How To Use The Gradient Map for Black and White Photographs

[Music] hi it's Jamal Minsky from altered space photo tribe it seems like there's a million ways to create black-and-white photographs in Photoshop everybody who does it has their own way and a lot of people will tell you that their way is the only way or that their way is really the right way and I'm not gonna tell you that I am gonna show you one of my favorite methods but I will admit that I use a lot of different techniques and a lot of different methods to make black and white photographs even the initial conversion which tool I use depends on my mood and it depends on the photograph and it depends on what it is that I'm trying to create what I'm gonna show you now is kind of my fallback tool the first line of black and white defense if you will and that's the gradient map adjustment layer I am however gonna combine that with another adjustment layer the black and white adjustment layer and that might sound confusing just bear with me and you'll see what I mean what we're gonna do is we're going to go from this photograph to this photograph we're gonna do it really quickly so let me get rid of this layer and let's just kind of jump in here and start from scratch so the first thing I'll do is grab a black and white adjustment layer and I'm not gonna do anything to it I'm just gonna go right ahead and put a gradient map adjustment layer right on top of it and your gradient may look the same as this it may look different it depends on what your foreground and background colors are what colors you use last when you were working in Photoshop if your gradient doesn't look right all you need to do is click right here in this gradient bar and just select black/white and you get a nice black and white photograph so let's turn this layer off and you could see the difference between what the black and white adjustment layer gave us by default and what the gradient map adjustment layer gives us so why are we using both because this black and white adjustment layer can still see the color from the background layer that means that I can go into the black and white adjustment layer and I can adjust the colors so I can bring my yellows up a little bit so I can get some of the nice texture from these stones and rocks in the foreground and bring out some of the texture from my trees so I probably got some greens in here too not too much and there's red in there but I don't want to make that that's in the foreground I'll make that too bright and there's probably not very much in the way of blue and magenta because it's a pretty overcast sky for an initial black and white conversion that looks pretty good I'm gonna go with that so let's close this down for a second and just take a look at where we are so really quickly we've run from this to this I'm gonna go back up into my adjustments palette and grab a curve and it just gonna darken the curve so I'm starting to add some atmosphere to my photo now and my blacks are starting to get a little too black so as I go I like to protect my black so I'm just gonna click on my black point here and touch my up arrow key a time or two and you can see that my black start to lift if I go too high then I get that kind of flat matted effect and that's not really what I want here I just wanna keep them from getting too dark on me so that's pretty good and I'm gonna move this up above the gradient map where it belongs and of course now it looks different but that's not too bad that looks pretty good so and I'm dragging this white point down because I want to maintain these relationships these tonal relationships if I leave this up here I've got too much contrast and I just want to pull that down just a little bit so I'm gonna take a big brush let's close this down and I'm gonna make sure that I'm painting with black and I'm gonna change my opacity to about 50% and I just want to reveal the center part of this photo so I'm gonna click once over here and move over to the other side of the photo and hold down the shift key and click again and I get that nice stripe across there and I also want to reveal this bottom part here so I'm gonna try using the same brush size and let's just click and that's perfect that's exactly what we want now I'm gonna do something completely counterintuitive I'm gonna add a brightness and contrast adjustment and I'm going to brighten this significantly and it might add a little bit of contrast too and the reason I'm brightening this is because I'm about to darken it and you have more latitude darkening tones that you've already brightened than the other way around it's hard to lighten tones that you've already darkened so I'm going to do some really substantial darkening here and I'm gonna be better off with light tones so at this point I will make a stamp and I'm going to go up into the filter menu and I'm going to select blur Gaussian blur and I'm gonna blur this about Oh 30 pixels maybe not even that much that's a little too much let's try 22 that's good and I'm gonna go over here and change my blend mode to multiply so now everything gets really dark I'm gonna back that off a little bit and it's obviously too dark but we're getting that kind of moody look that we're after now so I want to protect my highlights I don't want my highlights to get this blur so much so I'm gonna double click on this area right over here this gray area in my layer and bring up the layer style dialog box and I'll use blend if to bring back some of these highlights so let's just grab this slider here and you can see what happens if I go and we want that to feather out nicely and that's perfect so that's our before and that's our after now it's looking like my blacks are getting a little buried again so I want to bring those up and I'm just gonna do that by grabbing a curve here and I'm gonna lock this quarter tone down right where it's at because I don't want anything above there to move just the black so I'll click here and I'm just gonna have to tap a couple of times to bring my blacks up so again if I go too far then I get that mad effect and that's not really what I want I just want to make sure that my blacks aren't buried and that looks really perfect so let's start to play with our sky a little bit I'm gonna add another curve here and I'm just gonna pull this down just like that I don't really need to worry about the tonal relationship here because I actually want the contrast but what I'm gonna do is invert this mask and I'm gonna grab my gradient tool and I'm going to paint with a foreground to transparent gradient using a linear gradient and I want to be painting with white because I want to reveal the adjustment that's underneath this black mass I'm gonna switch my foreground color to white and I'm doing this at a hundred percent so I'm gonna start right about here and hold down the shift key to constrain this to vertical and just drag to about there that's great that's exactly what I want I've got nice drama in my sky now so what I want to do is select this mask and paint back some of these highlights in the sky so it doesn't look so vignette II so I'm gonna grab my Wacom pen here and switch over to the brush tool and reduce the size of the brush tool and I want to make sure that I'm painting with a brush that's sensitive to pressure and that the opacity will change depending on how much pressure I add to my brush and I'm gonna paint with black because I want to paint some of this darkening effect out and I'm gonna do it at a really light opacity I'm gonna do it at like 10% just a little bit at a time really light touch so I just want to bring some of this stuff back and you could see that I am using a very light touch but when I turn this mask on and off you're gonna see the difference sometimes I'm gonna need to reduce the size of my brush a little bit and again I'm gonna say that you know you want to use the biggest brush you can get away with big brush strokes are hard to see so I want that revealed like that so if I turn my mask I don't know let's just step through the history palette actually and just go up above my brush strokes here if I can and you can see the effect of my brush strokes so all we really need now is a nice vignette and some tone control I'm going to grab my lasso tool and make a nice organic shape because organic shapes don't look so thin Yeti and I hate it when vignettes look like vignettes let's make a curves adjustment layer and Photoshop will create a mask based on our selection now we want to darken the outer edges of the photo and that means that my mask is backwards so I need to invert that controller command I and I'm going back up into the filter menu blur Gaussian blur and I want about 400 pixels this time so I'll click OK and grab my curve and just drag it down now my blacks are starting to get a little out of hand again so I'm gonna click on my black point here and just tick tick tick tick tick go up a few times until those blacks start to come back now what I want to do is I want to bring back some of the darker spots in this photo because I don't want it so dark uniformly everywhere so I want to paint with black and I'm gonna grab my brush tool and we're gonna paint with 20% that's pretty good let me make my brush kind of big because I want to bring back this area here because that's what's leading me into the photo right and so we'll use up on this corner a little bit and I'm gonna bring back some of my highlights again he's gonna really light touch on this brush let's make this a little smaller just come in here a little bit and a little bigger just to blend that in and we'll bring back some of this some of this and maybe some of this shadow a little bit of that and there you have it so really quickly really quickly we went from this to this the gradient map adjustment layer is your friend it is an awesome tool for creating black and white images so practice using it and I'd love to see what you're doing so post some of your images on the photo tribe Facebook page the link is below and if you like what you see subscribe to the channel this is Jim well Netsky from the photo tribe be creative have fun and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Jim Welninski

Views: 60,696

Keywords: black and white, photoshop, tutorial, gradient map, black and white conversion

Id: FNv8XXuhtbA

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 02 2017