FOOLPROOF 4 Step Black and White Photos!

so let's talk about black and white photography but more importantly how to make better black and white photographs through the use of your colors yes your colors are actually the most important value that you have in creating the tones that you want in your black and white images [Music] hey everybody blake rudis here with f64academy.com where we learned to master photoshop to make better photographs f64 academy is photoshop for photographers and today we're going to be talking about black and white photography so what i'm going to show you today is just a little bit of history as to what black and white method is best for black and white processing i'm going to show you why color is so important for making your black and white images and then i'm going to wrap it all up and show you my four step processes very simple four-step process for making phenomenal black and white images and i have an action for you but wait please please please wait until this video is over before you just go and download the actions i always say that and still someone says i just download the action i don't know what to do with it that's because you probably need to watch this first now last year i did this video called stop making photographs and what i was trying to share with you there is how to build experiences and i'll go ahead and share this in the uh in the description below there'll be a link to that video also posted at the end of this video and in that video i made a very bold statement first and foremost the thing that you have to understand here is color color is the most important element that you're going to find in your images i would argue with anybody all day long the composition is not nearly as important as color now i still backed that statement 100 percent i didn't get any arguments which is great i did get some people that were suggesting that well you're saying that color is better than composition but what about a black and white photograph well the thing about black and white photographs is that they're made best through the use of your colors yes the use of your colors your black and white images can be better all too often i find that there's drab dull boring black and white images that are just gray on gray on gray on gray on gray and that's a problem because what that tells me is that someone just took their image and said this would be great as a black and white photograph and they pull it into photoshop they do their black and white processing and there's no black there's no white it's just gray all black and white processing is not created equal and all black and white plug-ins programs or techniques are not the same they all will do something different to the colors in your image to create the tones and the values that you're going to receive in your black and white photograph to begin with so what i have here is a great example because it's got quite a bit of color in it the greens the blues skin tones the lips i mean there's a lot of different color that's happening in this image that's great for a black and white process and i want you to ask yourself how would you process this in black and white just think to yourself what's the method that you would use okay just stop here think about that for a second so i'm going to break down these methods and give you three methods that are common for making a black and white image and then i'll show you how my method differs okay so looking at this let's take a look at this image with some color wheels on it because that will help us the top color wheel is going to be what i call the digital color wheel because the complementary colors are going to be cyan and red yellow and blue and your magenta and green the bottom is going to be your painters color wheel where red and green are the complements blue and orange are the complements and yellow and purple are the complements there are two different color wheels that kind of come to the same different end but it will show us the data and the values that we're going to receive when we turn this image into a black and white photograph now initially the first way that i ever learned to make a black and white photograph and it's the worst way it's very very destructive it even gets rid of your color information when you do it is to actually make a grayscale image now to make a grayscale image you would go to image you go to mode and then hit grayscale right here and that will actually take your image and make it grayscale and when you select it it's even going to say hey we're gonna toss out your color information is that okay and if you say yes all your color is gone and what you get is actually not that bad of a black and white conversion but you don't have any colors to work with after that everything in your image when you're in the image mode of grayscale all your colors all your color palettes everything will be in the form of grayscale which might be fine if someone's doing like i don't know a drawing or something like that wants it to look like graphite but it's not fine when we're doing our black and white processing so i'm going to shy away from that black and white adjustment the next one that i've seen people do is to go into the hsl or hue saturation adjustment layer and drop the saturation down now what i want you to pay attention to here is not necessarily in the painters color wheel at the bottom or in the photograph on the right it's actually in the digital color wheel that we have on the left notice how when you say desaturate by taking all the saturation out of the colors you're saying oh it's making a black and white image blake yes but it's taking all of your most potent forms of your primary colors and it's turning them gray it's basically saying hey take the the highest potency or the highest saturation of red cyan green blue uh whatever color and just knock it down to nothing to 50 gray so this isn't actually the best way to make a black and white image because we're taking the highest potential of our color and we're telling it to be 50 gray let's not do it so the other way is actually to use the black and white adjustment layer that some people like to use here if we go into our adjustment layers we go to black and white and actually this does a pretty good job of making a decent black and white image right off the bat we'll go and delete that hsl adjustment layer there this is a pretty good job of making a decent black and white image because as you can see here we have some separation of the tonal values of the colors here which is exactly what we want we want to attribute the right colors to the right tones when we're making our black and white images so this works out pretty well the only problem that i see with this black and white adjustment is if you look right here on the on the top here this gives you the opportunity to make your reds a little bit darker or a little bit brighter sure but it's only giving you the luminance value of those individual colors meaning the value or the amount of white or black that is present within the color to create the tone that it's creating which might sound great because you get this slider to do it but it's not the best option because it doesn't give you access to many more things like your saturation and your hue and other very valuable attributes for your colors in your image so i'm going to delete that and what i've done here is i've kind of made this like a cooking show so here's our grayscale image here we'll just put this one at the bottom because that is going to be our first one then we have our hsl adjustment which it's not that great because again we're just stripping all the color out of our color and making it gray and we have our black and white adjustment which isn't too bad actually makes a pretty good black and white image but here's what happens when you really know and understand the colors in your image and you make a black and white image that's more compelling based off of the colors that are in your photograph and if you notice what's happening to the color wheel on all three of these the color wheels look at the color wheels as we go through here they all change but look at my method it's very deliberate about what colors i want actually to be the most prominent and dominant and what colors i want to push back and that's where you get some really awesome values for the colors in your image that create the tones that you want in a good black and white photograph now the beauty of this is that here is an image that uh we have from adobe stock here's the exact same model with slightly different attire on but here's the cool part about this is that once you get this set up for one individual scene you can use this black and white process that i have here on any image that would be in that same batch or same series just look at how they are unified with this exact same black and white process for both of them now i will go over how i created this in a minute here but i want to share with you just how important it is to have good quality color underneath this black and white process my black and white process includes a gradient map that goes above the image and then i do all my color work underneath so if you were to just put a gradient map on this photograph that has no color work done to it and i say to myself oh wow this would be a great black and white photograph and i put this on here it's like it's not that great but watch what happens because of the color work that i've done underneath and how that responds and reacts to how those colors will turn when it comes to the black and white process that i'm going to show you so if we look at the color work here here's the before here is the after the color work works really great here's the gradient map on top now here's my process this is my personal flair on black and white processing i don't go into an image and i say to myself this would be a great black and white photograph let me make it black and white some people do i do not for me i personally feel that black and white is a finishing effect it's something that should be done at the end of the workflow to ensure that your tones and your colors are beautiful before going into the black and white process so what i'm showing you here you may need to change your idea and your mindset about where in your workflow black and white needs to take place me personally it's at the end always at the end because i can use all that beautiful data that i created underneath to create the most spectacular black and white photograph i can now i'm going to go over to this image here and in this image i'll share with you what that process is so ideally the way you want to start this out is by adding a gradient map to the image now you're going to watch this image just completely transform when we go through this process and it has to do with how we control our colors how we shift our colors how we refine our colors and then balance our colors underneath a tonal adjustment so let's say that this image is done i like the way the tones and the colors look i'd be happy to let's say share this okay we're just going to for all intents and purposes why i'm telling you that is because this should happen at the end of your workflow so we're assuming that this is the end of our image so i'm going to go to the gradient map here now the gradient map is going to be based off of whatever colors you have in your color palette so if you have let's say red over here and then let's do some off-the-wall color let's just do its complement like cyan okay so if you have red and cyan that are in your foreground and background palette here if we were to make a gradient map you're going to see that this is going to go to a gosh that's horrible red to cyan gradient map and what's happening here just to kind of give you an idea of what's happening here your reds are being attributed to your darkest values in the image and your blues or science here are being attributed to anything that's in the lightest values of your image not that great for this kind of color work i definitely use it for color grading but that's not what we're talking about today so how we would use this in a black and white workflow is i would make sure that this is set to black and white so what i could do here is just click on that gradient map i'm going to save your life here and i'm just going to change this to this black to white gradient either of these black to white gradients will work okay wow my eyes can reset so can yours sorry about that maybe should have chose some less violent colors but what we have here now is our darkest colors are now being told to be black as they transition into the lightest colors that are now being told to be white so this is the baseline that i start for my black and white process now one thing i do want to show you here though is that this is going from pure black to pure white so it could it make some clipping happen in your image meaning your darkest dark areas become too dark and your lightest light areas become too light so how you would fix that is just click on this gradient map and then down here on your black we're going to double click this and we're going to call this see where it says rgb is zero zero zero zero zero zero is black so let's go five five five so what we're saying here is that the darkest dark areas in the image can't necessarily go to pure black we're going to put a little governor in there that says you can't go to pure black we'll press ok then i'm going to double click on this white side and you see what this is 255 255 255 that's white so let's make this 250 250 250. now you can make this 245 to whatever you wanted to make that to help that area from getting too dark but here's what i would recommend on that is that i wouldn't go below let's say 10 so i wouldn't go to 15 or 20 because every zone from 0 to 10 so if zone 0 is black is only 22 pixels of value so what that means is that i wouldn't take this black area over here to something like 22 because nothing would ever get pure black everything would stay within zone one so that's why you want this to be somewhere between five and let's say 12 okay but that will protect your areas from getting too black or too white so now we need to do is we need to ensure that we shift our colors underneath so what we can do is actually add an hsl adjustment layer anybody who's been following me for any given amount of time has seen me do this and i'm going to create an action for you here all you got to do is press play and it'll set you up but i want you to understand what's going on here with this hsl adjustment layer underneath the gradient map we now get three values for our color we get hue saturation and lightness okay we don't just get the lightness if we were to just go come down here and make this the black and white adjustment all we're getting here is lightness we are not getting hue we are not getting saturation it is just the lightness or the presence of black or white within a given color so this is what i'm going to do turn these back on the beauty of this what's really great about this is that you can actually use the targeted adjustment tool here click on that and then click on whatever color in the image you want to adjust you're thinking well blake i don't see any color here that's fine photoshop knows there's color here photoshop smart lot smarter than me so what i'm going to do is i'm going to click right here you see it's going to say yellows but if i click on this area it's going to be reds and if i click over here we got cyans so it knows actually underneath this gradient map what colors are there which is really great because now i'm on my reds or let's say reds right here okay i'm going to increase the saturation of the color red what you're going to see is that we can start to shape the tonal value in the presence of the tones in our image through the colors that are there so that age-old question of well you blake you said that color is more important than composition but what about black and white now you're seeing it here the reason why color is so important for black and white images is because color creates your black and white image if you do it this way okay so now we can go into the lightness of the color red so now i can make reds a little bit deeper a little bit darker what i'm trying to do with my vision for this is really focus on this yellow beam of light that's coming down through here so that's what i'm going to aim my primary focus at so i'll click on this color and i want that yellow to be brighter watch what happens as i make those yellows more saturated they get initially they get more bright right so i can make the lightness of them even brighter as well so we focus our attention on that area now let's say i wanted to go into some of these individual panes up here of the stained glass here's where i would start to manipulate the stained glass a little bit maybe make that stained glass a little bit darker here so that our attention doesn't go necessarily to the stained glass but stays primarily on that yellow that we have there this is what i call shifting the colors this is the first step shifting the colors so we shift the colors we're moving them around if we were to actually take our gradient map and turn it off it's like whoa blake turn that gradient map back on that's almost as bad as the first gradient map you showed us the colors underneath aren't supposed to look that great because what are we doing this for we're doing this as an artistic effect that happens after our processing is done and the great thing about this is that once you're done with this you can put these into a folder and then turn it on and off and then that folder which is going to be in the action will just dictate what the black and white is going to look like regardless of the color that you chose so this is we'll call this uh we'll just call this shift colors okay after that i want to go ahead and refine the colors so the way i'm going to do that is i'm going to go into the selective color adjustment layer now the selective color adjustment layer i've done many tutorials on this before it basically adds a percentage or reduces a percentage of a color within a color kind of confusing but we'll think about it this way when we talk about refinement let's go into the yellows okay and this is happening with the cyan that is present within the color yellow so now i can get very nitpicky i'm not just moving and shifting the the hue and the saturation of the color i'm refining the blend of the way this color is working so as i add more yellow to that it's going to get brighter if i add more magenta to that it's going to it's going to make the magenta and the yellow more present which is going to make this a little bit darker and then if i move this over in the cyans i can make this a little bit more refined there make it a little bit brighter i'm kind of tightening down the tones within those yellows now let's go into the color red see what happens when we shift the color red around so with red if i make it more red it's going to get darker i can also add a deeper presence of black to the color red by moving it this way you see that so now our reds are really tightening down and our yellows are starting to open up a lot more here going to the yellow of the color red maybe boost those a little bit to brighten them up so they don't get so the red doesn't get so dark that we can't necessarily see the detail that's within there so that's the refinement stage taking those colors and shifting the colors that are within the color to refine the color and make it the way i want it to be in the given tone again if i turn my gradient map off this is gonna be hideous it's supposed to be because we're really pushing our colors into places where they shouldn't go to get the tones that we couldn't get now what i'm going to do here let's call this to refinement if i could spell correctly let's take that off the end now what i'm going to do is i'm going to add the color balance adjustment layer and this is where we're going to balance those colors so what you'll notice is that i'm going to delete this color as 3 and then call this balance okay so what you'll notice with this is that after we have shifted our colors then we've refined our colors we now come down to the color balance and we can force those colors in various different directions so looking at our mid-tones here if i force this more towards the reds because we initially made our reds darker at that shift and refinement phase we move the balance more towards the red it's going to make the image darker if we move the map balance more towards the yellow it's going to make the image brighter so look at the amount of control that you have here when you shift your colors refine those colors and then balance them in the direction that you want look at the tonal values you have here unprecedented black and white images received from color and color alone the only thing that's happening with this gradient map up here is it's saying hey anything that changes underneath me just change accordingly to this map that we have here that's what a gradient map does it maps out the colors and gives it in this case the tones we want on top of there so if we go into the balance here again that was in the mid-tones going to the color balance and the shadows look at how deep we can make those reds in those shadows but then we can boost up maybe some of the yellow the presence of the yellow in those shadows and see if we can add some more contrast there that's a little bit too much i think and let's see what happens when we move the magenta in the green i'll admit that sometimes when i'm doing this i'm actually seeing how far i can take a given slider to see what kind of results i'm going to get and i think i like that when we move that more towards the green it's a nice nice shift there okay now let's go into the highlights so going into the highlights let's boost up the amount the presence of yellow within those highlights let's turn this gradient map off now just for grants oh my gosh that's hideous that's hideous but it's predominantly what yellow and red so as we are shifting the balance of the yellow and the red there that gradient map is acting accordingly and giving us the beautiful tones that we would want initially now if i turn this off all these off look at that muddy blah gray on gray on gray now we're getting that presence of black to white so at this point i'm not done what i would do here is go into the gradient map and at the gradient map level now this is where i get to dictate a couple more things about how the tones are going to react in this image so this is the way the gradient map is set up we're saying transition from black into white okay what we can do here is we can actually grab this little point here make sure you grab this little point here because if you accidentally click outside of this little diamond it's going to add another point to your gradient it's really a kind of a pain in the butt i really wish they would have made this much bigger for me to grab onto but when i click here this is how you can make an image more high key or more low-key if i want it to be more low-key i'll move it over to the right and as i move it over to the right you're going to see it's going to get much darker there the presence of the image is much darker heavier more favorite on the black why because what we're telling this image now is that we want the presence of black to be much stronger in through the mid-tones into our middle white areas but if we want this to be more high key we move it this way and as we move it this way the image is going to brighten up quite a bit more because we're telling the image to have a much higher potency of the white tonal value in there now another heavy hitter in here is actually going to be this smoothness slider this smoothness slider when you open this up is actually going to dictate how much presence of contrast we get if it's as high as it can go it's going to be a very deep contrast between the darks over here to the lights over here so we can adjust the smoothness a little bit as we adjust this over here and start really shaping and refining the tonal value in our image from the black and white at the very end but this would be our before if we just did this as our gradient map here it's atrocious it doesn't look good we need that color to create phenomenal black and white images color still to this day in my opinion hands down is more important than composition even in black and white images because it's the color that creates them now i did tell you that i created an action for you all right so what i'm going to do here is i'm just going to go ahead and delete all of this or let me put it in a group and turn the eyeball off okay what i did was i created an action for you and in this action you're going to see just the black and white layer all that's going to do is going to give you that traditional black and white gradient map that i think is the best because of the way it maps out your tones but if you click this one here black and white with all color layers it's actually going to run this action that's going to create all of those layers that i did for you there and give you some directions on how to use this so that you'll never forget how to make the best black and white image go and press continue and here we have all the steps already lined up and it even starts you off right away with the hsl adjustment layer there so you can get at it you're gonna see two links here at the end of this video one is to download these actions and the other one is to go watch that video on stop making photographs and build experiences just like you saw me here build an experience with black and white images you too can do the same thing in your color work as well as your black and white images

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 52,865

Keywords: Blake Rudis, f64 academy, f.64, How To, Tutorial, Photoshop, Adobe, black and white photography, black and white, black and white photography tips, black and white photography editing, black and white photography photoshop, Best Black and White Process, Why color is important for black and white

Id: aSS1LU3yTDY

Length: 21min 44sec (1304 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021