Get BETTER Black and White Photos with Capture One

welcome back everyone in this video we are going to talk about converting color images into black and white images I personally am a huge fan of black and white photography back when I shot film all the time I pretty much exclusively shot black and white for me personally I think with this way like we all experience the world in color unless you're colorblind of course but most of us experience the world in in color and that's a dimension that we're used to seeing in reality and when you have an image that is monochrome or you're only using black and white you remove one layer of reality into abstraction and for me that abstraction is a way that you can use to create a mood draw emphasis to your subject it's very expressive in terms of what you can do with an image and I always have considered black and white images I would treat them very differently than I would when editing color images now in the early days of photography everything was pretty much monochrome or black and white and then we moved into color photography and that's much different than what we have today with digital now we have images that come off of a camera in color and actually that gives us an enormous amount of power when we convert it to black and white in terms of what we can do with the image nothing is really locked in so I've got some examples that I want to show you we're going to be using capture 1 for our examples in this video this will be another in our sponsored series of capture 1 tutorials if you want to see more I will put a link in the show scription so make sure to check that out but what I love about capture 1 is it handles black and white images from kind of two different sides so let me give you an example this is just an image that we're gonna work with here and I think typically most people would think ok if I want to make this black and white the fastest way to do this is go over to your exposure tab here go down to saturation and just turn that off completely desaturate the image now yes this is a black and white image I can continue to work on this with levels curves all my contrast adjustments whatever I want to do with this but we're a little bit limited in the power that we are actually given in another tool that capture one has let's go ahead and reset that and what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over to the color tab and we're going to go down and we're going to find the black and white palette here and this is a tool specifically allowing us control over black and white images now what we're going to do is just first of all tick this box that says enable black and white that will turn our image black and white and this pretty much looks exactly like it did a second ago when we just desaturated the M but what's really cool is there's kind of two methods that we're going to look at of what we can control and capture one the first one you can think of is controlling how bright or dark colors are just below that level of saturation so just pretend for a second that we put a filter over the image that just filters out all the color well there's color underneath that still so I can actually change the brightness of those colors individually so for a second let me deselect this box and you can see that red is a predominant color in this image this woman is waving this red sheet and so I can obviously control red in fact that's the predominant color in here so if I select edit black-and-white you'll notice that when I take the red slider and I move this to the right we are brightening up all of the Reds in the image now also note that her face and costumes start to go bright too and a lot of that has to do with the lighting of this image there's a lot of red light and a lot of red tones that affect the overall image if I go the opposite direction from 50% you're going to see that we start to darken that and at some point we're actually going to start darkening her face as well and there's kind of a point of diminishing returns where it's too dark now in an example like this where red is more of a global color I can approach this from the aspect of I'm going to go do all of my global adjustments on this image and I want to just match that mood and then what I can do is actually go create a mask layer and I can brighten up the model space and if you want to know how to create masking layers that's in that playlist as well I'll link that in the description let's look at another example here I want to convert this image to black and white and one of the problems that I'm going to see when I go ahead and take enable in black and white is that we just don't have a lot of emphasis on the model's face this is kind of just a darker image part of the problem is that she's sort of backlit here at least a side backlit so let's disable black-and-white and look at the image and see what kind of tones that we have now skin tones are going to lean more towards red and yellow in our spectrum here and obviously we've got a lot of foliage there's a lot of greens so this probably is a good candidate for some nice separations so if I go ahead and enable black and white I'm going to head bring my red channel up and you can see that we already start to brighten her face considerably in fact I cranked that all the way up we also pulled some of the highlights back here but that's okay I'm gonna bring my yellow channel up a little bit too you're going to notice that that affects more of the light coming in behind her so maybe I tone that back I'm not real sure want that yet we're gonna go down to green and obviously there's a lot of plant life and foliage and trees in here so you can expect when I turn green down to start darkening up that background which it does and now we start to have a nice separation between the model and the background and this is exactly what I want if I look at my Scion here there is some cyan and it's mostly in this gazebo thing back here there's some other background so I'm gonna go ahead and bring that all the way down to because I don't want that to be a distraction we've got to go towards black blue as well you're not gonna notice that much change maybe just a little bit in the image and magenta there's really no magenta in this image so if I do a quick before and after here's before and here's after and I've created a really interesting mood and something that I'm very happy with with this image another really cool example for this and I think another argument for black and white in general is when you shoot a scene that has colors in it that become distracting to your overall image and let me give you a couple examples so I visited the dogfish Head brewery last year and did the brewery tour and did a lot of photographing when I was there and they have some really cool stuff this this this tank has a really neat steampunk look to it but unfortunately when you're in a factory type situation you have a lot of safety requirements there's obviously not a design standpoint that went into the overall interior design of the building and so if we look at this image in color you're gonna see that we have really loud orange on these brackets these are kegs that are stored and this is hard to see in this particular image but then this is this huge wall where they do like literally thousands of kegs of beer and they store them in here and it's really interesting to look at and it's hard to photograph because they've got all these orange attachments the actual kegs have blue in them it's just not a color scheme I'm crazy about but when I do a black and white conversion I'm able to control that so let me go ahead and reset my black and white conversion panel here and I'm going to show you what I was able to do so if I go ahead and enable black and white once again we have specific control over colors so we have kind of a flat image and what I want to do is draw the I end into the middle and I want to reduce some of the attention to things like these orange brackets so obviously those being orange we know that we don't have an orange slider but orange is a combination of red and yellow so if I move my red slider we can make those brighter for instance that didn't do the effect that I want I want them to be subtle we can also move the other direction and then back and we can do the same with yellow since they're orange it's going to darken them even more and that's even better because look now you don't even notice them they're really drawn in with the background I can also lighten up the tanks in the front or darken them depending on which way I want to go I might end up actually wanting to darken them and we want to bring emphasis but remember in color let's go back we have these silver tanks for the kegs but they also have blue in them too so what we want to do is address the blue so if I move blue up in scale it's going to lighten it don't really like that it I mean there's less competing in there but I think the contrast is what's going to draw your eye and so if I bring those down the other direction so here's up and bring them down you notice that I'm able to just isolate one color range in the image and I'm able to target that specific area so this is something that's extremely handy now you may have noticed that on the black-and-white panel here we have been working under color sensitivity and there's a second tab over here that says split tones I'm gonna select that I want to explain what split toning is so earlier I said that I wanted you to think of this is we have this desaturation filter that's over the image we're adjusting color regions underneath it so you don't see color anymore but we're able to adjust how bright or dark that color region is and this affects our overall image now split toning is actually going to be on the other side of that filter and it doesn't allow us to recolor eyes the image but it allows us to tone the image if you've ever seen printed photographs you'll realize that black and white photographs are rarely actually black-and-white in fact they're never black-and-white there's usually some kind of tone to that this can have something to do with the paper we have warm toned papers that start to bring your highlights to a warmer kind of yellow off-white we also have cool tone papers that go the other way and they make the image cooler by bringing those highlights more to blue because the paper just has that type of tone to it you can actually as a printer go in and physically tone the paper there's selenium toning there's sepia toning you could do old-school processes like amber types albumen prints 10 types though those all have colors to them and then also we have things like Sienna types which are very dramatic and you can get very strong toning to them this is why most people call this monochrome and not black-and-white because the reality is in the computer it is exactly black and white but in the print world it rarely is so if you're doing images that you want to share even digitally online you might consider coming up with some subtle toning so let's look at how this works so you have to slide actually a four sliders here but there's two sets of sliders and one affects the highlights the other affects the shadows so for instance if I look at the highlights I'm gonna move the hue slider around and I'm not going to notice any change in my image at all that's because we have to introduce some saturation right now it's completely d saturated so if I slowly bring this up and believe me you can go here let's bring it all the way up you can go way too crazy with this so this is just really subtle you can see that our highlights are turning red the way I like to work in here is go ahead and bring it up so you can see what your color tone is now might want more this more gold or yellow you can actually take it the other way to make it cooler maybe more blue and what I'm gonna do then is drop my saturation and this is kind of one of those things that when you're editing go ahead and get the look and when you think you've got it right bring it back a little more because it just gets really intense really fast I'm gonna do the same with my shadows so bring up the saturation and I can make my shadows warmer I can make them more green and so you can experiment around with this a little bit too I'm kind of like that where they're both blue I'm gonna bring this down and we have a cooler tone look to this and so this is very different than just a straight-up black and white image we've actually introduced some tonality into it by using color it's another dimension of interest another thing I want to show you too is there are actually presets under this panel here so if you go under these three straight lines here the three horizontal lines if I click on that it's going to have a drop down now the first of these in here there's gonna say color default and you're gonna go through these just reset all of my sliders on color sensitivity because they're more or less trying to replicate sensitivity of something like panchromatic film in this instance or back in the days we used to use color filters over a lens so red yellow filter a yellow filter so on and so forth if you go down to split toning it does a little bit of each and that can go down to just pure toning and I can look at these two and you'll notice that they're all subtle but they have very different effects on what they do to the overall mood of your photo so if you're not really sure how to tone an image or you're not familiar you don't even printing experience this is one way you can go in and kind of get a feel for different looks and you'll notice that you can see the sliders change even as I'm dragging over these to preview them here so it's a very cool technique you can see that capture one is giving us an enormous amount of control over converting a color image to black and white or monochrome I love the way that capture 1 is set up because it treats this much like the old analog process so when we shot film a film has a sensitivity to it we're actually able to go in and replicate that with color sensitivity under that panel and we can actually go in and increase reds we can make those brighter or darker and I actually argue you have more control over this because back in the old days when I shot film you pretty much commit everything on the roll to one sensitivity type which is fine but there's no editing there's no controlling that you can do burning and dodging in the printing stage later but it was just a much different process with this you can actually change and customize that sensitivity to each individual image we don't use filters necessarily with color photography like a red filter rat and red or orange filter for contrast but we just shoot them straight out but we can control that in post I also love the way that they address split toning because this is really important black and white photographs aren't really black and white now when you get into printing you'll realize that in people who have extensive printing experience kind of go with it with that in mind and it gives it a much more natural look but even if you're just sharing your images online you're putting them on Instagram or Facebook or whatever that is you can start to replicate some of that toning and I think there's a lot of power to this anyway if you haven't tried to capture one I have a link in the show description download the free trial check it out I think you're gonna love the way your images look I think there's some wonderful things that are happening in capture one so anyway I'd love to hear from you guys drop me a comment if you've enjoyed this video remember to thumbs up subscribe for more I'll see you guys in the next video until then later

Channel: The Art of Photography

Views: 40,800

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Id: dRkDlnjhDug

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 20 2020