GIMP 2.10 Black and White Photo Editing Tutorial

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'm gonna show you guys how to edit black and white photos we're gonna be using the latest version of which at the time of this tutorial is 2 point 10.8 but of course before we get into that I want to direct you guys over to my website at Davies media design com as always we have tons of video and text tutorials on here so definitely check that out you can also enroll in our best-selling 2.10 photo editing course from beginner to pro photo and retouch it on udemy and you could support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and get some awesome give extras in return and I'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so you'll see here I have various photos set up all in black and white and these are all photos that I took with my camera and we're gonna go through some of these today we're not gonna get through all of them I'm just going to show you a couple examples as to how to edit your black and white photos each photo is going to have a slightly different technique I think every time you edit a photo it's pretty much going to turn out different every time but the goal is to create a sort of process so that you can have more confidence while you're editing your photos and know what to look for so in the case of black and white photos what you want to look for is a photo with tonal detail or a wide range of black and white pixels or dark and bright pixels similarly you also want images with a lot of contrast so you want elements that are sticking out from one another in this case you've got the dog which is up front and center it has a lot of contrast between the variations in the light hitting her fur and then the background obviously is contrasted against the dog herself and then in this case with this photo of a bridge you've got a lot of contrast between the shade and the light you do want to keep an eye on overall composition when you're taking these photos in black and white or when you know you're gonna go into a post later and edit these photos in black and white although you can use the crop tool to reframe the composition so sometimes it is more so about light and contrast and the composition part can come later or be perfected in your photo editor such as so the last thing I typically look for when I'm either taking a photo or when I'm searching for a photo to use as a black and white photo is texture so if you come over here back to the bridge photo you'll notice there's a lot of textures going on here whether that is the concrete road here or the texture created by the light so wherever it's dark it kind of creates a varying texture from the areas that are light and then you've got the texture of the sidewalk here we've got some old weathered wood instead of some concrete so that just provides a little bit more texture and then you've got the steel here so the steel beams on this bridge create textures as well in the metal and in the bolts holding it all together so those are pretty much the main elements I look for when taking or finding a photo that I'm gonna use for black and white so tonal detail contrast composition and textures all right so all that being said one last thing before I open up my first image I'm gonna go to edit preferences and under here under image import and export I'm just going to check under import policies promote imported images to floating-point precision what that's going to do is convert all of my imported images to 32-bit linear floating-point and what that does is it basically provides more data so it can provide a wider range of that tonal detail so we can have a wider range of the black and white or the gray pixels going on and I only recommend checking this if you know your computer can handle it if you have a slower or older computer your computer might not be able to handle the 32-bit floating-point images so you can just keep this unchecked but I'll keep it checked on my computer and click OK so I'm gonna open up my first image so I'll come over to my file and I'm going to right click on the image I want to open up here and go to open with and choose all right so now we have this opening one thing to note is that this is a pretty large image and also this did come in as 32-bit floating-point or 32-bit linear floating-point so I do want to scale this down a little bit to start so I'm just going to go to image scale image and this is optional if you have a powerful computer you don't have to do this or if you want to keep your original file size but I'm just going to scale this down in nineteen twenty by twelve eighty and I'm also going to change the resolution to 300 pixels per inch and then I'm just going to set the interpolation and no halo and click scale all right so that scaled our image down and that is just making this image a little bit easier to work with I'm gonna use this zoom to zoom in a little bit or I'll just hold ctrl and use my mouse wheel and zoom in on my subject so now I have to convert this to black and white there are a couple of methods you can go to image mode and then grayscale and that will convert it to a grayscale or black and white image or the way I recommend is by going to colors desaturate desaturate and this is just the method that I prefer I'm gonna set my mode to luminance and we're gonna do that for every photo that we're gonna edit today and I'll click OK and by the way I'll be editing three photos total today so this being the first of course but now what I want to do is add some contrast to this image there are a few ways to do this in I'm going to start by going with the easiest one the most obvious one so go to colors brightness contrast and I'm not going to mess with the brightness because I think this image is bright enough as is but I'm going to turn up my contrast just a tiny bit and I'll click OK and then another way to do this which will give you a little bit more control is to go to colors curves and I'm gonna click in the middle of my curve that's going to create a midpoint and then I'm just going to click on the left side of my curve and that is going to drag down the shadows so you'll see that makes the darker pixels even darker here and then I'll come up here to the right side of my curve this is going to adjust the highlights of my image so this is going to make the bright pixels even brighter and by making our bright pixels bright and our dark pixels darker that's going to create some more contrast here so there you'll see there's a little bit more contrast and I'll click OK and finally another method you could use is you can go to colors levels and you can adjust the levels here the far left side is going to be your shadows this middle triangle is going to be your mid-tones so I'll just turn those up a bit and then this slider over here is the highlights so you can see when I drag this to the left it's going to actually brighten up my image a little bit more there so there's a before there's an after and I'll click OK so something to know is that in a lot of the other photo editing programs people recommend editing the colors of your image in that's not going to really work because the colors are just going to get overlaid on top of the black and white so for example if I go to color color balance and I add red to this you'll see that we'll actually add red on top of the image it's not going to affect the red pixels below the D saturated image so basically you know this isn't performing on the original pixels and then being rendered as a black and white photo it's just adding those colors on to your black and white photo and that's not what we want to do so I'll hit cancel but if you do want to edit those red green and blue channels in order to further adjust your black and white image you could do so by going to colors desaturate mono mixer and here you have the red green and blue channels and now we can adjust these channels separately and as we do that you'll see it will affect our final black-and-white image so there's a before there's an after and this adjustment is more effective when there's a lot of sky going on in the image right now there isn't any sky here so it's not really making a big difference and in fact I don't really like this more or less than before we even use this but I'll click OK to apply that anyway but now I'm going to come over and create a new layer and I'm just going to name this soft light Emma change the layer mode to soft light as well and fill this with transparency and click OK and what I'm using with this layer is I'm using the soft light mode to make the subjects eyes stand out a little bit better so I'll grab my paintbrush tool here I'm gonna set my color to white and I'm gonna increase the size of my brush so it's a pretty large brush here I don't want it to be too large and then I'm also going to turn the hardness way down and this is going to create a very soft and very large brush and so when I paint that on my soft light layer you'll see that that enhances our eyes of our subjects instantly and then I'm just going to decrease the size of this because the eye on the right side is a little bit smaller so the subjects left eye and you can also use this to enhance other areas if you want like the nose or something I'm gonna take controls II actually don't want to do that but here's the before and here's an after so the eyes stand out a little bit more and now what I'll do is I'll create a new layer and I'll change this to vignette and I'm gonna change the layer mode back to normal so all of the images we're editing today will have vignettes I'll click OK so making sure I'm clicked on that vignette I'm gonna go to filters light and shadow then yet and here we have our vignette filter this is a gaggle filter so we can live preview it while we edit it and I'm gonna come down here to proportion that's going to change the proportion of my vignette right now it's the same proportion as the image or the same aspect ratio I'm just going to turn that down a little bit and then I'm going to change the center by clicking on this mouse here and then clicking where I want the center of my vignette to be so right around the eye here I'm doing this because I want the vignette to bring people's attention to the eyes and then I'm just going to expand the radius out a bit because I don't want so much of the vignette on the image you'll see if I bring this down we get too much black going on here so I'm just going to expand the radius so this comes off the image a bit more I can also adjust the softness of this if we have too much black encroaching on our main subject we can turn the softness down a bit and they'll bring out some of the black or it'll take the black out I should say so there's a before and there's an after you can see that does a good job of framing our subjects and I'll click OK and the last thing I'll do here is I'll just sharpen this up so I'll click on that main image layer and go to filters enhance sharpen unsharp mask and I'll keep the radius to 3 in the amount to 5 if yours looks a little bit weird you can always adjust these values until you get the value you like and I'll click OK and there's our first image alright so now I'm going to open up the second image which was this image of the bridge so I'm going to come back over here to my file and I'm going to find my image and click on it and this time I'm just going to drag it over here to this little Wilbur icon this is just another way to open up your image this photo was taken on a different camera so is asking me if I want to convert this to the native sRGB color space so I'll just hit convert on that and now we have our bridge photo open here the first thing I'll do again is scale this down because this is a really large image and so I'll go to image scale image and again I'll just scale this to 1920 and change the resolution to 300 this isn't that important by the way you can just keep this to 72 if you want and click scale all right now our image is scaled down so I'll hold ctrl and zoom in a bit this time I'm going to rotate and crop my image so I'm going to come over here and grab my rotate tool I'm gonna make sure the interpolation is set to no halo again and I'm going to set the clipping to crop to result and then I'm just gonna click on this and I'm going to move it up a tiny bit because I think it's a little bit crooked here so I'll go to about right there and click rotate and now you'll see there is some transparency going along the border here and the layer size has shrunk down as well so I'm just going to zoom back out a little bit all I need to do to fix this is go to image crop to content and that'll crop out all of that excess we had there and now what I'll do is grab my crop tool I'm gonna uncheck my size with my fixed aspect ratio I had here originally and I'm just going to click and draw the elements that I want to keep in here or I'm going to crop in the elements I want to keep here so I'm just going to crop out some of the left side of the screen here and some of the top nothing major so I'm just going to click the crop once I've done that I can now convert this to black and white so I'll go to colors desaturate desaturate and set the mode of luminance and click OK alright so we have a lot of contrast here but we do need to enhance it a little bit but first what I want to do is recover some of the details in the shadows so there's a lot of cool textures going on within the steel but you can't see it right now because it's too dark after converting it to black and white so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to colors shadows highlights and I'm going to turn the shadows up a little bit and I'm going to turn it up until I see the amount of detail I want to see in the steel so you'll see I'm turning this up quite a bit I don't want to do too much like if I go all the way to 100 you'll see it looks really artificial over here so I'm just going to turn this down a little bit and I can also turn up my highlights and that's going to help bring in some of this light so the light will spill in a little bit more and here's a before here's an after so a lot more detail going on in the steel here we're gonna bring out some more of it as we make more adjustments and I'm also going to adjust the white point that'll also bring in a little bit more white pixels which will brighten up the image overall so there's a before and there's an after and actually let me turn the shadows down a bit all right so now I'm gonna click OK the next thing I'll do is I'll increase the exposure of this so I'll go to colors exposure and you can play around the exposure this is based on stops so I'm just going to turn this up by half a stop and let me try a full stop here so here's before here's after you can see there is a balance between completely blowing up the sky and the details in the sky and bringing in details of the steel when I use this method because exposure is going to brighten up the whole image not just the shadows or the highlights so a little bit less control here but what I'm going to do is just turn this back down at 0.5 and click OK now I'm gonna add some contrast by going to colors curves and again I'm going to create a midpoint here and I'm going to just play around here and see how this looks so this time when I drag the shadows up a little bit it brings up the details in here without really adding too much noise in my opinion and then if I drag the highlights down it recovers some of the sky here so here's a before here's an after and if I go the other way so if I turn the shadows down a bit I do lose some detail and then if I turn the highlights up again I also lose some detail but it does create more of a dramatic effect here so I think this edit ultimately is up to your personal preference I'm just going to keep this with the shadows turned up a bit and the highlights turned down a bit before or and after and click OK and then let me adjust the levels to this I'll go to colors levels and let me just play around with this and see if I can get a look that I like so let's get some of the mid-tones turned up test the highlights here so this brought some of that dramatic look back into this while also being able to turn some of the mid-tones up there a little bit so I'll click okay all right so now compared to the original photo you'll see there's a lot more detail going on in the steel beams here you can see more of those textures but now what I want to do is enhance the light right here the light source and I also want to add a vignette to this and sharpen it up so I'm going to create a new layer and we're gonna name the soft light again and also change the mode to soft light and click OK and once again we will grab our paintbrush tool here I'm going to adjust the size of my brush so it's a fairly large brush size and I'm just going to click with this set to white right here on the light source so you'll see that has enhanced our light source right there and now I'm gonna create a new layer again and name this vignette and click OK and then once again I'll go to filters light and shadow vignette and so this time the default settings aren't too bad I'm gonna play with the radius here see if I could bring this in a bit and also let me change the mode here to normal so this is the layer mode set to normal here so let me play around with the radius I'm gonna keep this proportionate to the aspect ratio of the image and then you can also play around with the gamma to again determine how much of that black from the gradient creeps into the center of your photo and softness kind of does the same thing as well it's a very similar adjustment there so there's a before there's an after you can see this is framed a lot better now with this vignette and I'll click OK and lastly I'm just gonna add some sharpening to this image so I'm gonna click on the main image layer go to filters enhance sharpen unsharp mask and I'll keep all the settings here the same and click OK and there's our second image alright so I'm going to do one less image and this is going to be the image of the two gentlemen on the train platform so I'm going to open up my file window here and I'm going to come over to the original image and I'm going to open it up with so I wanted to use this image because it shows you how much you can play around with your image when you do capture your photo in a very large JPEG format or even a raw format so because this is such a large photo right now instead of just scaling this down immediately what I can do is I can grab my crop tool and I can sort of zoom in on my image and just look around and see if there's any composition in here that's worth cropping this image too and one thing I noticed is that there's this guy wearing like a hat and he's got a funny mustache and then there's a security guard that he's talking to I just thought that was kind of interesting and you can't really see that unless you zoom in on that so then what I did was I just came over here to my crop tool and I'm gonna click this to a fixed aspect ratio of 1920 by 1080 just for this photo and now what I'll do is I'll draw my crop and you'll see that this is now allowing me to reframe my photo so instead of having all this stuff going on out here we've just zoomed this into what's happening right here and then another thing you can do is if you want this to be a specific size you can come over here to the size and change this so for example if I wanted this to be 1920 I can type that in there and that'll shrink the crop size down and then I can just change where this crop is residing or where it's sitting on the image there and I can double click to crop that so now if i zoom in this is still an HD photo but it is zoomed in a lot so you know there's not as much detail going on with the subject and everything there I'm gonna hit ctrl Z because I actually don't like that composition too much but this time I'm going to draw my crop again and only keep the elements I want to keep so let's go with about right there and then once you're ready just click to crop and then hold ctrl and zoom in a little bit so here's our new composition now I'm going to convert this to black and white so go to colors desaturate desaturate and I'll click OK so this is a pretty dark photo once it's converted to black and white so what I can do is go to colors shadows highlights and I'm just going to work on recovering what's going on in the shadows and I'm not going to turn this up too much there's other adjustments we can make to this to recover those details and brighten our subject up a bit but I can turn this up a decent amount here so I'm at around 50 right now and that's looking pretty good I can also increase or decrease my highlights depending on what I want to do here I'm gonna increase them a bit and then of course you can shift your white point here and that's going to change the clipping point there for your white pixels so I'll preview here's a before here's an after so we've recovered a decent amount in the shadows and I'll just click ok next I'm going to come over to colors exposure and once again I'm just going to increase my exposure a little bit so in this case once again I'm going to increase it just by 0.5 and hit enter and because this is a gaggle filter I can preview what this will look like before I apply it so there's before there's an after and I'll click OK alright so this photo is looking a lot brighter now the last thing I want to do is just brighten up my subjects right here so I'm going to create a new layer and I'll name the soft light once again and keep the mode set to soft light and I'll grab my paintbrush tool again and increase the size of this and then once again I'm just going to click on my subjects and you'll see now here's a before here's an after that just brings your attention it draws the eye to that spot where these subjects are standing but right now there's not really a clear guideline telling you to look at our subjects here so what we can do is we can create a new layer and name this vignette and change the mode to normal again and click OK this time we're not going to use the vignette tool we're going to use just the gradient tool I'm gonna switch my color over to black and I'm going to set my shape now to linear and what I'll do is I'll just draw a line from the right side of my image heading towards my subjects this is going the wrong way right now though so I'm just going to come over here and click to switch my gradient so now it's coming over from the right side of the image and then I can click on this midpoint here and just adjust the fade of my black and you'll see that as I do that it is causing the right side of my photo to fade out a little bit and I can always adjust where this endpoint sits if I want and then further adjust my midpoint here and so by having this fade out over here it does draw your eye more to the left part of the image so I'll hit enter to apply that gradient and I'm actually the changes to vignette right because we're going to create another new layer and we're gonna name this vignette left click OK and we'll do the same thing except this time we'll do it on the left side and I'm gonna hold ctrl to stay in the straight line mode while I draw this gradient and this time I'm going to stop this gradient right about here and maybe cause the endpoint to come a little bit off of the canvas here and so now you can see that these vignettes are helping to draw the eye right here to our subjects I'll hit enter so now I'm gonna come back over to my main image and I'm gonna use that mono mixer so I'll go to colors desaturate mono mixer and now I can adjust the various channels here in the image and this is just allowing me to further enhance the black and white pixels going on in the image so it's basically making them either brighter or darker that's really the only two options when it comes to black and white photos so there's a four and there's an after and I'll click OK and the last thing I'll do here is enhance this I'll go to filters enhance and choose sharpen so we're just sharpening this image up a bit and I'm just going with the default settings here and I'll click OK and there's our final image so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you guys liked it if you did you could subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash Davey's media design you can visit our website at Davey's media design com you can roll in our best-selling get photo editing course from beginner and a pro photo retoucher on udemy and you can support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and get some awesome extras in return and I'll include a link to that as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 20,121

Rating: 4.9356914 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, gimp graphic design, gimp photo editing, gimp 2018, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, black and white, b&w, grayscale, black and white photos, black and white photography, photography, b&w editing, grayscale editing, desaturate, mono mixer, monochrome, photography for beginners, intro to photography, intro to photo editing

Id: 7m6Jd01vD9s

Length: 23min 20sec (1400 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 06 2018