd filter neutral density filter maybe a 10 stop basically something that's going to allow you to keep your shutter open for about 30 seconds that's what i like to go for but it depends how quickly the clouds are moving and what effect exactly you are after now one caveat i photographed this particular shot whilst i was traveling in warsaw i did not have a tripod with me so unfortunately i wasn't able to capture that beautiful movement in the clouds however that was my artistic intention and vision so i am going to composite one of my other skies with long exposure into this image now if you're a photography purist and you don't like that idea i'm sorry just skip past that step but stick with the rest of the processing hopefully you'll learn something and hopefully you'll enjoy seeing what i come up with let's get into lightroom guys so here we are inside my architectural travel catalog and the image we'll work on will be this one here and currently this is absolutely straight out of camera no editing whatsoever so the first thing i'd like to do is change my profile to a camera matching profile and i like to use something either neutral or flat neutral is a good option by sticking with something that's not too punchy we get to keep quite a lot of that dynamic range in the image now i mentioned before that i wasn't very happy with the sky in this shot and i would have loved to have had a long exposure to capture movement in these clouds so this will be removed so i'm not worried about the fact that we're bleaching out to white here so let's put our white warning on anyway just while we're making adjustments and we can actually focus rather than down here but actually on the building itself so we're going to boost the exposure slightly protect the highlights bring the shadows up this is normally a good thing to do if you're wanting to increase the dynamic range of your photo we can actually start bringing the whites up i mean we can push this quite far before we start to get any warnings on the building itself we just really want to make sure that we have a good range of depth in this image i don't have my warnings on here so let me turn those on and i can see that the blacks are just clipping out there so let's bring that back if we add a little bit of clarity that will certainly help us with a nice punchy image let's go with something like that and now we're clipping those blacks again so we'll just bring those back up the dehaze slider can sometimes help us with this nice punchy look to our image but we don't want to add too much of that and i'll just jump into the tone curve and i may just bring the mid tones up ever so slightly and i'm pretty happy with that as a starting point one thing we do want to make sure in our lens correction is that we have chromatic aberration removed and we also enable the profile correction so if i turn that off and on you'll see that the barrel distortion is present in that particular lens i'm using is gone so thank you lightroom profiling that's great if we feel that we're getting a little bit too bright over on this side what we can do is just introduce a linear filter which will just bring the exposure just down ever so slightly and just drag that across and we could bring the highlights down slightly as well and for our lightroom component i'm pretty happy with that so now all we need to do is right click and go to edit in and open a smart object in photoshop so here we are in photoshop and we have our fully editable layer here it's still got all its raw properties which means it's non-destructive and that's great but the second thing we want to do in our process now is actually make a whole series of selections now buildings lend themselves really nicely to the pen tool because everything is nice and straight so if we were wanting to make a selection with the pen tool we would just be clicking along the path that we want to make and i'm not going to go around this whole thing because it is very time consuming and you guys don't need to see that but let's just say that this is my selection here and we come into paths and what we do is we just control click on that path and now we have that as a selection so if i press ctrl and d that deselects that and i'm just going to throw that work path away but you'll see that i have already used the pen tool to actually go around the whole building nicely there and this central column here and the two sides now i've gone over here and that doesn't matter because i've actually used a combination of let's say this here and the outline of this building where i subtract one from the other to create all my different channels so just to quickly show you these selections we've got a building outline that includes all the buildings and i've got a middle only because i'm going to be replacing the sky i really don't want this little nubby here because the symmetry of this i feel is ruined by this little extension of a building here so we're actually going to get rid of that but as i move down these alpha channels here which effectively are just selections you can see that i've got each and every facade of this building selectable so any one of these that i want to select i just press the control key and i select them you can also find them accessible via the select drop down box and you can load the selection that way and as long as you've called them an appropriate name they're nice and easy to see there but i prefer to use the channels because i can actually visualize exactly what these are and i don't need to worry about the name so much i like to make my selections whilst my image is still in color just in case let's say we have a pure blue sky that may actually aid us in our selection we can select by color and that option is obviously not on the table if it's already a black and white image so now it's time to move on to step three which is the black and white conversion so i'm just going to come down to adjustment layers here and i'm going to select black and white if i take the blues to the right hand side and you look at the left column here that looks really nice for the windows we're getting a lot of contrast in there but if we push it too far i just find that this central column gets a little bit too flat looking whereas if we take it to the left it has more three dimensionality so what we can actually do is have the best of both worlds so let's make this how we might want it for the right hand side of the image i don't think these other sliders are really going to do anything for us in this particular instance let's get our gradient tool and we're just going to draw a gradient so we're just going to mask that out so currently we only have that effect that we've created over this side of the image now i'm just going to duplicate this layer by pulling it down and delete the layer mask now we have our whole image black and white again but this time now we can talk directly into that left hand side of the image and that allows us to get that contrast back in the windows here i feel like we're getting a little too bright in this panel of windows here so i can just come to our previous black and white conversion get a brush reduce the size of it using my bracket keys and with white just paint back in on that area there nice i mentioned i was going to replace the sky in this image so this is a bit of a bonus step and normally you'd capture this right in camera but i didn't i bodged so let's introduce a new sky so i'll come to file open i'll come into my skies for compositing and just choose this long exposure sky could have just placed that in but i didn't so what i'll do is use the move tool and hold shift as i add it and that will constrain it to the center of the image now it's just giving me a warning about having a different color profile but i'm not too worried about that given that we are dealing with black and white now all i need to do is just mask out the building so let's come to our channels and let's select the building there come back to our layers and we're going to add a mask and just like that we have a masked building but oh no it's back to front so all we need to do with the mask selected is just press ctrl i to invert the mask easy as that now for the next step which i really enjoy which is sculpting the building guys this type of fine art approach to processing architectural photography is something that i haven't shared before so if you're finding benefit in this and you'll find it useful do me a favor give me a like and if you want to see more kind of content like this subscribe to the channel and if you've got any questions as well leave them in the comments because i always do my best to get back to you with an answer so let's keep going guys so now let's start sculpting our image let's come to the top of the stack and let's add a curve and we're going to drop this curve down so it's nice and dark real punchy maybe a bit more contrast and now what we're going to do is come to our channels and select the areas that we'd like to apply that to and i would like to add it to the brickwork just off to the side of the center column and potentially the other side as well so if i hold ctrl shift and click on either one of those that's adding to my selection i come back to layers and i fill these with black and then invert this and i really like that let's have a look at our before and after already we have a sense of more three dimensionality i want our attention more on this right hand side so i also want to darken off this side as well so i'm going to get the gradient tool i'm going to make my selection come back to layers and now i can either draw that gradient across just darken that side off or i can paint it in now if i select the center column i can actually darken off the left hand side of that so let's select the center column and i'm actually just going to paint with this and i'm just doing this with my mouse i do have a wacom tablet that i often use but for this example i'm just going to show to you guys that it's quite possible to do all of this just with a mouse if you feel like you've gone too far with it you can change your brush around by pressing the x key and reduce the size of your brush with the left bracket key and just paint the effect away again okay now in the same way that we've darkened certain areas of this image we can also lighten areas up so if we deselect that and we come and add a new curve in this one we're going to push upwards and so that's brightening and what i might do is just pull the highlights down just a little bit just so we're protecting them and if i press alt and delete that's going to fill with my foreground color which is black and if i want i can just repaint that particular effect in where i want it so again i'm going to come to the center column here and select that and i'm just going to start painting it on the right hand side so i'm going to switch to white and i'm going to paint down and that is just going to brighten everything up over here and as i'm painting down this column yes i fully realize that the clouds that are reflected here belie the fact that we have a soft motion of cloud here i could correct that but for the sake of speed and demonstration purposes in this tutorial i'm not going to now let's select the whole building and let's see if we can't paint a little brightness into the top of this area here and this area as well just so that we have a little transition from dark at the bottom to light at the top and while we have this selected as well i think we're going to add some more contrast to the top and that's just going to help our eye lead up towards that very top of the building so this s-curve that creates a lot of contrast that's obviously too much but i just wanted to demonstrate that is the curve that you want you want the top right hand side to go up and bottom left hand side to drop down so if i hide that you'll see pretty flat adding contrast and now what we'll do is we'll take a gradient filter again we'll use the linear gradient and we'll switch to black so we're going from black to transparent we'll push it all the way to 100 and as i bring this up from the bottom to the top i hold the shift key so that constrains it to 90 degrees and you can see that we've just added a bit more contrast to that top part of the image and the next thing i'd like to do is actually just work on the sky a little bit so if i come back down to where the sky layer is and we're just going to add another curve just on here if i pull that all the way down you'll see that we're affecting the whole image so what we need to do is say to this particular curve adjustment please just talk to the sky so we're using manners because the layers care and we hold the alt key and when you hover between the two layers that turns into this little arrow click that and we've just created a clipping mask that's called and that's great because that gives us the control if we wanted to push things out to a brighter sky we could if we want to darken things down we can and as i said to you earlier my preference for these kind of images is to have a little more drama have things a little low-key and so i'm happy pushing this more into the realms of darkness this guy and if you feel like you don't want that over the whole sky you can paint it away over areas so i'm just going to paint the mask just a little bit over here because i felt like it was just a little bit too dark a little too strong just around the building itself yep i'm pretty happy with that as things start to take shape you can go in and just refine things using those masks that's the really great thing about having already created them is that you can come in and just tweak things to your liking so i feel like this is just a little bit too bright on this side here so i'm actually going to bring in another curve and just darken that down slightly so that's darkened it down and added some contrast but i'm going to add another curves layer and this time i'm just going to bring the highlights down and i'm going to use that just for the bottom part here so if i fill this with black that mask is going to be concealed re-select that side of the building and paint that back in a bit of white over there so it just dulls down that brightness that was there on that part so what i'd like to do is just group all of those adjustments we made and we can turn the eyeball off and on and you can see what a mark difference that makes and that really is the heart of this kind of processing is controlling the brightness values of different planes of the architecture from here we can make a global contrast adjustment things already pretty dark but as i said i really want to create a very low-key kind of image so we can actually crush these down even further we could go pretty extreme with this you can get quite precise with your tone curve if you want to so that was our before and that was our after one more thing that can really help is just to add a vignette and we can do that with curves again and that is basically bringing down this bright point on the right hand side so the right hand side represents all the bright pixels and we're just going to grab the point and bring it down and we're going to bring it down quite aggressively sort of 50 percent maybe just boost the shadows ever so slightly so things don't get too dark down there and now using a radial gradient we can fill that with black in the center so that's hiding this effect from the center where i've placed this or sorry i'm saying the center the top of the building and drag down to the corner of the image release and now we've got a vignette that's controlling these very very bright areas and you can refine that by painting black so that you're in control of that vignette really nicely and it's just darkening down the brights that were around the edge of the image if i just sort of point out around here we had really bright highlights a really bright highlight here and just by introducing this vignette we've just kicked that back just a little bit and our eye goes much more to this area within the image which is what i was saying at the beginning you want to control the viewer's eye okay and now we're in luminar and the fun begins so i can play around with all sorts of stuff in here exposure smart contrast there are so many great tools let's see what ai accent will do for us so that's just introducing just a little bit more contrast through the image so localized contrast let's go with structure as well let's see what that's doing for us see structure is such a good tool especially for architecture so let's have some of that we are going to add a vignette but for now let's come into the creative section and let's see what adding a bit of dramatic does oh yeah look always push these tools right the way to 100 just to see what they're doing and because they are so strong then just ease them back to a point where you're happy with them even though we've created a strong black and white if you wanted to have matte look you could introduce a matte look to your image not really doing it for me in this one but i do always like a little bit of mystical it just seems to soften things up just to that point where you've introduced a lot of hard edges through those other filters mystical kind of creates a softer look over the top of it so you get the best of both worlds so if we look at our before and after it's just giving us a little bit more punch but it's still a really nice look and i'm going to come back to the essentials tab and just add that vignette so to start with let's just push that down quite heavily and let's bring the size in and from here let's work with the advanced settings so we've got the roundness option and i think we want to go quite far to the right with that and now we can just feather things off we can now use the eye tool just to see our before and after and you can see that what we've done is very very subtle indeed but i i like that it's more dramatic creating things in luminar is just a lot of fun i'm going to leave that there and say i'm happy with this as you can see we've come a long way from our initial in-camera capture now you can do pretty much everything i did all with inside of photoshop you don't need lightroom to do that pre-edit you can do that with inside adobe camera raw and equally you can stop at the sixth step you don't need to take it into luminar but personally i enjoy that just takes your imagery just to that next level and i know that luminar has come to my rescue on several occasions from a professional point of view with sky replacement and stuff like that so um if you guys don't have a copy of luminar and would like to have one i have a discount code which is at sky10 and that really helps me out with the channel because you guys get to save some money and i get a small commission from luminar as well which helps me keep creating these kind of videos as i said if you have any questions please leave them in the comments and i'll be happy to answer them for you now speaking of comments we've come full circle i was left a really stink comment the other day it was real nasty saying oh really great information shame you you're really boring and no personality that actually like hurt quite bad and i thought oh man that's so unkind but the more i mold on it the more i thought maybe he's got a point maybe i'm not putting enough of my own personality into my video and so i thought i've got to stop censoring myself just get myself on camera and the first thing i did this morning when my eyes opened i said i'm gonna go and press record on that camera and i'm getting something on video stop censoring myself just put more of me out there to you guys so i hope you like it leave me a comment but not a nasty one it just hurts just leave me nice comments i'm doing this for free for fun for you guys leave me nice comments okay cheers thank you very much and i'll catch you in the next one

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 21,118

Keywords: Photography, Photo editing, editing, Lightroom, Photoshop, Post Processing, post production, photography editing, Adobe, Photographer, Photo education, Photography education, landscape photography, HDR, architecture photography, architectural photography

Id: qTf1A23JlFs

Length: 24min 54sec (1494 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020