Optic 2016: Black and White Mastery with John Paul Caponigro

welcome folks sorry for the technical difficulties I want to thank B&H for putting this event together it's a terrific event some really nice things and I've really been appreciating the sensibility behind bringing things people like Michael Kenna to talk about the inner spirit of work and to bring my dad down as well know David was really thrilled we it took some doing to get my dad to get on a plane as the 6th time in 20 years so for him to share the stage with me tomorrow at 2 that's pretty special pretty neat very different sensibility and it's really neat to see that the bnh community understands a lot of the history of photography and the other players that are out there dad doesn't even know what a social network is so it's a different era and to hear voices from that other era like Michael only shooting film it's pretty wonderful I also want to thank Canon for sponsoring me for so many years and also x-rite for those free giveaways sander just gave me those and I think it's a good opportunity just to note I'll say it again might seem a little strange to D giving out things for color management in a black and white session and what I'm hoping today is not to explode your head with a thousand software possibilities though I will give you resources for lots of follow-up but I'm hoping to encourage you to see in new ways that's the real voyage of discovery that's the real challenge if we can get away from the tools and the techniques the traditions and get into directly seeing not only seeing our subject not only seeing light not only seeing our images but also see what our tools can do they can do amazing things and a lot of times people end up doing things with these tools that wasn't part of the engineers plan but they then incorporate it believe me after more than 20 years of consulting with Adobe I know what that process is like same on the printer end so I'm going to encourage you to think of black and white differently the reason you need color management more than ever with black and white is black and white they are colors in fact you might even think of them as the colors that all colors share and there are critical colors and they're hard colors to reproduce accurately because tiny shifts in brightness or in hue or in saturation will be seen very quickly in near neutral fields and to achieve absolute neutrality well that might be like chasing perfection and I've seen lots of experts in the community have these long debates about one thing is one point yellow or two points blue or which settings on certain drivers reduce an absolute neutral but you can only split hairs like that you can only deal with that kind of subtlety and precision when you've got a color working correctly or at least consistently let's put it that way so let me tell you a little bit more about why I think black and white is color there's a long-standing debate and how that's one of the first paradigm shifts we really need to retrain ourselves from it sits at a legacy from the 20th century we're now in the 20th century and we're using different tools I want to show you where some of the resources are I'll point to this throughout the demo so you don't need to take copious notes I do recommend you take spare notes and certainly things of what you would want to follow up on on my website and the challenge to getting my website is learning how to spell my name just grabbed the BH literature they spelled it correctly thank you so John Paul Caponigro calm under creativity you'll see a whole technique section and this is a whole well for each one of these there's a menu like this and this is the menu for black and white there are tons of resources I'm going to move quickly through a lot of subjects cutting to the essence of these things are hoping to direct you to the things that will help you see and think a little differently about it and then when you want to follow up with more technique you certainly can you may see in some of these something that says free to members the members are the ones who sign up for my newsletter once a month I put out a newsletter that tells people about new resources some of them are inspiring things like 12 great photographs from Michael Kenna Plus 12 great quotes others are the next newsletter is going to feature a lot of information about sharpening so a lot of different kinds of subjects all you have to do is enter your email it doesn't get shared that's where you go for the resources so to make the best black and white images we need to a understand the black and white our colors the colors that all colors share know that black and white needs color management so we can get neutrality so that we can get let's turn another technical term out there gray balance that is consistent throughout the tonal scale you don't want your shadows carrying one color in your highlights carrying another you want it to be consistently toned even if you're making a platinum print what the same brown throughout the whole tonal scale unless you deliberately want to introduce a color cross and then you need it even more because you want a precise color cross not just one at the printer or god forbid the monitor gave you do we start in color if Ansel were working today Ansel Adams were working today he'd be capturing in color I don't think that means he'd be a color photographer I do think that he would still continue to be making the types of images he's making but he would filter after exposure not before exposure and there's huge power and create a possibility some of you may have seen the change that his classic image moonrise over Hernandez went through each decade they got darker and more contrast II more dramatic after all he said the negative the score and the premise of performance and this is key keep your digital negatives your Photoshop files with all their layers flexible layered don't lock yourself in so that you can Reaper form the image with a minimum amount of effort and instead of having to build it from the ground up we want to optimize color before conversion and we actually want to optimize it in a very specific way at the risk of repeating myself I'm going to say it now and again later you actually want to clear out any kinds of color cast you want to boost saturation as high as possible without introducing any clipping into the highlights shadows or posterization ie ideal color 5000k strip out a color cast boosted really high in saturation but not to the point of crazy posterization is going to start to give you the best black and white conversion you actually have to know how to color adjust your file to get the best black and white conversion there are many ways of converting to black and white in my DVD I list thirteen or fourteen in them I think my friend Denis Versace has identified a fifteenth or a sixteenth I haven't had a bottle of wine with him recently he may have found a 17th or an eighteenth but you don't need eighteen different ways to make color conversions I'm going to show you the two go two ways that are going to satisfy more than 80% of the cases that you'll need and I'm going to show you what to look for in terms of why you would choose one over another sometimes it depends on the image afterwards we'd like to optimize the global contrast before the local contrast a lot of people try and build in the contrast during the conversion instead lay in a good tonal foundation I'll give you visual examples of that optionally at the end of it you may want to add color back in so if you want to make a Santa type you're going to need a little bit of sign and a little bit of blue if you want to make a platinum print or a digital equivalent of a platinum print you're going to need a little bit of yellow and a little bit of red you see where I'm going not all black and white prints are black and white platinum prints are brown and white cyanotypes are blue and white oh and by the way there's some blacks and whites in there too okay blue blacks and blue whites you see where I'm going interestingly you can make prints on any medium you can go back out to another piece of analog film if you use an LVT film recorder a laser exposed a sheet of film and you go back into the traditional darkroom you use silver gelatin paper or whatever else you'd like there's been a huge resurgence in alternative processes because of digital contact negatives using inkjet printers on transparent substrates that can now be made very large-scale interestingly you start making test negatives rather than test prints to get the final one luckily they print very consistently if you keep your chemistry stable there's some great resources on there out there just want to highlight the contrary to a lot of the fears ten fifteen twenty years ago oh my god digital is killing analog it's all going to go away in fact it's created a resurgence in alternative processes there's really fast anytime to be around we're faced with extraordinary choices and that's one of the big issues that we have to deal with when we're making our black-and-white conversions before we go there I'd love to celebrate what's unique about black and white or just some of the things that are unique about black and white black and white is to my mind a color palette that has some very specific characteristics and it does specific things to our nervous system we think about it in specific ways we have specific emotions now when I say specific I mean there are some shared qualities that many people also share with us it doesn't mean that there is only one way of thinking about it if people have a lot of feelings about black and white some of them passed historic remember there used to be a day where televisions were black and white and newspapers didn't have color so they were more truthful because they were black and white and that's being shifted those are cultural norms that have been changed by technology it is quite interesting that it still holds to some degree most would consider it the past because as part of our history other question neutral quiet restful there's kind of a settling down if you look at each of the elements of color luminosity which is what we're talking about black and white hue the ROI to be over the rainbow and saturation how intense is that color is it near neutral or is it very intense and saturated each one of those is a quality of energy add more of each you get more and more energy sometimes too much energy so by directing all of the energy into one component of color we create a different sensation other times people use things like abstract or essential even ethereal we don't see the world in black and white it's a huge transformation they say some animals see it in black and white I don't know they say we only see in black and white at night I see color but the less light the less color because there's a lot of interesting dialogue about it and sometimes you just have to go for the ride because it's not always clear but there's a long history of this debate and even goes into the world of painting and being a formed about it really helps but I think it's important to celebrate we really are creating a dramatic transformation in her images Jerry oldsman works in black and white and it makes his surreal composites even more dreamlike it's a different kind of thing when you get into color believe me I know my floating rocks have a different quality because they're in color sometimes near neutral it certainly is more interpreting so when we create this dramatic transformation we are exerting some control Ansel might be using a red filter we might be filtering our digital files but the choice to make a very dramatic dark contrast esky is an interpretation and then the negatives the score the print is the performance the photographer is the director or the conductor so thinking a little bit more about those qualitative aspects are important let me highlight one other thing our eyes actually use this light and dark to find contours and positions in space interesting that the object Ness of our perception is often heavily laid by this light and dark foundation it's also the least relative component of color in other words it's harder to get it to shift in context with other colors and in different lighting situations like night if we turn the lights down even further than they are now you're going to Isaac will do up pretty quickly more quickly to the light and dark than it will to the color and of course your eyes white balance we don't have the same kind of equivalent of white balance for or our eyes so what I'm really trying to celebrate is what happens when we go from something like this on the left to that on the right and there's so many ways to do it obviously there's a lot of possibility even within a simple image that is predominantly blue and white same file just filtered differently it's more on that on my website if we want to talk about what's unique about black and white and even some in my color psychology resources about the colors black gray and white they all my color psychologists are studied and there have some interesting shared qualities so to further that if black and white is color this is my phrase I don't know Jeff she we loves to tease me when I say look if you can see it it's color color is our visual response and it's important to understand that we're deeply involved in that visual response there's the light the object that's being the light is being reflected from and there's the observer so in that sense color is an event because color is what happens up here we have this tiny little slice in the electromagnetic spectrum called visible light there is more out there so they tell me if we've broke all this color our visual response what's going on in our eye and in our brain a lot of the color interpretation happens by interpreting the data our eyes deliver to our brain at I think it's over a billion impressions per second but at the risk of understanding it hundreds of millions of impressions per second we filter a lot of data out and we interpret it we grab onto the stuff we think is significant we dump the stuff that we don't think is as significant so we look at color it's useful to break it down into three different elements color luckily only has three elements hue the one what you usually think about all that color the ROYGBIV red orange yellow blue indigo violet that's often plotted as a circle saturation how intense is the color as you get further out you get towards I'm plotting the chromaticity diagrams of a given device like a monitor or a printer or even the human eye this one happens to be the the happens to be lab what the human eye can see as we get further away from neutral right in the center we get more and more saturated so that means this neutral spine we can really only see in three dimensions here from white our ISO brightness through down to black our D Max or blackest black which any color space whether it's our eyes a monitor or a printer has we're really talking about operating very close to or right on this spine that unites all of these other colors that joins the complementary colors of cyan and red or yellow and blue it's this intermediary meeting place interestingly we can see color casts in there you might even see it on this screen right now the blacks are being rendered a little bit warm a little bit red down there that's really just a color management issue between this computer and that projector we need a better profile spend a little time we can get a profile to make sure that renders absolutely neutrally same kind of thing that you're dealing with when you're trying to make a print or when you're viewing this on the monitor luckily my monitor looks neutral start there that's what you need that I want display two four if you don't have a color imager please calibrate your monitor one of the most important things is setting the brightness of your monitors appropriately for accurate prediction to print set it to 100 or even 90 the default is usually hundred twenty to bright when people are saying my prints are coming out too dark that's one of the reasons why so all hues share this and there are many types of black and white from neutral which might be close to silver gelatin to a warm tone which could be a warm tone or a silver gelatin or could be platinum to cyanotype or even cross toned let's say chloro bromide papers a lot of my thinking got developed by being in the darkroom with my father and I remember one day when he was showing me these different papers and chemistry that he was using I said dad why are you printing the same image on all these different papers with these different chemistry's I mean it's black and white no no no there's a lot of color in black and white look at this one can you see the trace amount of warmth in the shadows here and can you see how this one over here has a cooling rendition and you see how it's changing the spatial relationships within the image suddenly my eyes were open I no longer looked at black and white as just black and white but there was this rich world of semi neutrals and I saw that it did things to my image all images were quite unique and quite interesting interestingly the ability to reproduce these accurately is extremely important if you have a color cast and you see it in these grayscale ramps that you'll often see they're really good for testing very often that will also be present in the color field but you won't see it because all other saturated colors overwhelming but when you clear out that color gas and get down to that neutral quality you're going to see all the other colors more clearly and of course it's really important that you not introduce color cast like this unless you meant to do that to quote pee-wee Herman because if the printer gives you this when you were expecting this or you see this on your monitor when you're trying to print this houston we have a problem being H we have a solution X right okay so interesting question what's neutral I think most of us would agree we're somewhere in between here and I've deliberately put it to cool on the left and to warm on the right but exactly where we would land that would be an individual difference our eyes actually change over time and our eyes adapt we would have a different answer if we were tired if we drank a lot of caffeine if we had a lot of sugar or if somebody had really upset us we literally do see red yeah you need to be very careful and part of that is the viewing light that you're evaluating prints under as well as the monitor that you're looking at it so it's really important to have a high quality display well calibrated it's really important to have a high quality light source when evaluating proofs never more so than when you're looking at a black and white image and it's important to think about what light your prints will be exhibited under if you make prints under a really good high quality light source but then you put it under something that's quite different like the light that my hands are in right now is quite warm quite yellow your entire black-and-white image is going to get a lot warmer so the light that you display it under is important in context most of these look fairly neutral take that context out and suddenly you start to see all of these rich colors and that none of them are actually neutral some are a little more neutral than others there's a lot of possibilities in addition if you surround neutral colors with saturated colors ie you hang your black and white prints on a red wall you can anticipate your prints looking cyan it's the complement of red you can see that this blue surround makes this look yellow er and this yellow surround looks bluer they don't look the same but if we took that around out anybody doubt that these are the same colors we took that out you'd see that those are exactly the same color so color is contextual and that's important in the tonal scale as well I couldn't believe it when dad was showing me Albers studies his students he would do these Albers studies with neutral colored pieces of paper and show how tones would shift in relationship to other tones quite interesting so let's talk about preparing for conversion as I said you want to set your white point in black point the overall brightness the most important clear those color casts and set saturation high why there's not a lot of tonal variety in this where the white balance is set for the sky here the white balance was set for the foreground in general both of those are a little more saturated the Blues are coming up today if you white balance it for both and boost it at high and this is right on the edge of where I'd look out I'd be zooming into areas like this and making sure I wasn't introducing posterization or reducing separation actually having more like that would allow me to get a greater contrast between the yellow and the blue that yellow where blue you'll see very quickly could be either light or dark it's up to me it's up to you depending on how you choose to convert it this has some implications for how you'll prep your file if I just set my black point and white point I'll get a better dynamic range I'll have close to white and close to black that's certainly a good starting point if I use the eyedropper say in levels or curves this gray point dropper to wipe out that yellow cast I'll start to see greater separation between the yellow the blue and the red there's even an old-school trick in Photoshop where you do that for all three channels I'm here in levels going down to red and moving my white point to the part where the main mass of the histogram starts this image has some clip shadows I'd be doing the same thing on the left side if those shadows weren't clipped then moving it to a different point with the green and it's still different point with the blue and you can see how the color rendition of this is quite a bit different than that and this is actually not accurate to the scene as it was shot this is much more accurate it was late in the day in ravenna in November but this clearing out the color cast is going to allow me to make more of the saturated blues yellows and Red's and allow me to make those lighter or darker much more easily this is going way beyond dodging and burning this is laying in a tonal foundation the tonal structure and that's where those black and white conversions come in so heavily but you can see it helps to process the file to prepare it for that conversion there are many ways here are 13 please do not memorize this instead let's use Occam's razor or the KISS principle keep it as simple as possible we'll listen to Einstein make things as simple as possible but not simpler and we'll talk about two or three go to ways when they're at the in the interest of keeping it brisk today I won't show you the wrong conversion I do want to show you this dual adjustment layer and the localized adjustment I think most of you are familiar with it maybe maybe we'll be able to touch on it pretty quickly think of these as progressively more complex solutions that not all images need if I shot a foggy seascape and it was predominantly blue or mostly one color this could be a Navajo Sandstone landscape if we had mostly one color or it was already pretty close to neutral like much of the ice that I shoot in Antarctica we don't need one of these more complex solutions and would be absolutely fine that conversion during RAW processing on the other hand if you start to have a more complex image like this the tonal structure of this image is completely up for grabs more up for grabs than you would think and this is what makes this notion of pre-visualization or seeing the possibilities not knowing exactly what you're going to get but seeing the possibilities so you can explore them and end up on a solution that you own at the end of the day that's really what pre-visualization is about now we need to start thinking about more complex solutions like dual adjustment layers and even adding in selections into this mix let me show you let's just jump in and do that really quickly I'm doing this I'm in Photoshop if I were in Lightroom or opening up the image through Bridge when I got into Camera Raw I wouldn't be in Photoshop and be coming out a bridge under our HSL sliders you have this convert to grayscale and it'll come in with this default set of percentages which will allow you to change certain colors and you can even come in and scrub on some of those colors as well so all of my Reds move all of my oranges move one of the useful things about this is if you were to do this with a dual adjustment layer that I'm going to show you notice in in the next set I'm going to show you you won't have an orange and an aqua those extra two sliders allow you to split the difference between closely matched colors which can often be very important and you see what's going on in the test strip to the right with all of those colors you can see how with the Aqua as I'm able to move certain colors and the greens I move other colors and that's going to allow me to get contrast to assign a brightness value to those specific colors with more precision and I can get more separation between closely matched colors that's where you need the more advanced techniques what I can't do with this is I can't make a selection to just adjust this piece of paper I'd have to do that in Photoshop if I think about making a a black and white conversion to one small area of an image I'm instantly thinking I'm going to be doing that in Photoshop because Lightroom has limited masking doesn't have the ability to make this kind of mask same with Camera Raw and I can do that brilliantly in Photoshop you'll also notice that while I can explore my options by making moving these sliders I very often lost what I originally saw in the color image and I recommend having a color version of the image in your field of vision while you're making the conversion so that you can see what the possibilities are like I'm going to duplicate this file several methods of dual adjustment layers the one that I prefer the most is using the channel mixer which basically will mix all of the channels to be the same when you check monochrome and it comes up with the default conversion which we get if you made a gray scale conversion please don't do that you'll eliminate your future flexibility you'd only want to do that when you're sending a derivative file out to a specific device like an offset press or we're making a negative on a particular kind of device otherwise you always want to preserve your color you don't want to convert to grayscale and that's true when you print it as well you want to print your RGB layered file directly to the printer in this case what I want is an extreme conversion I want to go for broke yeah honestly it actually doesn't matter in most cases which one you choose so I'm just going to come in here and make sure that these guys add up to about a hundred percent if you do a lot more than hundred percent you're going to clip your highlights they'll blow out if you do much more than that you'll clip your shadows you'll also gray down your highlights generally you want some combination that adds up to a hundred percent here I'm just choosing one channel because I know I'm getting an extreme adjustment but I don't plan on sticking with that adjustment I call this we're calling this dual adjustment layers because we're going to use another adjustment layer on top of this we're going to break the norm of our workflow and we're going to come back and make this adjustment layer below so I'm coming back to my layer here and I make a second adjustment layer yes this technique is only two adjustment layers and I'll repeat that in just a second but first I'm going to get hue/saturation so why would I get hue/saturation well so I can do this and now can you see how I can visually explore hundreds of possibilities very quickly and I can see that with this image I could choose either a dark ground or a light ground dark pieces of paper or light pieces of paper and in fact the light pieces of paper are light at different settings different pieces of paper light at different settings which would indicate to me that if I wanted them all light on dark I could get there let me show you amazing that you can get there from here if you wanted dark on light you can also get there from here having been taught the traditional way to visualize stripping out color and just looking at the way that light rests and falls cast shadows highlights renders form to now have to filter in every field of color when I should put on this black and white conversion filter and I look at this room I instantly identify the saturated shirts while you guys and girls with red shirts can now either be light or dark there's a couple of spots of blue and filled in couple of yellows that could go light or dark see the whole structure is so variable that when you look at an image like this you really have to say look there's hue is a fair amount of saturation that area can be either light or dark nearly white or nearly black work anything in between this is a real mind shift if the whole thing were mostly gray we wouldn't have that possibility we wouldn't need these dual adjustment layers or selections but when you have this kind of control it really pays to explore your options one of the things I'd like to emphasize here is using Photoshop as a tool for exploration so if we've come in with our channel mixer here and we start swinging these sliders like the hue saturation slider come on it exists there you go wildly it's in decision its research it's finding out what's possible I have strongly encourage you to inform yourself to educate yourself to find out what's possible before you commit to a final solution there is no one right solution remember we don't see in black and white very few things in the world are truly black and white there are a few but we see in color so why not decide to change one piece of paper and make it lighter than the others how would I do that yeah masks okay so I'm gonna have to take a little bit of time I've already made these masks ahead of time this would take a few minutes maybe half an hour to get it done just right or encourage you guys if you're not sure that this image is going to work or this solution is going to work just make a rough selection don't spend a lot of time making the perfect selection find out what's possible then once you know you've got a solution that you like spend the time refining those masks again do the research first find the optimal solution and then start noodling the details work much more broadly so you can see here I'm taking a couple of pieces of paper they're the original conversion with the black background add in a few accents there it's all up for grabs it's really just a matter of making these selections with a different hue saturation adjustment layer - what are we been doing the whole time changing the color the reason that this changes the color changes the black and white is because under this we've changed hue now I never in my wildest dreams would have changed it to this pepto-bismol pink not in my wildest dreams but that may well be the set of colour relationships we need to generate the final black and white conversion the tonal foundation that we're looking for so much again all you have to do is move the slider and more importantly feel these tones respond to it see what's what the image has to tell you moving quickly after you do the black and white conversion it's so important to fine-tune the contrast if any of you are suffering for curves and I know many of the folks who come into my workshops either for printing or even in the field do suffer fear of curves remember it's what the traditional darkroom was all about it's actually like the go-to tool after the black and white conversion you need to master this tool there is no more precise tool for being able to come in and grab the highlights move them upward down I'm just using that scrubby tool right there grab certain shadows or mid-tones and move them down come back in and reshape a curve not based on chemistry and paper and how long that chemistry lasts or how hot or cold that chemistry gets but based on reshaping the curve to create a certain set of tonal relationships for a particular image giving you a desired result very often all you need is three points to shape the right kind of contrast typically it's a matter of adding contrast when you take the saturation and hue out of an image it loses some of that energy generally your black and white conversion is a little flatter and you need to boost the contrast but often in very specific ways sometimes you'll want to pull out very fine separation in the highlights other times you'll want to steepen the curve in the shadows and get more separation particularly when you go to print those shadows most printers end up dumping some of the shadows over inking it and very often steepening the curve in those areas will bring to life some of the shadow detail as well this is your go-to tool spend half an hour with it and you'll spend a lifetime with it I don't suffer fear of curves but to practice in in the order curves keep it simple again as few points as possible keep them smooth be careful about posterization how do we add color how do we go from here to here or here well actually in one of several ways you could use any color adjustment tool I actually prefer curves believe it or not because you come into a single channel and now let's say we can add a little bit of red to my highlights and a little bit of cyan to my shadows and come up with a very specific cross tone not one that the chloro bromide paper and a specific developer but the in the colors that I chose for this image based on what I wanted to do with it you can also do very uniform changes if you want to add kind of a platinum effect just one point in the middle add some red come down to the blue take a little blue out or another way of saying that is adding yellow so you still need a little color theory to come up with whatever warm tones solution you like there is another way if you're going for these monochromatic solutions and I'm going to wrap in three minutes you want to think about using the printer manufacturers black and white solutions the printer software whether it's Epson or Canon this is the Epson driver this is the Canon driver all have these non ICC compliant solutions thank goodness to resep rate the file the key is that when you send it from Lightroom or Photoshop you're letting the printer manage the color should be a clue for us as well that this is going to make printing on third-party substrates a little more challenging but the look-up tables work quite well you're probably going to have to come in and use some of the color toning options that allow you to shift the tone image print does an interesting version where it can cross tone the highlights and the shadows in case you come up with with that what are the advantages of printing with these black and white solutions separates the file differently and uses less of the saturated ink they're forced less susceptible to color shifts uses more black ink the blacks are blacker you're taking it from Issei at 2:35 d-max up to 265 did I just say that an inkjet print can be blacker than a silver gelatin print yes I did Ansel Adams selenium tone silver tone gelatin 2.35 inkjet print on a glossy surface printed through the advanced black-and-white solution chopper driver it is 2.65 it's going up as ink sets improve we're getting blacker blacks that does not mean that a inkjet print looks the same as a silver Gellin Silver Gellin has a particular quality this silver suspended in gelatin reflecting light in particular way ink on paper has another quality also very beautiful but different and now we're starting to see the contrast ratio of our prints go higher than we've ever seen before we're able to get a little more snap out of them blacker blacks whiter whites than ever before this is your solution for getting the blackest blacks the most of these solutions have monochromatic or uniform toning that is you can make them a platinum or cyanotype but it would be hard to do something that was as complex as this where it might be locally toned or crosstown or trace amounts in the original color are there if this is the look that you want you end up printing this file as a color file through Photoshop or Lightroom there you let Photoshop or Lightroom manage the color Daler you use your custom profile which again if you're using third-party substrates will be for that substrate not the defaults that the manufacturers supply so you've got a lot of options the other option is to go work with a service bureau who has a laser that can expose film and make a whole new piece of silver gelatin egg I've had to retouch negs for Arnold Newman for my dad for a number of people to get them new masters that are every bit as good as the original but they may have been a little bit retouched or somebody scratched it or it wanted to sharpen it a little bit they actually can be better than the originals what would be even better is if those people started with color we completely change the conversion to what they wanted and then you optimize that silver gelatin piece chip forelli does this quite a lot I'm not sure if you know him as a photographer all right there is a lot more to say but I've set a ton on my website on directed to those resources and also if you're interested in the printing aspect of it this is a new ebook that I just released recently that's free up on my website just go to my blog you can download it pretty quickly I think I covered the basics there find out what these new tools in the 21st century can do for you figure out what you would like to do and then use them to get where you want to go we've never had this kind of control ever in the history of photography and it just keeps getting better all we have to do is figure out where we want to go no small task but it's the real task and be more sensitive to light to photography itself that's what will make your black and white images really sing you so thank you guys whether you're a hobbyist or a professional bnh has the answers to your question experience a world of at our New York City superstore connect with us online or give us a call our staff of experts is happy to help

Channel: B&H Photo Video Pro Audio

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Keywords: bhvideos, bw, b+w, 2016, explorer of Light, black and white, bh photo, John Paul Caponigro, Canon, b&h, BH Photo, Optic, b and h, B&H, optic 2016, BH Photo Video

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Length: 41min 19sec (2479 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2016