How to Perfect Black & White Landscapes - WITHOUT PRESETS

hi my name is Alistair Bain and this is expressive photography this week I'm going to start a series of videos where I dive into the whole art and creativity of black and white photography this is something I've had a lot of requests for in comments and by email and on social media so we're going to be looking at Lightroom and the powerful tools that exist just in there to make very expressive and very beautiful black and white photographs without doing too much processing or relying on third-party filters or plugins so I hope you enjoy this episode where we look at the powerful expression of black and white photography [Music] [Music] black-and-white photography has been around for a long long time it started as a limitation of the medium we only had black-and-white film back in those days no black-and-white photography is a creative choice and why would we do that when we have all this amazing color and the capacity to manage and deal with color why would we do black-and-white photography and that's kind of what I want to look at in this first part is the creative choice of making images in black and white and what they're telling us different from the color photographs no black-and-white photography is something that is very close to my heart I've written two books on black and white photography and the second one is luminosity and contrast which is still available on our store I didn't want to just do a regular black-and-white book because they've been done again and again and in luminosity in contrast what I've done is I've broken down black and white photography into his component parts and some of those I'm going to start addressing today but obviously in the book I go and turn off a lot more detail including Photoshop processing so we'll start off by looking at some photographs today and understanding why we may want to go into black and white and secondly the advantages of doing so and thirdly the tools that we have at our disposal just in Lightroom that will allow us to make these black and white photographs without having to do too much processing or indeed making it too complicated so I think we can just dive straight into Adobe Lightroom and have a look at some of these photographs now something I actually do quite a lot and if you were to look at my broader Lightroom catalog you know some of these photographs you know like this this area for example in there all of these are black and white in Lightroom and that's because I actually photographed them in black and white and I do that because quite often by just shooting in black and white you strip the color out of the scene and it allows you to focus on the other relationships that are talking to you pardon me which is geometry atmosphere contrast luminosity by stripping the color away we zone right into what these images are actually about which is their structure and the transitions all of this I've talked about in the compositional consequences series so if I just go in to some of the images I've chosen here I posted this image on social media last week this is the color version just with a few basic adjustments in Lightroom and then the black and white version is this one and you'll instantly see how much more contrast II the black and white version is the blacks are blacker the whites are whiter I've been able to introduce more contrast more luminosity and one of the reasons for this particular case is that the color version if you start pushing contrast in color so if I just take this into the develop module and let's see we just grab the contrast slider as soon as you crank up the contrast to create that darker darks and brighter brights the colors get really out of control and you end up shifting the colors around an awful lot now we can overcome this we can make high contrast photographs in color but sometimes it's it's just too much it can become very very difficult and very time-consuming and one of the things I enjoy about black and white photography is that you can really push contrast and not have to deal with all of that color situation so if I come back in and just have a quick look I've got three examples all desert images all from China and it's just because they're all quite low contrast natively and what I'm wanting to do is demonstrate how we can increase the power and impact of these photographs to make something really quite striking with some very simple adjustments but understanding that if we try to do the same thing in color that things get kind of out of control so in this first case again if I just grab the contrast slider and let's see just set myself a black point in a white point we've created a very powerful color image which is rich and vibrant and and really quite beautiful and we do have a bit of cool to warm transition there so we've got the warmth and the foreground the coolness and the background so the thing is successful as a color photograph it now has way more impact than it had at the beginning and I've just made a couple of very simple adjustments here no the thing about this is that once the color is in it's talking to you the warm colors the cool colors were creating depth and three-dimensionality and the thing about color images is there's a native connection to reality whereas with black and white there's a departure from reality purely because we don't see in black and white so if I just turn this into a black and white photograph where suddenly detached from that reality situation this now becomes almost timeless the date stamp this could have been taken 80 to 100 years ago whereas the color photograph is contemporary so by allowing ourselves to make images in black and white we're removing an immediate identifiable time period and that that's a kind of that departure from reality allows us to pursue other creative avenues because if we want to start changing the the kind of overall contrast and tonality of this image we can quite easily and I think I'm gonna just drop this into a sixteen by nine just to get that feeling of a little bit more expand and sickness and I'm gonna drop gradient down in the back here and just get a little bit of D haze and take out the darkest shadows and that is going to create soaking a nice dreamy backdrop for the back of that photograph now we haven't done a massive amount to this image all we've done is increased contrast we have just added a little bit more atmosphere to something that was already there now the tools that we have in Adobe Lightroom allow us to change tonal relationships based on colors that are no longer being shown in the file and if I just click on this BW mix button here we know if we go back into color we know that this background is bluish and we know that the foreground is warm now if I just increase the vibrance of this and make have quite an over-the-top color version of this and now go back into black and white I've now given the computer more data so I'm now giving it an opportunity to basically make black and white conversions based on more color values and that's what the black and white mix does when we first click the black and white button it makes a default conversion where the brightness of the colors is just transferred to a tone so a bright warm tone is the same as a bright cool tone there's no distinction so if I come in with the with the color picker here if I wanted to increase the brightness of the background I can do that and you'll see that the blue channel has been pushed up or increasing the luminosity of the Blues if I come into the warmer tones here and pull those down I'm actually making you can see here the orange tones and the yellow tones have been darkened so we can use the black in room white mix to create contrast and you can do things with this that you cannot do with the color version purely because if I now go back into color you'll see that the colors themselves just get really vibrant and rich because we're messing around with those values is just we're not seeing them in the black and white version now I do not ever use presets I don't use the presets in Lightroom and I no longer use any presets and some software like Nik or anything like that I'm gonna look at Nick next week just because it's one of the most commonly used black and white conversion tools and I might even look at some of the Topaz stuff but for now I want to stick in Lightroom because we can make great black and white photographs right here in Lightroom if I now move through to another sanjana image here now this is an image that nothing's been done to it this is the raw file I've removed a few spots I think that's about all I've done now this is a classic example of an image that if I start making it very high contrast you can see quite quickly we get some of this weird banding there's kind of the distribution of of the tones and this and the saturation is quite strange in this photograph which is why I've chosen it there's only so far we can really go before the luminosity and the colors just get very kind of out of whack if I try and cool it you know other weird things happen it's it's it's quite an unusual photograph whereas if I go straight back into black and white all of a sudden I can really push the contrast and dial in a version of this photograph that is far more expressive for one I want to bring down a bit of a gradient mirror to try and brighten some of those background highlights and open up the shadows a little bit and just make that a little bit more explicit and there's another little brush down in here that I'd quite like to try and do something with I think I'll just use a brush for that and again I'm just gonna crank up the waves and paint in and maybe just add some texture and clarity into there as well make that really shine a little bit more so you'll see very very quickly we've ended up with a photograph that's been stripped down to its essence we've got that beautiful curve we're not being distracted by some of those colors were not being distracted by strange distributions of saturation that didn't seem to make any sense and if I was to go back into the color version you'll see that it's weird you know we've got purpley blue shadows and kind of washed out highlights and it I mean don't get me wrong I can make this photograph work in color but some of these very striking graphical compositions I think just works so beautifully in mono now why is that appealing to us I think if we look at some other black-and-white photographs out there that I've made on the screen right now what we're doing is we're stripping the landscape down to his component parts we've got shapes we've got geometry we have atmosphere we have curves and lines we have transitions between detailed areas and Atmospheric areas and if you go back to the compositional series the compositional consequences series I cover all of the cycle attributes that come along with these decisions so for black and white it's a conscious choice to remove color and I think the thing with color is is such a dominant thing in our lives as I just look around my office right now I've got a blue guitar here I've got a colorful acoustic guitar behind the camera there's all sorts of color in the room that becomes very very dominant and if we take it out or photographs we then have to rely on other things to tell our stories other things to engage our viewers because it's very easy to rely on color now this final photograph literally I just found this in my catalog two minutes before starting to record this so I haven't done any work on it I haven't explored possibilities of it and now I took this photograph because of its striking geometry I love that kind of lightning bolt line that goes through the middle of the frame and the sweeping textural shift from the foreground right through into the background so as I see a lot of depth in this I feel a lot of depth in this so if I come in and process this to start off with in color I can make this look pretty beautiful I think quite quickly and I'm going to make it very high contrast because as we've discussed before high contrast images have more engagement now I don't always make high contrast photographs but in this particular case I want to strip it down into its absolute essence and make something that's got all of the component parts that I find so captivating in this so I'm going to start off just with a simple it's not quite a black and white point but it's really close in fact if I hold down the J key and pull down my shadows the clipping is going to be up there so I'll do it to there and then my white point see how those colors just start to get a little bit out of control that's basically the red channel getting near clipping you can see in the histogram up in the top right hand corner we have the redshift in those highlights and we've got actually blue in the shadows there's nothing more powerful in a histogram to understand what's going on in a photograph so if I was to cool this photograph down we're going to end up getting to a point where it gets closer to the real colors and we're getting rid of the overly warm shift and we're getting rid of the overly cool shift and we're starting to neutralize this photograph and because of the time of day there is a cool warm transition because it was this is the light that was going on I think it was very overcast on this day so there's a lot of blue light in this now you can see all the detail and texture in this right-hand side I think I'm just going to exaggerate that somewhat with a gradient and just increase the clarity and texture and the luminosity of that side and then the other side I'm going to pull down a bit of a gradient and I'm just going to cool that a fraction more and you can see that we're just starting to create some of those transitions I've talked about an awful lot this is an image that can work in black and white or color before we move into black and white what I want to do is make it over you know I want to really crank up the vibrance introduce more color because when I come into the black and white version I want to give data for this to play with and now I can come into my BW mix and see right what do we want to do here let's there's not a lot of clicking potential going on here so most of it so if I come in and cool it further you'll see now by changing the temperature and the tint that I am changing the contrast within the photograph it's a bizarre thing that if you come in if I if I crank up the white balance see how quickly we start to clip all those highlights because it's quite warm so if I darken if I cool this temperature if I'm play around with the tints you will see that we can change the contrast as well the tools playing around with temperature and tint when the images in black and white is incredible equally playing around with the curves also I can now come in and really pull down some of that contrast create a little bit more luminosity now this little shadow up there for me is just a little bit too dark so I'm just going to come in and with my brush I'm just going to open up that a little bit now this is something to have a real awareness of is something that's that dark is really going to drag your eye and if it's dragging your eye up into that top part of the frame it's going to feel quite odd it's going to feel quite tense I'm going to finish this image off with a very simple vignette where zero that effect again and I'm going to do something I do from time to time which is vennett regularly and then use the range mask to get rid of the vignetting on the darkest tones and the brightest tones and that way it's more just sort of an yet the mid-tones and open up those shadows a little bit more so really what we're getting to here and I would have to spend maybe a little bit more time with this to sort of dial it through again when you're processing to demonstrate a technique it's kind of different from processing by gut feel if I was to sit down and just process this image without talking about it it would probably turn out a little bit differently but what I want to demonstrate or why think I've demonstrate with the images that we've looked at is that every single case is different so I'll just take this back into black and white there we go the images that we've had a look at if I were to just make them a bit bigger on the screen every case is different we have a situation where we can we can certainly adjust contrast far more aggressively in black and white photographs and we can in color photographs we can use the b/w mix to vary how bright or how dark certain colors are going to be represented as tones and I think this is one of the most powerful tools that Lightroom has I ignore presets there's nothing creative about using a preset and that isn't a judgment it's just a fact if you want to learn how to be a better processor you have to take responsibility for the processing clicking a preset and we'll do that next week when we look at Nick creating a preset it's not creativity it's just making a bunch of algorithmic changes to the photograph none of which you have any control over and it's like clicking a preset and then saying this is my art I'm afraid that's under no definition is that considered art any more than getting a program to paint a painting for you so if we want to become better more expressive landscape photographers we have to realize that the tools that we have at our disposal are our most powerful ally and in fact they're not that complicated and again we need to look at luminosity contrast and the transitions between areas in the frame that have more or less of those qualities and really that's what processing is all about again I can't stress enough I covered all this great detail in my book luminosity in contrast the clue isn't fight in the name I hope you found this short video useful it's a starting point where we're going to move forward with black-and-white photography for maybe three more weeks and looking at lots of different images lots of different styles and how we can evolve some of these concepts so please stay tuned on a regular basis on Wednesday of this week coming I will be speaking with massive enjoyment to the wonderful Alex Noriega fabulous landscape photographer who always has incredible insights into the creative process next week we'll be back of course with another black and white video until that point in time stay safe thank you very much for everyone who has subscribed and if you haven't yet then please click on the subscribe button and the Bell notification and I'm hope that you'll be able to get lots of enjoyment out of the content that we take a lot of pride in making every week thanks for watching again I hope everyone's okay all the best bye for now [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Expressive Photography

Views: 14,599

Keywords: Lightroom, Photography, Alister Benn, Landscape photography, how to, tutorials, composition, educate, expressive photography, barriers, vision, experience, tutorial, lesson, teach, professional, be better, at, happy, motivation, inspiration, inspire, Luminosity, Processing, Understanding light, Light, engagement, better photographs, landscape, mountains, process, meaning, emotion, personal development, contrast, Transitions, Adobe, desert, black and white, BW mix, BW, black and white photography

Id: w0kymyxNCPA

Length: 25min 43sec (1543 seconds)

Published: Sun May 10 2020