From landscape to fine art print in black and white. Making a photo print, from beginning to end

hi my name is keith cooper and norflight images and in this video i'm going to talk about the whole process of making a large print it's a large black and white print right from getting out the car deciding i was going to take a photo through to processing the image to how i would process the image for a particular print size and then on to actually making a print now i'm not actually going to go into great detail about the precise process since that varies for every single image you're likely to take varies by print size and loads of other things but this is an up-to-date version of an article i wrote a while ago about making uh this particular print and i've gone back to this and looked at how things have changed since when i originally made the print back in 2005. now the original image and the print is here now any of you who've come across my black and white test image may recognize the image this is a print i made in 2005. it's lasted well i'm actually going to be printing it on the same paper because it's a paper i like and one that works very well for this image but i'll cover that in a bit but this is the image i made then i'm going to go back to the camera raw file explain what to do and look at making another print the actual picture was taken in washington state in september 2004 i was driving along highway 101 besides hood canal and it was a grey damp day as it's quite often in those areas and i just saw a nice looking view now the thing is a great view can be a great view to stand and look at it can be a great view that you can turn into a print or it can be a great view that no matter how you photograph it you never really capture it as a print and it's capturing an aspect of the scene and to show that i've got the entire sequence only 13 pictures that i took at that point where i got out of the car i walked down and i'll cut these into the video so um you can see a bit more detail of them that is obviously limited by the video format here's where i got out walked down to the water looked around i said there was a lot of structure in the sky there's mist there's low cloud this right away said to me this is going to make a black and white print and there are a few things you do if you're taking stuff for a black and white print i overexposed slightly so that i would have not clipped because when you clip you lose information so it's overexposed slightly to make it i've got more information to work with when i convert the color file into black and white so i take the picture using my camera set normally as a color image and i process the raw file now the camera back then was a canon 1ds mark 1 the original canon 1ds 11 megapixels on a full-frame sensor that was a lot at the time and was seriously impressive it was expensive as well uh today i would use canon 5ds um or maybe an r5 but i've got an r5dx this is 50 megapixel that makes it a lot easier to make large prints but the principles are still the same i'm going to cover a little bit about resizing um old images in this as well since i've gone back and looked at how modern software can process images but most of the process i'm looking at is virtually the same as when i produced that picture for an exhibition in 2005. anyway here's the scene i've got out we've always got a slight problem when you look along a beach of some sort of how you handle the diagonal of this curve of that we've got these distant trees we've got little boats um yeah we've got cloud we've got detail there's plenty of detail in this that can be picked out and there's there is color but there's not a lot of color so this is an image that let's say i thought black and white so there we go i've what got out i've walked down to the uh shoreline i'm looking across the water nice and still perfect reflections but we're getting a bit of it move to another shot this is probably taken with a 16 to 35 lens um it's quite wide angle i'm just exploring here just looking at and think what am i going to do about this scene here the boat where it's positioned does it look right does it fit and i'm i'm not certain i move back a bit get a bit more of the uh beach in and this is where the road is at the back here turned out this is a a small state park um it's bigger now with a lot i haven't been past it for a few years yet but it's bigger than it was in 2004 but it is still there on highway 101. so there we've got the view yes that's okay let's look the other direction well it's well we have a seagull and that's about it maybe i can and i have stitched these two to get a feel for it but you know it wasn't really one for a panoramic so we're back to that what works i've walked work back a bit more no but a longer lens on i've put a 7200 2.8 l and this is about 190 millimeter this is nearly full telephoto i've decided to concentrate on this detail it's just it looks it looks interesting however this first shot i got the trees i don't like the angle the boat facing straight on to me nor do i like it's too central and also there's not enough being made of this sky at the top here so we go to the next one remember i'm moving along the beach as well which is not i'm at the limited zoom for this we've got this nice line of mist on the water running across here and we've got the shapes of the trees in the mist and it's probably spitting rain while i'm doing this but anyway we'll move back there we go that's a bit more like i'm a bit happier with this i've moved this across i'm still not sure about this and what to do about this tree things at the edge of a frame and crop if you wish i don't have no problems with cropping but how to handle objects at the edge of the frame um do you want just a bit of them it ties the scene to the frame or do you want a gap now here the gap creates more space than the edge here and separates this area from over here and also this is perhaps a little far over so there we go we'll move it across a bit i'm now happy with the frame cutting through the edge of that tree um it's a personal choice as to how you like composition and things there are various things any photographer who gives you a long list of the various rules and principles they followed in order to get a picture is doing it after they've taken the photograph um i never think much about formal rules of composition when i'm doing things i might occasionally think about balance empty space things like that but i really don't go into all the details that you'll find in an essay or article about photo composition um most of it is having a good eye and being able to see and visualize a picture i've got a bit of beach here which i don't really like um i want this lowering down i've moved along and the boat is now in a slightly better position okay that that's much better um i've lost a bit of tree here but i've gained a bit on this i'm still not sure about that we'll go there we go we've moved around a bit more boats more over this way tree i'm quite happy with this edge just touching the edge of the tree we've got picnic benches on that and it's it's looking fairly okay but there's this line of mist here that just doesn't do anything and it doesn't really show at the back here so i walked back up the beach towards the car a bit um and i recall it was starting to rain a bit more then and here's the photo that i've used i'm slightly higher which has lowered the boat now has meant that this line of mist is now continuous and joins up and separates the distant hills or just not really hills at this stage you can't see the hills in this right it's just too misty and damp and we've got shapes only i'm i'm happy with that composition um that's 13 photos i've taken um at this point it either was raining too much or i was bored with this and thought i'd got a picture and off i went i was at the location no more than 15 20 minutes at the outside and it was purely because i was driving along saw a bit of landscape i thought yeah that's interesting there's a picture there so there we go there's the picture that i'm going to base it on it's exposed fairly light so we've not got much detail in this in the sky here i'm going to bring that out later but other than that i'm fairly happy with it and i'll now go to the actual raw file now i'm using photoshop cs6 here that's ancient version of photoshop but it has all the essential tools and the only tool i need here is a curve i just need a simple curve to apply to this image and i can fix it and convert it to black and white but anyway if i open the raw file we have raw file here um things i've noticed about processing uh the raw file i'm intending to take this image which is only 4 000 by 2700 pixels 11 megapixel is not that big i want to make at least an a2 probably a larger picture for this so i'm going to need to resize that means i need to pay a bit more attention to things like sharpening and detail so whilst i've got the image here and it seems that i shot this for some reason at f 3.5 a 320th of a second um i'd not had the camera very long at the time and i was still experimenting it's one of the reasons i went on the trip i look at some of my decisions about exposures here as to why i took them and i'm still not entirely certain why i picked particularly if i was to take the picture today i would probably use a slightly smaller aperture to get a bit more detail in the picture certainly with 50 megapixel camera um i'd want a bit more and probably a newer version of the lens now i've still got this 70 to 200 lens and it's fine it works i don't use telephoto very often but this is more than good enough for what i want and here it is we've got the image um there's very little i'm going to adjust in it we can maybe set in terms of the settings i don't want any lens corrections i don't want anything changing the picture very much but i will and i have checked this again in processing later on i will use the remove chromatic aberration because there is a bit of chromatic aberration i zoomed in on some of these fine branches around here you would see a little bit of color fringing that fixes that i know it's a black and white image but color fringing leads to loss of detail in black and white images so we want to reduce that other than that in terms of sharpening this depends very much on what i'm going to do with the image to me all sharpening at any stage from opening the raw file right through to final before printing has a creative element about it there is no automatic sharpening it is what is needed for the image all of this area here for example there's no really fine detail there is detail here if you zoom right into it but um it's not much there is no real fine detail in this that really needs no sharpening um i've also i've set the noise reduction at quite a low level as well i've shot this this is done at iso 100 anything much above about 400 on the old for 1ds you would start to see more noise and things that would need dealing with but i'm happy with this just as a name simple image and i'm opening this up in the pro photo color space this is one of the few times i always use pro photo is for black and white the reason is profoto retains as much of the color information when i'm working at 16 bit as well in this profoto retains as much as the color information as possible color variations when you convert to black and white transform into tonal variations the more variation and detail in color that you rate retain the more chances you have of bringing that this that detail into the black and white image so it's just something else like pro photo always work with that for black and white images gives you more capability i'm going to turn this to black and white very soon anyway but at this point i'll just do that so i've got my image there it's a 11 megapixel image so we'll open that now i'm going to resize this i'm not going to do it on this laptop here because it isn't powerful enough for it um i'm going to use topaz ai gigapixel or 2 gigapixel ai to do the resharp resizing and it does very good resizing up to large sizes certainly if i'm taking this image and i'm printing it i want to rescale it to 600 pixels per inch at least a2 size so that's quite an expat roughly a four times expansion i know from experience that it works very well on that software certainly better than any other method i've used in recent years for fine detail but this is a sort of an option you don't need to do this this is just because i'm making a big print from an old file so it's uh embedded pro photo use the embedded color space there we go and there is the image now i'm going to work just to show you the curve on this image unresized the laptop slows down a bit if i'm opening sort of 800 900 megabyte images um it's it really does slow things down a bit but there's the basic color image all i'm going to do for conversion and there are lots of ways and i've looked at aspects in other videos and articles about this all i'm going to do is a very simple straightforward conversion from color to black and white there are fancier ways but i'll show it a bit some potential problems you get with those all i really need to do for this is image adjustment black and white now i'm using the default photoshop change here it's going to convert that to black and white there we go now you can play around and tweak the settings a little bit here but don't try and do too much at this point so there's the black and white image the problem is i'll make it a bit larger there and i should mention that i've actually got this particular monitor thank you sw 2700 i've got it hardware profile to a color temperature of about four and a half thousand k that's very low far lower than you'd normally work i've done that specifically so it doesn't look too blue in the lighting here with the video normally i'd work with it in certain knotted conditions like this i'd work in dimmer lighting and i'd work with it set to a d65 maybe d55 but this is just for showing on the video here's the image here now the simple adjustment here is i'm going to add a layer i'm going to add a curves adjustment layer now here's the curve it's just a line you bend now let's just convert this image from i'll change the mode to grayscale converted the image to grayscale here just to make it easier smaller and faster to work on here there's no real difference in working on an rgb version of a black and white image which is where r equals g equals b for each pixel or a grayscale one there's no difference some software sharpener nick sharpener which i use occasionally requires an rgb file so even though this is a gray grey gamma 2.2 color space it's a black and white time i will at some point for sharpening would need to convert this back to rgb as long as i take it back to a gamma 2.2 space such as adobe 98 i've got no problem there's not going to be any changes or shifts but the key here is this curve now if i just move the end points i can lighten the whole thing i can darken the whole thing we just don't want much to so what i'm going to do is just take a fairly steep curve there and for this curve i am only looking at its effect on the sky the water these distant trees on the misty bits no matter that this bit is too black we'll deal with that in a moment so one curve adjustment because if i look at the shape of the curve i can see there's a main bump which is all the light gray and there's another bump on one side which is the darker bits so that's adjusted the curve for the sky if i now adjust further down add another point and bend the curve i can adjust the details here and bring out some more detail on this spit and the boat now there are just a couple of points on this curve and just by changing these two curves i can change the tonal balance of the light part of the screen and the dark part of the image and that's all it takes now if you have a look at the written article that i've got that the older article that goes into more details is it got it's got lots more options of why i picked different aspects of the curves how i adjusted things and design very difficult to show here on the video and there is utterly no point at all in doing the screen recording of me doing stuff here because i'm trying to show the principles not the actual details i'm very loved to give precise step-by-step recipes for doing adjustments for photos because i feel that misses the point it's the principle of what you're doing is important and it will be different for every single image so here we have an image i'm relatively happy with i could save that do that work on various things i can tweak this curve a little bit there's not much more needs to be done to it that's it i've handled the tonality of this dark bit and i've handled the tonality of the sky what it actually looks like yeah that's that'll come out later so we'll just get rid of that so there we've got that now if i was resizing i would have resized the color image not the black and white so i would done resizing with the color image before i do the conversion to black and white so if i go to the examples here now i'll just close these windows down and show you the sharpening one of the problems um and i've produced versions of the file at the the color file at no sharpening in the raw processing slight sharpening in the broad processing and my normal degree of sharpening in that and it happens that if you're doing lots of enlargement the amount of sharpening of your source image is critical on the results now i've i've written an article goes into lots more detail about resizing and why sharpening matters so much in taking an old image one taken on an old camera like the 1ds and enlarging it up to a much larger size now the example i've got here this is just some detail of it and if i look at um raw sharpening i can see in the resizing and this is d this is zoomed in a lot i can see halos i can see sharpening effects on fine lines i've discovered that if you reduce the amount of sharpening considerably on your raw file and this is just for this particular camera so you'll have to do experiments with whatever you want to do then you don't get halos you get a much more less artifact in the image than you would do by sharpening in the raw so when people say you always have to sharpen raw files there are times you don't need to sharpen raw files because i've i've covered this in a lot the articles and stuff i've done i put links with this because i appreciate this there's quite a lot in this video i'll put links in the text to go with it and i'll take you through to the articles and that please feel free to ask questions as well but i'll try and cover as much as i can in this but anyway here's the with no sharpening and there are virtually no artifacts if i look at a version of it with normal sharpening there are artifacts now these are going to be very small features on the print but these do make a difference so anyway that's it that's a bit of a bit of resizing if you're not doing the resizing ignore that step we just need to think about how we're going to print the image now i've converted it to did the black and white image and here is the image i'm going to be working with after i've been working with it let's say simple curve adjustment just to handle the dark areas the light areas what else needs doing well before you print it you will need a bit of sharpening to allow for the natural softening that printing produces of ink drops on paper now i'm going to print this on cotton rag paper an arc paper and so it does need quite a bit of fairly subtle sharpening now i can use for this i can use nick sharpener there are lots of other ways of doing it it's a tool i've used for many years i've got articles about it as well and the reason i use it is because it gives me control over sharpening it allows me to decide i just want sharpening in a particular area and it allows me to give no sharpening in parts of area because as i said before cloud like this doesn't need any sharpening whatsoever whether it's raw sharpening while you're editing it doesn't need any detail sharpening and in fact the example here at its normal setting there are huge sharpening halos on some of the fine detail um but i when i use this i always turn it down a bit so that's it with the sharpening and if i turn it down it gets rid of most of the sharpening halos now what i do want however is what this calls uh structure which is a sort of local contrast enhancement and that does make a difference but you mustn't overdo it if i just take this to adding a bit of structure the main differences are that it just brings out the detail a little bit more here and a little bit more detail in the cloud don't overdo the structure adjustments these are the things that look over processed these are the things that just look bad now if i go from there back to that's the one without the structure it's very slight i'll show you how slide and his print this is i need to look carefully this is the straight version with no structure added to the image during editing and his version where i've added some structure to it now i'm going to be surprised if you can see much difference between these two prints it is there it is slight there we go and back again now there really isn't a great deal of difference but that's the sort of stuff that you end up fine-tuning with printing so it would also vary i might need to apply a second curve if i was showing this image in a particular dim environment or a bright environment i might change the overall tonal curve of it so the image that you see here on this screen obviously through the through the video that looks fine here when it becomes a print there's a matter of a lightening or darkening of uh for an adjustment one other thing i would mention is i'm printing using the black and white print mode now i've loads of videos and articles about black and white printing and invariably if a black and white print mode is available for a printer i prefer to use that in this because i know that on this particular paper with that printer there is an ever slight crunching of shadows i would add another adjustment curve just to open up some of the shadow detail on the print so that's areas around here and it's one of the reasons this image is on my black and white test image because i know what this should look like and if your printer crunches up shadows this will appear as a near solid dark black block so it makes it good for testing as well but anyway there's the image printed i've printed it from photoshop i could have printed it via the epson print software i could have printed it if i was printing it on a canon printer i could have used the canon print software it doesn't really matter the key things are what i've done in going from obviously taking the photo going through the whole process arriving at an image that i'm happy to print there are adjustments you'll need for print so if you were to print this on a glossy paper it would look quite different you might need to change the tonal balance i like it on this paper i like it on this this is a smooth natural paper and it's a paper i prefer using for prints like this but there you have it the real key for creating this print was the photographs i took at the start um you might look at aspects of fine detail other things like that when people look at prince they're not interested the fine detail contributes to it but it's only other photographers who really get the magnifying glass out and look at the fine detail and so and worry about that the real important thing for print is to me does it convey the right feel for the scene for you know what i wanted at the time there's no deep message in this um i'm sure if i had to put it into a show somewhere i could come up with some suitably convoluted artist statement about my aims and expressions and what i wanted to achieve through my photography complete hokum it would be made up on the spot just for that so but basically if you read an artist's statement uh ever by me always assume that it's been written for a very particular audience and that i don't actually agree with one word of it probably but anyway back to this we've got an image that's gone from a set of images i took through to the final print um i've got loads more bits and pieces like this i can do for videos please do have a look at all the detailed stuff in the notes that go with the video please subscribe to the channel if you find it useful feel free to ask questions but above all if there's something interesting this do check the website links as well because i have a lot more detail on the website than i could usually fit into videos so hopefully that's been of some help so thank you very much you

Channel: Keith Cooper

Views: 4,851

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Id: iJxVPtqA59c

Length: 32min 15sec (1935 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 24 2021