Low Key Black and White Editing Technique in Luminar AI - Simple Editing, Great Results!

if you want to see how you can easily create stunning black and white images like this in luminar ai stay with me for this photo editing tutorial [Music] recently i put up a video showing how i created this black and white in luminar ai and i'll put a link to that video in the description if you're interested in watching that but i've got a lot of positive feedback from you guys saying you wanted to see more on black and white post-production so here it is we're going to take this photograph a stunning model sammy that i took in a barn in new zealand and i'm going to share with you some pretty simple steps to actually get a really nice black and white conversion to create the whole look we're just going to use three of luminar's tools all within the essentials tab and then we're just going to finesse the look by controlling those highlights using some local masking other than the black and white conversion itself probably the most important part of this particular process where we're lifting the blacks and pulling down the white slightly to give a more muted and soft black and white look is all done through the curves panel now if you're new to curves don't panic i'm going to explain exactly how to use them is well worth investing the time in just understanding and learning a bit about curves because you can control all manner of effects plane airplane every time unbelievable outside every time i record a video i think it's like the truman show he's trying to record a video send the planes up anyway i digress curves totally worth learning and i'm going to talk about them in this video so let's dive into it and take a look so in the last black and white tutorial which you guys all seem to really love we did this edit of bella here in the top left corner and at the end of that video i said if you're interested i can show you the technique in developing this photograph here and possibly this one as well so we've got a kind of low-key crushed look to this one and we've got a nice bright high key look to this one so rather than recreating this black and white template by root by showing you exactly what i've done here what i want to do is just get creative with luminox that's what it's all about and work on a different photograph very similar and see if we can't create a similar kind of look i don't just want to follow by number exactly what i've done in the past and hopefully by following along and me talking through my thought process you guys will get a little bit more out of this so the first thing we want to do is jump into the edit section and most of the heavy lifting for any of these black and white looks is created in the essential section here so the first place i want to start before i do anything is jumping straight into the black and white conversion so if we click convert to black and white as you would have seen in the last video we get something which is black and white but it's not necessarily that compelling so in order to get a little bit more from our black and white what we want to do is actually control the colors that were there present in the original picture and we can actually brighten the reds or darken them we can do the same with yellows brighten or darken those and because the skin color resides predominantly in red and yellow what i recommend doing is boosting those up so that the skin of your model takes on those brighter values and that will just help to stand out just a little bit more because as we've discussed in the past your eye will naturally be drawn to brighter parts of the image and won't focus as much on those darker areas so even before we've done anything more to this photograph your eye comes to the model's face to the shoulders and chest area and for example up here in the ceiling the rafters here in this shed your eye just hasn't really got drawn there because it's all dark not much going on this is where our attention is and that's what we want to do with our black and white just get that attention of the viewer to focus more where we want it to now while there isn't much of these other colors present i'm just going to move them from the left to the right just to see if they're having any effect at all so the cyan is just having a slight effect in the shed in the background so we'll darken that down and the blue definitely in our dungarees that's controlling the brightness level of those so i'm actually going to bring those down but not too far and the magenta is just affecting this little bit of rope just here so that's neither here nor there we can leave that alone now i've got my basic black and white conversion what i want to do is actually come into the light section and this is one of the most important sections in the whole of luminar from inside here we can change the color balance of our photo and while we're working with black and white you might not think this has any effect but you would be wrong my friend if we take this from the left to the right you can actually see that by changing the color temperature we actually affecting the brightness values of the black and white and that all comes down to the fact that we're changing the colors in the photo and then that black and white conversion we just worked on here that's already dialing in and brightening up reds and yellows so as we were pushing the light section the white balance up towards the reds and yellows obviously that's brightening up the photo in those zones while we can work with the exposure i prefer to try and get it right in the camera and then not build that into an actual template itself and that leaves you free to have templates that aren't exposure dependent and you can come in if you need to just with one slider and actually change that exposure whilst not affecting the overall look of the template now smart contrast is really really powerful especially for black and whites if i push that to a hundred we can see that we've created a really really strong punchy image now how much of that you want is up to you but for me i think that's too much but i certainly like the way it's heading when we push that smart contrast up even if i were to push that all the way to 100 i know that i'm going to recover some of the detail in the highlights by bringing the highlights down and i'm also going to recover some of the detail in the shadows by lifting those up with this slider here as i say smart contrast all the way to 100 just a little bit too heavy for me and if we look at our before and after we can see that we are already well on our way to creating a nice black and white image before we go any further i'll just give you a little bit of an insight into my thought process at the moment i'm really liking the nice high contrast we've got in her face now i feel like we've got a good range of values from her skin on her forehead and this side of her cheek wrapping around into the darker side of her chin and her cheek here and also the darkness of her hair something you may not have noticed but i'll point it out to you just so you're aware of this sort of thing when you're taking photographs yourself i could have pointed my camera taken this photograph of sammy sat on this hay and framed her head against any part of this background but by moving my position i was able to change the background relative to her head with quite a specific purpose in mind what i wanted to do was take the bright part of her face here and frame that against the black wood the wood frame here so we had a really nice strong contrast between her cheek and this darkness and the same on the back side of her head here we've got back side the back side of her hair here nothing to do with her backside um against the brighter part of the shed here so you've got that contrast you've got that duality between bright and dark and that just makes this part of her head pop out and the same on this side here but the other way around and that makes the front part of her head pop out so while a lot of the editing is done in the computer in that conversion process to black and white you want to consider these light values when you're actually taking the photograph so that your photo will have the best of both worlds a really great in-camera capture as well as your post-production so if we have a quick look again our before and after we're seeing a nice process going on here i'm enjoying what's going on with her face but i do feel that her top here is a little bit too bright i also find that these panels to the left here the top one and the one just to the left are a little distracting as well so there are some things i'm going to do to take care of those but that's where local adjustments come in when we're talking to specific parts of the image we don't deal to that on a global adjustment because obviously any slider we work with is affecting the whole picture we're going to deal with that local masking section here to deal to those areas but for now i just want to get my overall template my overall look the way i want it now i know you've got luminar ai already that's why you're watching this video but if by any chance you don't you can use my link below and i've also got discount code at sky10 that you're welcome to use to save yourself some money at checkout and i also get a small commission from that as well which helps me keep creating this free content for you guys cheers for watching let's get back into it if you understand histograms the next bit's easy if you don't it's still going to be easy because i'll explain it for you so if we look at our graph that's represented inside of this section here this square if you look to the left the greater distribution of this graph the data here that's saying there's a lot of black so we have black on the left white on the right and mid tones in the middle so it's saying we've got a fair bit of black going on here a little bit of darker tones here not much in the way of highlights and mid-tones so for example this little spike of the graph right here that would be referring to her top here the mid-tone area would probably be this area around here a bit of her face and some of her body here and then this darker area all around here that would be referring to the areas in the background and her hair if you're wondering how i know that it's just from years of experience of dealing with curves but basically that's the principle and i'm explaining that to you because the crux of the overall look we're trying to create and emulate which is in this photograph here a lot of that look comes from what i've done in the curves panel right here so let's go back to this one here which we're working on which is currently a much higher contrast black and white than what i just showed you and i'll show you how we can use curves to create that softer more muted kind of black and white that we're working towards so before i dive into curves i just want to move the white point if i start moving this you will actually see this reflected on the histogram when i move that up to 16 you will have seen the right hand side which as i said talks into the white points of the photograph if i push that to 100 you'll see that push all the way up and now we've blown out all these whites here so what i want to do is get that white point just to start on the right hand side of the histogram so somewhere around there is okay and then the same with the black point we're pretty close already so i probably don't need to go down too far with that and i'm just going to do a little bit of a luminar dance here because sometimes when you change one slider it can affect other things so the fact that we've pushed the white point further up i feel now we've gone really bright in the chest area here so i'm just going to dial back those highlights a little bit further again and just recover just a little bit of that detail there as well so now let's have a look at the curves so this line going across here represents our black to white if we pull any point on this curve down on this line down we're darkening it so if i click i'm going to make a point and if i pull it down you'll see that we start to darken everything in our photograph it's predominantly pulling down through the mid tones in our photo but as i pull that down obviously it's also pulling down into the blacks also pulling down the white slightly as well so by putting control points along this line and moving them up moving them down i can control the brightness values of different parts of the photo so the curves which is buried away and not normally shown is a really really powerful part of any photo editor in luminar it's naturally in a collapsed state and i think the reason for that is because it is slightly more complicated and luminar is very much designed to make things as easy for you as possible but i just think this is such a powerful tool you can't really ignore it so if you put points where you don't want them we can just double click them and they disappear and now we get to the fundamental part of what makes this particular black and white look so in the same way we can push the middle point up and down and create a point there these points that we have bottom left and top right they are also movable but you can see that if we grab this point that represents those blacks and move it up we're brightening those pixels and by the same way we can grab the top right which is the whites and bring that down and darken those whites as well so now we know that we're able to grab this black point and lift it up just a little bit so the dark parts of our image aren't quite as dense as they were if we want to we can bring the white points and just soften those off just a little bit as well just so they're not quite as stark and just by moving those two points that is the essence of that black and white process that i showed you in the last video that all of you said yeah show me that how do you do that so it's as easy as that but we can take things just a little bit further and what i like to do is actually just pull down a point just quite close to the blacks so that we're keeping our shadows nice and dark and then if i feel that things are getting a little bit too dark in the mid tones we can put a point in those mid tones and lift that up slightly so to create a template like that it really is as easy as that and i haven't even looked at any of the other useful ai tools at this point and for the sake of keeping this demonstration fairly brief i'm not going to dive into the other stuff like ai enhance or structure or anything like that but i will show you how to deal to these bright areas that are kind of bugging me at the moment so we're going to come over to local masking we're going to add a basic adjustment and we're going to bring these highlights down and we're going to bring the exposure down as well i'm going to grab the contrast and just see what's happening if i start playing with that contrast and if we take it to the left and reduce that contrast a little bit i'm going to bring the shadows up just a bit so they don't get too dark and now with my brush i'm just going to paint that effect in over the shirt so now i've darkened the shirt down i can darken down these panels as well and if we turn that off and on you can see that we've controlled those brightness values we could do the same on our knee if we feel that's distracting her arm basically you're free to craft the light and control the light as you want so again off and on and one thing i haven't done in this process which really helps to guide your eye it's really easy to do let me just show you this come into the essentials jump into vignette and just take that all the way to the left that just helps us see exactly what's going on with this vignette and now we can control the size we can control the roundness if we want to and a really important slider is the feather because if we take the feather away you can see exactly where our darkening effect is going on and if we push it to the right we can smooth transition between the dark and the light now if we choose our subject which will be sammy up here we can see that again our eye is drawn to this area because it's the brightest part and while the effect is far too strong at the moment by pushing that to minus 100 its fullest extent we can see exactly what we're doing if we put the vignette up here we can see exactly what's going on whereas if you have that a lower amount it's hard to judge exactly what these different sliders are doing to the vignette but now i'm happy with it i can just ease that effect off so that's with nothing on and we'll just start to feather that and tickle it in until a point where we're happy with it that's a nice soft black and white conversion using nothing more than the light tool in the essentials tab and the black and white conversion we've got a little bit of vignette and we've added a local mask just to control those bright areas this is our before this is our after this is our before and this is our after i really love creating templates that work well with multiple photos i think it's pretty pointless creating a look or a template that's only going to work for a few photos if you can craft a template which works universally you're winning so the problem with any local masking is it's specific to the regions of a particular photo so if you're going to create your own batch of templates that you've created i recommend don't include the local masking don't put that on so we're going to synchronize this look across a few other photos and just see how it works so for now i'm just going to take that basic adjustment away if we come to the catalog mode we can see that the effect the black and white effect that we've created here is very very similar to the look that i showed you in the past video so this photograph selected and those edits applied to it what i'm going to do is control click on some other photos i want to apply that look to because these are all based in that same barn i think they're going to work very well but let's choose something quite different let's choose one of these ones where she's out in the field in the sunshine and see if it works there too so we can either right click and come and copy those adjustments and then paste them onto those photos or much simpler way is just a sync adjustments or press control shift s on the keyboard just like that that processing is now applied to those photos and i think that works really nicely for these ones in the barn just have a look and see whether that's working for this one you will have just seen the look of this one just change ever so slightly and that's basically because there are quite a few adjustments that we've made luminar needs to apply those adjustments to this photo before it gives you a more accurate representation of what you've done so although i prefer the process working on these ones that were in the barn for example this one for example the one we edited or this one i do like it on this i do feel for this one we might want to create another local mask and perhaps increase the contrast just on our model i'm getting carried away here but let me show you in order to do that same process we just go local masking add a basic mask and then we can crank the contrast to where we want it to we could brighten her up slightly if we want to we could knock the shadows down just a little bit if we want maybe even control those highlights now let's actually push them up slightly we can even give her just a little bit more structure as well and let's turn that off and on so let's paint that effect onto our model we're going to do this quite rough and ready no problem about doing that and boom just like that we've made her pop out from the background and we've got a really nice black and white look for her well thanks so much for watching guys i actually really enjoyed going through this process if you found this video helpful do me a favor leave me a thumbs up if you would like to see more black and white editing just write more in the comments or if you've got anything else that you would like help with just leave me a comment on that as well and i'll be happy to look at making a video for you i hope you're having a great day wherever you are in the world from here in new zealand i bid you adieu and send you much love cheers guys i'll see in the next video

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 4,057

Keywords: Photography, Photo editing, editing, Photoshop, Post Processing, post production, photography editing, Photographer, Photo education, Luminar AI, Luminar, Artificial intelligence, Black and white, monochrome, greyscale, low-key, low key, B&W, Conversion

Id: aThec_IyQs0

Length: 18min 41sec (1121 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2020