The ULTIMATE black & white conversion for a DRAMATIC look

i'm going to show you how to create the ultimate black and white conversion [Music] hi i'm joel grimes and when i started out in photography back in the film days and i had to process my film and go into the darkroom make a print there was a goal that i had was to make and get a print that had all the tones and the greatest amount of value i could between pure black and pure white now in the days of digital we are in great times it's a little different you have to understand how to get that process to get the ultimate results you can't when i studied black and white in the old days under the film i studied amsoil atoms and i used the zone system so i've really had a keen eye at looking at tonal value tonal the changes in values especially in things like gradient skies or say if i'm photographing a harley-davidson motorcycle and i have the chrome and i want all the tones that i can and the transitions there so how can we get and understand the greatest way of taking a digital file and making it into a black and white and getting all the tones that we want in the right spot now color is very forgiving to our eyes it's a it's a it's a thing i've noticed even from the days of the film days is that color is sort of forgiving black and white is not forgiving so if you don't get your tones right in black and white it does not look right so it's actually a great exercise to practice your photography in shooting black and white because you have to learn how to get everything right in your tones and everything so that's why we started out in the old days well i think it was probably more because of just the way photography was but we started out in black and white and then we went from there to color so today i'm a big fan of black and white and i think hopefully uh you are too and this is why you're watching this so let's talk about a few things that uh will help us understand how digital works i'm not gonna get into too much of this because i have tutorials that go in for an hour or more on just bed depth but i want to give you the basics and there are some of you out there that are engineer minded that you can go do a little more research i say engineer mine but you might want more technical behind the scenes i've talked to a lot of people i've talked to the adobe people i've talked to people that understand bit depth and have what i call a phd in bit depth so let's talk about this idea of creating again a tonal range that is as smooth as we can possibly get in the digital world so we have to talk about bit depth so um if we um if we get more bit depth we get more tones and transitions so the more bit depth we get the more transitions we get um and when we look at numbers let me show you some numbers a minute we're looking at mathematics or in theory in the real world it's a whole lot different but we can still see the results and i'm going to show you those in a minute what things look like in the real world that's what's most important to me so mathematics and all the numbers mean little to me what i want to see is the final and say okay i'm getting a better result so if you have a camera today the chances are that you are capturing in 14 bit now my first camera i think captured a digital camera was a 12 bit oh now 99.9 of all cameras on the market are 14 bit if you bought a medium format a hasson bag with a leaf back or whatever they have on those many of those medium format backs or some of them have the ability to capture in 16 bit some of the medium formats are still 14 bit but that's there's a rare opportunity for you to get a 16-bit capture so almost everything is 14-bit all right so 14-bit uh comes in you open it up if you open it up in bridge or lightroom um if you bought photoshop or lightroom it defaults in guess what working in an 8-bit srgb environment so you've just thrown away a huge amount of information by the default that photo that adobe gives you so you have to set your parameters in bridge or lightroom to work in 16-bit environment or and change the um color space to either uh 1998 uh adobe or say pro photo or another color space that you might like i used 1998 adobe 1998 that's the general one across the board so i when i teach a workshop i mention this and people go huh they go to their laptop and they go oh i've been working in 8-bit for the last 10 years they didn't know you could change it to 16-bit so i hope you maybe already have learned something check your parameters and make sure that you are working in a 16-bit environment now you take a 14-bit file you work in a 16-bit environment it does not add two extra bits of information you still have only 14 bits of information get that just makes sense okay but you're working in a 16-bit environment so you're not throwing away any information you're not getting anything by going into 16 bit but you want to work at a 16-bit environment how do we increase our bit depth to go from 14 to say 16 or 16 to 32 well there's only one way i know of that is called hdr you are capturing a under normal over exposure and you're blending that into picture you're taking shadow detail out of one image you're taking the highlights down in another image and you're blending it all in and you're increasing your overall bit depth that's a beautiful thing now you can't shoot hdr in everything i do hdr on a lot of portraits a lot of ad campaigns that i shoot on i will actually shoot portraits hdr to get the best tones that i can so it's important to me i have been doing this a long time i've been trying every possible scenario on the planet to do uh say black and white conversion or whatever to increase my bit depth and so i don't know everything but i have done quite a bit so let's go through and talk about um where bit depth falls and where it's the most critical well you get bit dip falls from highlights to shadows down to shadows so you get less in shadows and more bit depth than highlights i have all these charts that show that but we'll go and just let you know that the shadow detail was where you lack most of your bit depth and in your gradients so if you have a sky blue sky you convert it to black and white and you start manipulating and you start seeing all these stair stepping and grain and all this stuff going on it's because there's not a whole lot of information in there to give you the gradients so you shoot on a gray sweep i have a model with a gray seamless well i tell you what getting that gray smooth in the background is very difficult and so i've tried all techniques in the world to get that to do that and you can do some things that i show in the joel graham's academy but if you don't have the information there it's really difficult i love smooth gradients so it's in the shadows and the gradients that you lack when you don't have a lot of bit depth okay so here's a chart i don't want to bore you guys or get too complicated or technical but let's take a look at this chart here is the bit depth from eight bit down to 32 bit so this is a values per per and color per channel so you get a 256 uh values per channel in eight bit um that's a jpeg 12 bit that's the first camera i had was a 4 000 values per channel uh uh 14-bit is 16 000 roughly uh 16-bit is about 65 000. but look at 32-bit it's 4 billion values of color per channel that is a huge increase again we won't see that because you're going through all these things like a computer and processing and then to a print but to let you know that if i get to and i can capture in 32-bit i have a ton more information than i did if i would just stick with a 14-bit capture or especially if i worked in 8-bit that's terrible that's a you don't you don't want to try to manipulate an eight uh a jpeg 8-bit jpeg there's nothing there maybe a little bit in the highlights but in the shadows it's terrible you ever try to pull out a shadow detail in the jpeg it's just like mush or no noise and i mean uh lots of green all right so let's go look at the shadow detail this is a this is an important little uh uh information eight bit i only have four bits of of information the shadows that's the ten steps of the zones uh so it's the bottom shadow uh zone um get 32-bit in 12-bit 256 and 14-bit 1000 roughly in 16-bit but look in 32-bit you get 68 million bits of information in the shadow so that will tell you right there how important it is if you can shoot an hdr and get it uh to where you can get and work in 32-bit you will get a huge amount increase in your ability to manipulate so let's take a look oh wait here's a couple images i just threw these up here just kind of show you uh when i work in black and white and landscapes look at the tones look at the values i want the greatest of gradients and tones that i can in my image when i manipulate the image i love black and white it's uh really to me one of the one of the more uh especially like my landscapes and stuff so we're going to show you an image here this is the image we're going to work on right here it's an image of death valley and the reason why i chose this probably not an award-winning photograph but um and maybe it is you know maybe uh but it's the gradient in the sky that i want to show you how amazing it is to manipulate that and get the results we want so let's get over to we're going to close that out here are my nine images because i stitched this i shot an uh my uh canon uh eos r with a i think a 24 70 2.8 version oh that's well it's the only version they have it's the uh rf lens and i have my nodal point i think my middle point was off a little bit because i got because when you zoom it in and out you're gonna you have to change the nodal point and i was in a hurry and i think it's a little off because you'll see that in a minute but i i stitched it shot three images in three different positions and i'm going to grab the sky here this is the top part so here's the bottom um here's the middle and then here's the sky that's the three positions that are the normal exposures so let's take the normal exposure on the sky and let's go through a 14-bit a standard 14-bit processing conversion to black and white and let's see what kind of results we get we're going to blow it up and look at the noise and the grain all right so command r it takes me over to bridge and ross command r is raw shortcut and i'm going to go over here and i'm going to take and we're going to hit black and white so that automatically converts it to black and white and i'm going to take over here and i'm going to go do the ansel adams the black sky now he shot when he shot film he put a red or an orange filter in front of his uh on his lens and that would make the sky darker in digital you actually take the blue slider and move it to the left now i would never go that drastic right off the bat i would do some gradients and we'll show you that in a minute but i'm going to push it i'm going to push the limits of it to show you how um how uh what 14 bit looks like and what 32-bit or 16-bit and 32-bit looks like so now we could do other things like we can move the highlights around and stuff but we're not going to do that right now so we're going to go just do one slider it's the blue slider to the left that'll make it really simple we're going to open it up let's take a look at it we're going to come over here in photoshop and we're going to blow it up to 200 oh i can't see that let me hold on a second i want to see my at the scale on the bottom so i make sure i get there it is 200 percent okay so we're going to bring it over here and i'm going to drop it right there so look at right here all this noise that's going on here we got some other artifacts going on here that's not important right now we'll deal with that in a minute all right so that is the standard 14-bit approach now i'm going to open this up and i got to go back to default here reset and say done that way i'm going to do my hdr here it's going to reset this all right so now let's grab the three exposures and we're gonna go and do the hdr that is through bridge and it is something i've used and it also has an ability to stitch and do hdr at the same time but let's just do the hdr on the sky and do the same thing command r command a selects all three i'm going to control right click we're going to say merge to hdr and we're going to align the image just fine nothing else would say merge we have to name it we're going to call this death valley test oh we'll call it uh 16 bit okay oh we got to drop it into my stitch there we go all right now we go and convert it to black and white we are going to take the slider and go to the blue all the way there and we hit open and it will open as a smart object which i've set the default to do that and let's take a look at it and again this is a step up but let's see how much we went so let's go command i'm gonna plus up to there let's get it over in the same exact position all right right there okay so that is a 16-bit hdr this is 14-bit hmm not a lot of differences there it should be a lot more but is it well it's a two it's technically it's a supposed to be a two-bit increase in bit depth except adobe when you really work in 16-bit it's only 15-bit plus one point something someone explained this to me so you only gain one bit of information not good so let's go and redo this now and we're gonna go and do it in 32-bit so this is a little different this is the older way of doing it and adobe or adobe's changed a few things since when i first started and i used to be able to have a workaround to where i could get it and actually bring it up as a 32-bit file we're going to process it in 32-bit but when it spits it out it spits it out as a 16-bit but we've done all our manipulation in 32-bit so we'll take a take a look at this we're gonna go up to tools photoshop merge to hdr pro now it's gotta bring every image into photoshop open up so this takes a little longer than the other way so if you're doing a lot of hdrs this is a little bit more time consuming but if you're going to hang this on the wall put in a gallery and sell it for maybe millions of dollars i don't know you want to make sure that you do it right and a little extra is not going to hurt all right so we're going to go and we want it to 32-bit we want to complete toning in uh adobe camera raw we say yes go to tone acr and it's going to bring me over to bridge now i wish adobe would allow us to say this as a smart object or as a dng but they don't i will keep talking to them not that i have a voice but all right so we're going to convert to black and white and we're going to go take our blue slider all the way to the left we're going to say okay and take a look at this folks we're going to blow it up 200 let's go over here and look how smooth that is so let's go back to our 14 bit look at all the grain in there look at our 16 bit not a whole lot better and then here it is beautiful smooth transitions in uh that that from the darker to the lighter so as we if we bring it out you can really see how smooth this is um so let's go to our fifty percent oh i can't do that fifty percent and we'll look at this one at fifty percent so that's your 14-bit that's your 16-bit and that's your 32-bit so you see where uh the advantage is here the smooth gradients now i didn't do any manipulation out so i didn't do like dehaze and on my contrast and exposure and all that that would even increase the noise more if i kept pushing the limits on the 14-bit the 16-bit and of course the 32-bit will give me a smoother end result all the way around so i'm just taking one slider and showing you the the difference that it makes from one slider so that's pretty amazing that i can get that results in my black and white so let's now take a look at um let's take a look at me putting this whole thing together for you so what we're going to do is we're going to get out of these let's get rid of these so let me show you how i go and we're going to put the whole thing together so actually let's go over here and we're going to get rid of this because i don't want them in there it just it it's uh all right that was my test i did earlier so let's go back to raw we're going to go over here pick my nine images we're going to start on the bottom one first so we pick the three bottom images and we're going to go to tools photoshop merge to hdr pro and we're going to make this image look like a million bucks something i can hang on the wall put in a gallery all right here we go complete toning and acr here we go now in this case i'm going to do a little bit of an adjustments we're going to do we're going to do what i would normally do to a black and white image landscape and then we'll apply that same adjustment to all of the other two stitched or uh images so i can stitch them so it's gonna take its time and this is one of the problems with uh doing this is that it does take its time okay so we're gonna take our highlights all the way to the left on the shadows we're going to bring it up a little bit not too much i'm going to check my my white point so i hold the option down and i slide it to the right until it starts to show up there it is so that's my white point right there black point we'll do the same let's go oh there's the black point okay now we're gonna add a little bit of texture just a little snappiness to because i love black and white snappy pictures let's go and do just a tad just a little bit of contrast now i can't see the sky as another image but we're going to come down here we're going to take let's take the orange slider first so let's take a look i'm going to manipulate this the the mountains there just a little bit let's see let's go here let's take that yellow a little bit more there's no green in there not much aqua blue okay so here's my blue slider i got to be careful because i want to um i'm going to manipulate i want to go fairly smooth on it so let's go about there and what does purple do purple doesn't really do a whole lot magenta not a whole lot all right so we're going to save this well i don't have to but i usually save it here so i'll save the settings so i know let's just do it i'll show you how to do that save we're going to save it and we're going to call it my black and white test let's just do that i'm going to right overwrite the one i did here just in case i screw it up and i can't remember what i did on the or uh it should be just previous so that's the first one oh and then we're going to save this this is where it gets tricky we're going to save the file as a tip because i'm going to use this in pt gui okay so we're going to call this uh bottom we're going to say i'm on a macintosh say okay and then we'll get out of this all right so let's go to here we go to our second set exact same steps tools photoshop merged hdr pro huh you know you eventually you probably can do this in your sleep if you do it enough times but when you see the end results you'll go yep yep it's worth it all right we're going to go and do previous conversion or i've got it saved as i can load the settings so let's just go over here to uh previous conversion there we go say okay save it i could do an action button here actually to do that to save this a little bit of time but i didn't do it so we're gonna call this um i don't know what i call this middle oops all right [Music] okay we're gonna get out of here because we don't need it in photoshop anymore let's go back to bridge and now we get to do the top now if you didn't do a stitching scenario you wouldn't have to do all this but whoops i didn't want to do that cancel that's the old system i want to go up here so we're going to go to tools photoshop uh merges photoshop hdr pro and going back to this so why did i stitch this i use till-shift's lenses all the time but this is a nodal point system i did it because i increased my megapixels um so no matter what camera i'm using i can do about a little over two almost two and a half times the increase of megapixels and so that's when i make a big print in the wall in fact it's hard to see in here in my office i've got big prints i got a about a 60 40 45 by 60 inch print hanging over here and so that's what i like to do is make big prints so previous conversion is all we need to do here say okay save as tiff and we're going to call this top now i could merge this in photo merge in photoshop which i do almost 90 percent of all my landscapes but in doing that i discovered something i was a little off on my nodal point so i'm going to go and do it in p.t gooey oop i want to go here we're going to grab though that's why i saved it as a tiff so go over here pt gooey pt gooey is a little bit better at solving the stitching uh we're going to line the images and yes there it is there's a little bit off on the top and bottom fine don't worry about that i'm going to go over here to create panel panorama we're going to save it as a psb we want to make sure it's 16 bit we're not going to lose that we're going to flatten the layers we don't need those layers say okay and we're going to say create a panorama now if you if i did a tilt shift lens uh photo merge in photoshop would have been fine but because i used my um nodal point and i kind of was in a hurry did not think i was going to be using this image to teach you guys something so here we go we're going to double click there there's our beautiful it should be 16 bit but we processed it in 32 bit so let's crop it and let's make the magic happen here i'm going to show you how i do my final of this image so let me get my wacom pen out and let's make this dead center dead center in the the horizon is pretty much dead center don't have to do that but i'm going to do it anyways okay so the first thing i'm going to do is we're going to make a levels uh adjustment layer we're going to go over to the gradient tool over here and we want the the linear not the circular and we're going to pull from the top down so i hold the shift key down so it's a straight shot and i had my black as a foreground so we want to flip that inverse it come back over here hit that little i always call this the crown but i want to go to my properties and we're going to pull that gradient down a little bit here we want some cool looking gradients going now i'm not stuck there yet so we're going to do it again so let's go to levels we're on the gradient we're on the linear and we pull it from the bottom bottom i'm not going to do is drastic let's flip it and let's do the properties and we're going to pull a little bit from the bottom not done yet with this okay so we're going to go and do again we're going to do levels this is kind of flat here i got some beautiful stuff going on here but sky looks pretty good from almost pure white to pure black but this is flat so we're going to go and i'm just going to look at the bottom here we're going to increase my contrast on the bottom here don't worry about the top part and if i could have done this in raw it would be much better just the way it is folks i can't i mean i wish adobe would allow me to do that so now we can take the mask black whoops i'm going too fast jets are flying over the top we're going to take the brush we have black 100 and we're going to black out this [Music] if i hit my backspace right under my delete it shows me where i've done it whoops i hit the x again so i can kind of see what if i missed any parts here i don't want to i don't want it to hit the mountains here so we hit the backspace again so that's increased a little bit of the contrast in that i might move it a little bit more oops let's go make sure my mask looks like my mask is a little off here i missed a spot right there i could actually see it over there in that little oh in the very top i missed a little section okay so we hit the backspace again our spec slash again now i'm going to um let's do another levels we're going to do the gradient uncircular this time just a little circular gradient right here and we are going to bring down the outside just a little bit there we're going to go the top i'm going to go shift command n we're going to take the uh mode for to from normal to overlay fill up 50 gray and i'm going to go and just increase that highlight just a little bit so i go to my dodge let's go to about 11 percent make sure i have a soft brush i do and we'll see here we're gonna just bring this up just so your eye is drawn in just a little bit more to that middle part there this is subjective you may not want to do this much then let's go down to small so let's take a look at my gradient my top gradient here we can probably feather that back a little bit now i haven't flattened it yet so there's a little bit just the way photoshop works a little bit of wobbles in there but i also have a little lighter spot there so let's go to my burn maybe about four percent and i'm just going to burn down just a little bit of that section right there if i go really small i can kind of see where it needs a little extra i am burning four percent yes i'm on my correct layer all right let's go back and we're going to smooth it out just a little bit more we're actually going to go and i'm going to go command t oop wrong one the one right above that command t and i'm going to stretch this out a little bit hold the shift key down so it's a little smoother transitions here and i can also take this mask get my brush and i want black and just take that so it's not hitting the bottom part here but i still have a nice gradient there and once again i can feather this depending what you want to do if i had clouds in there drama a full moon or something that happened i didn't have a full moon actually there was a moon but it was i think uh the other side of me other direction um all right let's kind of look at that now i want that went a little fast on that i think that um i could probably go back and and maybe make that transition a little bit better if i had more time we're going to go shift option command e that flattens it now you can see how smooth that is and the gradients let's go in here smooth as a baby's bottom i raised four boys so i know what that's all about i love that smooth at those tones and again i would if i'm gonna make this a final which the other one i did i went in there and i cleaned up some little stuff in there to make it look really good but there you go um how you can work in hdr 32-bit get the tones where you want them so what does this tell you um photoshop gives us that extra option in bridge but it doesn't give me the 32-bit option that i have in the older system through tools photoshop merged for photoshop uh pro hdr pro a little longer but in the end i think it's worth it so i would do your own experiment so people come up to me and they say well how many transitions do you do i say well i do three three exposures to my hdr i do say a stop each way or two stops each way and they go well i do 13 transitions exposures okay i've tried it i don't think there's a big difference but maybe you can come up with something so go out and do your own experiments and then you go and you become an expert at this and then you're teaching us all how to do the ultimate black and white conversion so there's something new to be discovered every day photoshop keeps adding new things and um so you got to keep up on it and so i keep every once in a while i go back and i revisit this and re-look at it and i'm glad that i was able to and this whole uh tutorial came out by someone asking me uh as a question joel how do you get your black and whites how do you do the the conversion so this became a result of that i hope you enjoyed this i got hopefully more information i can pass on to you guys in the future i want to keep doing that so thank you for joining me and as i always say go out be an artist create an income or b be an artist live your dream create an income with your camera that's the ultimate joy i've had in doing this for 40 years i hope you can do that too [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Joel Grimes Photography

Views: 37,113

Keywords: photoshop, tutorial, conversion, RAW, adobe, camera raw, raw file, black and white, black, white, photography, retouching, landscape, better, images, how to, guide, canon

Id: z4HYksU_7Tg

Length: 36min 7sec (2167 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021