Nik Collection Black & White Landscape Workflow in Full

hello I'm Robin Worley welcome to Lang's craft earlier in the week I headed over to Blackpool which is about an hour from where I live for those of you not familiar with Blackpool it's like Las Vegas by the sea but without the money it is though an absolutely great location for photography and I always enjoy visiting one thing that I would say about bike poo is it's got some of the best light you ever see anywhere in the world this image is one that may not look particularly spectacular but we're going to edit it and we're going to turn it into this I'm going to show you all the stages and the tools we're going to be using our Lightroom and the Nik collection now if you're not familiar with the Nik collection it's currently a free collection of tools it was originally owned by a company called Nick who were then bought out by Google who recently sold the assets over to DxO and DX are working on a new version you can still get the free version of the Nik collection if you contact DxO and they have got a page on their website where you can cut the link by email if you haven't got the free Nik collection I really would urge you to go and get it now because once they bring up the new version you're not going to be able to get it for free let's dive into this image and I'll show you exactly how I go about editing it and all the stages so the first thing I'm going to do which is what I always do with images like this is I actually change the camera calibration in Lightroom so by default you've got Adobe standard I'm gonna pick one of the others because this was shot with the Fuji XT 2 I've got all these Fuji profiles I can pick from and then know from my experience that the camera pro neck high and standard are very good in terms of producing lifelike colors and even though this is going to be black and white I still want to stand up with a good color balance because this image is going to be all about contrast and light I'm going to pick the high contrast version of camera pro neck and the next thing I'm going to do is change just some saturations to improve the saturation of the image that's big the camera prone egg profile is actually very low saturation so I'm happy with that now I'm now going to go and crop the image because I don't want this area down here actually in the frame I'm quite happy with that the top part of the framings absolutely as I want it I can see light coming in here as shafts of light coming down I'll look at the moment the very faint and I do want to just exclude some of this area down here with the birds and the seawall so that we can see this water just sneaking away into the distance from the lower part of the frame and I'm going to just next my basic exposures because at the moment we're getting clipping in the histogram you can see where the clipping is not too worried about that but when we do some of the later processing it's going to make it look a little bit worse so I'm going to just lower the contrast down I'm going to lower down the exposure very slightly because I usually shoot with what we call exposing to the right so I always over expose very slightly the other thing I should say is I'd normally shoot with a filter on the camera a neutral density graduate and I didn't in this case I didn't actually have anything with me like that then next I'm going to do is just reduce the highlights slightly but I'm going to then but the wipes because that will give me a better contrast and then finally I'm just going to increase the clarity because we want a bit of mid-tone contrast in there I'm happy with know those basic adjustments and I'm gonna go down and I'm now going to show you the detail for the sharpening so at the moment that's quite a good sharp image from a kit lens I'm going to reduce down the color noise reduction because that tends to add a slight blurring effect in Lightroom to the areas and sometimes it can cause a bit of color bleed and I'm going to then increase very slightly the amount of sharpening increase the detail I'm going to reduce the radius as well and I'm just going to increase the masking until I see the noise falling away so I'm happy with that and the next thing I'm going to do is just go to the tone curve and here I want to darken the image slightly but I don't want to lose the highlight so that's looking quite nice and then finally I'm just going to add in the effects I'm just going to try to add a little bit of D haze because that will really sort of emphasize the contrast of things like the wheel against the background and also the pier against the light areas so the image is now looking quite okay and in terms of what I had planned now I could add a graduate filter to the sky so let's try that and we'll see if that makes an improvement on to the sky so we'll just put on the mask so you can see the area that I'm selecting and I'm going to actually graduate that quite a lot I'm also going to use the luminance range masking option because this is there Lightroom Creative Cloud 2017 that I'm using and I'm just going to remove that from the the darkest area so I'm only going to be affecting this brightest tones so from 50% up to 100% of brightness I'm just going to reduce the smoothing very slightly so that we don't get too much bleed okay I'm happy with that and now I can boost the contrast in the sky I can reduce the highlights lightly but push up the whites nope that's actually causing this area here to blow out so I'm going to reduce the contrast a little bit and in fact I'm gonna yeah I'm going to keep quite low contrast there and we don't have much effect on the shadows at all because of the luminosity masking that we've applied so that looks like it makes a reasonable amount of difference I'm happy with that click done and now we can move over into using the Nik collection and I'm going to use that in Photoshop so I'll just right click and I'll choose to edit in Photoshop here we are now in Photoshop I've got my Nik collection selective tool over here which is where I can launch the Nik collection filters from on the right side you can also see my layers window and my channels window and the first thing I'm going to do is duplicate my layer and I'm going to create the are converted for use with Smart Filters the reason I do this is so that when I use the Nik collection filters on this it will allow me to go back in later and adjust them further if I need to so the first filter I'm going to use is the visor I'm going to use that for controlling the light in the image so that we can create contrast and my idea is that I want to enhance some of these shafts of light that are coming through in the sky so the first thing you see there is just a warning that I'm editing in the smart object we now have the image open so I'm going to actually increase the saturation just very slightly and also the warmth very very slightly and I'm now going to select one of these areas no I'm using control point I'm holding down the shift key and that shows me what's selected I want to limit the selection to this bright area here and all I'm going to do is increase the contrast there and increase the structure and and when you reduce the shadows slightly and just increase the brightness I'm now going to hold down my Alt key and that means I can click and drag a copy of that control point with the same adjustment onto another of these bright areas and again click and drag and drop it on to a new area and click and drag and drop it on to a new area and they gain another one there we've got one area up here and just there as well so I'm happy there and I'm just so I can control those control points a little bit better all I'm doing here is holding down my shift key and selecting all of them and then I'm going to group them together so those are no one group you can see here and any adjustments I make to one of these and control point handles it will adjust the rest of them and also because we've got the control point selected I can make further adjustments over on this side here as well next thing I want to do is apply some adjustments to this area here of the water which I'd like to enhance slightly it looks a little bit dull at the moment so there's my selection holding down the ctrl key again I can increase the brightness I can increase the contrast and I can also increase the structure yes the areas of blowing out here and here but that's helping the contrast against the the pier let's now add in some selection to the sand and those areas are quite dark at the moment and I just want to lift the shadows and increase the contrast slightly that's a little bit too too light well in a little bit of structure there and also more saturation and a little bit of warmth only a little bit though let's compare the image to how it was previously so overall that's a very slight improvement but now you can see that the shafts of light are a bit more obvious and the foreground appears a little bit more balanced or when we convert to black and white later hopefully it will look better so I can now click OK and I'm back in Photoshop the next filter I'm going to use is Nick silver effects Pro and this is what we'll do the conversion into black and white no normally I like to look down these presets down the left hand side of the screen just to pick any of that catch my my eye but with this image I'm quite clear on what I want to do so it's really about converting data nning the sky making these shafts of light stand out more improving the contrast and making sure that we can still see the detail in the pier set against the background the first thing I'm going to do is actually apply the color filter and these are very similar to the color filters you apply when you're shooting black-and-white film so if I apply a yellow filter it will make things that have the yellow tint to them such as a Sun appear slightly lighter whilst the opposite side of the color wheels or something that's blue for example that will start to get a bit darker so there you can see immediately the sky became a bit darker the Sun became a bit lighter and that can adjust a strength as well the other thing I can do is also change the sensitivity of the image using different colors what that does is if I move the blue you can see it darkens the sky or lightens the sky now I'm not going to use them yet what I'm going to do is use the tonal and structural and contrast adjustments here before I actually move on to those color channels because they will help refine our image afterwards one of the things I like is the image giving the feeling of darkness and contrast and I'm going to actually prove that using the dynamic brightness just to reduce that and I'm also going to increase the soft contrast because that gives a nice soft feel to the light in the image so if I just move up back you can see what I may watch the clouds here and watch what happens as I increase the soft contrast it gives it a sort of a nice glowing ethereal effect and will look to enhance that shortly a bit further the other thing you can do is amplify the whites which will lighten some of the dark areas I'm also going to before I go any further I'm going to protect some of the shadows and also protect the highlights from blowing out too much further and you can also amplify blacks if you want to which will darken things like the the sky but I don't want to go too dark on that because I couldn't see the at the moment I can see the big wheel here set against the sky I don't want to lose that I like the the look of the shaft of light reflecting off the off the wheel now I'm going to add just a little bit of contrast into the scene doesn't need very much and I'm also going to add some mid-tone structure because that helps just bring out these shafts of light a little bit further let's have a look at the highlights okay I think the highlight makes it look a bit too coarse so I'm gonna reduce the highlight structure down I'm also going to reduce the fine structure because I find that actually can cause a lot of artifacts in very fine details in the image so I'm actually I'm quite liking the effect I've got on screen at the moment so I'm now going to come back down to this tone curve and I'm going to use that to target some of the adjustments I don't want to darken the mid-tones slightly but also lighten the highlights which will affect these areas which have the shafts of light in them and now let's look at moving each of the sliders left and right so I actually quite like a slightly lighter sky at the moment and Saiyans not having much of an effect yellow will have so you can see there I'm going to use it to darken this area here in this area and also this area and [Music] Red's not having an effect and the don't think violet will either know okay so I'm now happy with my overall global adjustments I'm going to apply a control point to here and I'm just using that to select this area of the sand in the center a no apply adjustment to improve the contrast there because I want that to attract the viewers attention I'm going to amplify the whites slightly and I'm also going to increase the the brightness in that area and over here I'm going to darken just show you where that control point is I'm going to darken the sonned around here and the reason I'm going to do that is to give it more contrast against the the light here now as I'm doing that I can see that I'm affecting this building a bit too much here so I want to select that and we'll make some specific adjustments and prove the contrast and I'll improve the whites on it and just brighten it up a little bit because there's a shaft of light coming down here and I want it to appear that it's hitting this area so that's now looking quite good I think I will add in a little bit of lightness in the area just behind the wheel so we'll lighten that up a bit with brightness and contrast structure a little bit of the art away so that makes the wheel stand out further against the sky so I'm happy with that let's now apply a vignette to finish off and we'll use just one of the basic lens fall-off vignettes it's a very soft subtle one in fact it's not quite subtle enough so I'm happy to change that further I'm also going to place the center of that around here and that makes her a nice of view of the pier at this end because it was getting a bit too dark the other thing I'm going to do is apply a dart nning effect to the sky at the top and I'm going to use the burn edges to do that so I'm just going to push up the trunk the strength quite significantly there so I can see it easily and then going to use this size but just to see the area I'm covering and I'll reduce that note back down and now I can increase the transition so I can see there that's that's looking quite good now let's compare that to our original so that was the original image we brought in to the silver effects pro that's the adjusted image the only thing perhaps that I would like to see is this area here needs to be a bit lighter so I'm going to use a control point to select that okay that looks like a good selection and I'm just going to brighten it up very slightly add a bit more contrast there and a little bit of structure and that tends to make the area stand out more and I'll just use the auto whites a little bit there you can see the effect of that control point I'm happy with that so I'm now going to click OK shop and there's still one further filter that I want to apply to this image it's looking good but it's not quite how I imagined that so the filter are we going to apply is actually color effects Pro now you may have been wondering why I didn't have any film grain and that's because I actually wanted to add it in this filter the reason I do that is it's actually quite a nice effect that you can get with the film grain here I feel it so it's a little bit I don't know it's just it's just different to what you can apply in silvery flex Pro so I'm going to zoom in and pick an area here you can see that's really strong in terms of grain effect to start with so the first thing I'm going to do is make the grain just a little bit smaller and I'm also going to make it softer as well because it's quite harsh I'm also going to reduce this film contrast down because that tends to make the image quite contrasting so I'll soften that a little bit further make it a little bit smaller now the final filter that I really want to add to this is the glamour glow and that's going to really give the image a nice soft effect so you can see here with them without it and the eight just adds something and makes you feel that there's sort of misty haze in the image the other thing you can do with the glamour glow that some people aren't aware of is you can use it to warm or cool your image in terms of image tones so the actually gives quite a nice effect so I'm going to actually add a small amount of warmth to the image and I'm going to boost the glowing effect so that it's a bit too strong and the reason I'm doing that is because I want to apply the effect a very subtle way to these areas now when I did that you probably noticed that the area node that's been selected by this control point is actually where the glamour glow is being applied to at full strength so I'm just going to increase that and we now have the glamour glow applied to these areas that are very light but not to the other areas and when I did that it also hit this warming effect and I'll show you how we'll get that back in a minute but if I really push that up you can see it's only being applied selectively so that's the starting effect that we've gotten it's now applied to these I could hold down my Alt key and just make a further selection up here and also down here to soften the area and that's actually looking quite nice now but I do want some of this softening apply to other areas of the image as well and the way I can do that is using this opacity slider so at the moment that's set to zero which means everywhere except for the areas the control points have selected has the effect hidden as I push it up it applies it to the rest of the image and so I can actually reduce it down to an area riah or to a level that I feel comfortable with for the rest of the image and that means I can add in then more of that effect in some areas and I can also then still add back in my toning effect as well so let's look at that just the glamour glow effect so if I toggle it off toggle it on you can see the effect it's having on the image and actually that's quite strong so I'm just going to reduce it a little bit further parrot overall so that was the starting image we brought in that's the image adjusted and always very very stylized but that was the effect that I was going for so I'll click OK shop if I compare the starting image now to the finished image you can see we've made a substantial improvement and change I'm robbing wallet you've been watching lens craft I hope you've enjoyed this don't forget to share the video and don't forget to subscribe I'll see you soon [Music]

Channel: Robin Whalley

Views: 25,612

Keywords: Lenscraft, Robin Whalley, nik collection, nik collection tutorial, black \& white photography tutorial, how to convert colour photo into black and white, nik silver efex pro 2, nik silver effects pro 2, nik silver efex pro 2 tutorial, landscape photography, landscape photography tips, landscape photography tips and techniques, landscape photography editing, landscape photography editing lightroom, viveza, silver efex pro 2, the nik collection, the nik collection tutorials

Id: AYz77jqnHDg

Length: 25min 4sec (1504 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 02 2018