| A local gaucho with his horse, who happened upon the 2010 Wenger Patagonian Expedition Race and stopped to check out the action on the island of Tierra del Fuego in southern Chile. |
1 ) The image as it was worked up in
Lightroom 3, with the black-and-white settings dialed in via the
Black&White and Basic dialogs in the Develop module. |
Black-and-white photography seems to be more popular than ever in
this digital era. And in my opinion, it has never been easier to make a
professional-caliber black-and-white conversion, especially with the
new, easy-to-use tools. I happen to use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, and
in this article, I’ll show you my step-by-step process with it.
Lightroom has a before and after mode that, along with the individual
Black&White Mix sliders, allows you to see which colors each
Black&White slider correlates to, giving specific control of each
color channel and the resulting gray-scale toning of that color. To
convert an image to black-and-white, click on the Black&White option
at the top of the right Develop module in the Basic dialog box. Once
you select Black&White, the Black&White Mixer dialog appears in
the HSL/Color/B&W section, third down from the top. The Mixer shows
up with Auto adjustments already made, but you can adjust the sliders
individually to dial in the image. To access the before and after mode,
click on the “X|Y” icon in the toolbar, which is the second icon from
the left.
2 ) Before and after mode in the
Develop module. This is just one of the four ways you can set up the
before and after mode, which is a fantastic feature for converting
images to black-and-white. |
Also, don’t forget that you can adjust your exposure, curves,
contrast and the amount of vignetting in the other dialog panels. In
addition, the Targeted Adjustment tool allows you to adjust the tones
directly on the image itself by clicking on that section and moving your
mouse up or down. Just click on the icon consisting of concentric
circles (it looks like a small target) located in the upper-left corner
of the Black&White panel to grab the Targeted Adjustment tool. It’s a
super-slick method for working directly on the image and one of the
incredibly intuitive features in Lightroom. As you move your mouse up or
down, the sliders also will move in the Black&White panel, as well.
To start off, I normally
create
a Virtual Copy of my image before converting to black-and-white so that
I have both a color and a grayscale version of the image. Having both a
color and black-and-white version helps me to see if the image works
better in color or in black-and-white. Normally, I won’t know until I do
the conversion and look at them both, side by side.
3 ) Before and after mode zoomed into
the gaucho’s face to fine-tune the black-and-white conversion. To
maximize detail and contrast on his face, Clark used the Clarity slider
and localized adjustments. |
For an example, let’s look at this image of a gaucho photographed
during the 2010 Wenger Patagonian Expedition Race in southern Chile.
Because it was overcast and stormy for much of the race, many of the
images from that assignment lent themselves to black-and-white. In this
image, the sky was pretty much blown out before I got started, so in
black-and-white, I just let it go and cranked up the contrast. As usual,
I used the before and after mode to adjust the Black&White sliders.
For this image, there were a large variety of colors and hues that
allowed me to accurately convert the image as I wanted it to look in
black-and-white. And using the multiple views available in the before
and after mode, I could concentrate on key parts of the image.
4 ) Clark finished the image in
Photoshop by doing a bit of retouching on the hat and face, as well as
adding some brightness and contrast and adjusting the Levels. |
In my workflow, with both color and black-and-white images, I find
that to effectively finalize an image I need to continue the
postproduction in Adobe Photoshop once I export images out of Lightroom.
I export images from Lightroom as 16-bit ProPhoto RGB color files at
300 ppi. Then in Photoshop, I can convert the files to grayscale, set
the black and the white
points
in the image, make the final Levels adjustments and perfect the
contrast with either the Curves dialog or with the Brightness/Contrast
tool. And if an image needs it, I can extend the exposure latitude by
masking and compositing different pieces of the image together. For this
image of Francisco, all the image needed in Photoshop was a Levels
adjustment, some precise cloning on the hat and a brightness/contrast
adjustment.
Most images will be improved if there’s a part of the image that’s
pure white and another part that has some pure black. Many of the images
I choose to convert to black-and-white are images that in color have
little contrast. Perhaps they were shot in the fog or on an overcast
day. In either case, converting them to black-and-white allows me to
really crank up the contrast and fashion the image in a way that may
look a little strange in color, but works well in black-and-white.
Adventure-sports photographer Michael Clark is based in Santa Fe, N.M. This article is an excerpt from his comprehensive digital workflow e-book Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: A Professional Photographer’s Workflow
, available at www.michaelclarkphoto.com.
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