A Scenic World

Someone in a photo forum recently said that you can’t take shortcuts with a black-and-white conversion, and I realized just how true that is. There are so many nuances that go into each one that you really can’t just apply a preset or desaturate an image or convert to grayscale and leave it, not if you want it to have anywhere near the impact of the full-color version.

But then it occurred to me that a lot of people probably don’t know what, how, or why you would adjust certain things for black-and-white conversions. The “how” is the easiest part to do and the hardest part to explain in a tutorial like this since it’s completely dependent on what software you use. You should basically explore whatever software you have and find out how many ways it will let you adjust things. Black-and-white is all about nuances, so find as many ways possibly to adjust every tiny bit of your photo. I tried to keep my explanation of the “what” and “why” simple so that they could be replicated to an extent with other tools rather than Lightroom.

So I’m going to discuss what you can and possibly should adjust for a good black-and-white conversion – and why you should. The important thing to remember, though, is that every single photo you convert has to be treated based on its own merits. If the photo is mostly green and blue, your values would be completely different than from a photo that’s mostly orange and red. A landscape should be treated differently than a portrait, a gritty portrait should be treated differently than a soft studio-type portrait. So basically, you cannot copy what I do here and expect good results. But this will hopefully explain how you can go about finding what’s best for any photo.

First, the original photo we’ll be working with today, cropped to square because I’m thinking in squares these days:

Next, let’s do a universal desaturation. Basically, most types of photo software will let you either desaturate the entire photo, or you can desaturate each color individually. For this next photo, we’re going to do the first option, just to see what it looks like:

Some people use the term “grayscale” instead of “black-and-white,” but when I hear “grayscale,” the above picture is what I immediately think of: shades of gray, with no real black OR white. To me, this looks muddy and dull. Especially compared to what happens when we increase the contrast:

To me, just increasing the contrast in this image made the flower pop. Obviously you can’t do that with every photo, but because this one had so much negative space to being with, it makes a huge improvement.  Because we’re conscientious post-processors, let’s tweak it a bit with some curves:

Let’s back up just a moment here. I said earlier that there’s two ways to desaturate a photo. You can either do it universally, desaturating the entire photo, or you can desaturate each color individually. I prefer to desaturate each color individually, because there’s more to colors that just saturation. You’ve probably seen the term “HSL” in your software; that refers to the three components of colors: Hue, Saturation, and Luminance. When you desaturate universally, you can (probably, depending on the software) no longer adjust the luminances of each color. But if you desaturate each color individually, you can still affect the luminance.

Here’s an example. I’m going to take the last photo above, the one that has the contrast and curves applied, and re-saturate it (move the universal saturation back to the original). Here’s what we get:

Now I’m going to desaturate each individual color; this photo should look suspiciously close to the one where I desaturated universally:

When you desaturate universally, the flower becomes shades of gray; the colors, for all intents and purposes, no longer exist in the photos. But because I desaturated each color individually, I can still affect the luminance, which, in layman’s terms, is how bright each individual “color” is. You always want to be able to tweak as much as possible, because that’s where you can really make the difference between, “Nice!” to “Wow!” In this scenario, the flower is still orange and yellow, even though the saturations are at “0″, so I can make the oranges and yellows brighter, which is what I did in the following step:

This next bit is controversial: I almost always change the white balances in my photos. The reason is because when you change the white balance, you change the character of each color. My flower above is mostly oranges, so when I adjust the luminance of “orange,” I’m affecting all those oranges – basically the entire flower. But if I change my white balance, then some of those oranges can become more yellow. Some of the yellows become greener. I can basically make the colors whatever I want them to be and then adjust as needed. Also, I find that bluer white balances (more toward the tungsten end) brings out textures – great for things like flowers, horrible for things like skin. The converse is true as well: yellower white balances do wonderful things for the pores in skin but obliterate most grainy textures. Since we’re desaturing the flower anyway, it doesn’t matter what “color” it is, so long as we can manipulate those colors at will.

I want to bring out the texture in those petals, so I’m going to adjust the white balance until I like the effect. Experimentation is key here:

The effect is subtle, but it’s there. Now, on to some more controversial stuff: I always change the camera calibration in Lightroom. I think this is most similar to adjusting the various channels in the Photoshop world. I’ve found, for instance, that playing with the “red channel” can make my skin look creamy smooth (it is most decidedly not in real life). Playing with the “blue channel” makes my freckles and eyes pop. For our flower picture above, I experimented and played with all of them until I got what I thought was a dramatic, nuanced, textured look:

That’s it, for this photo. But in the course of playing around, I ended up with some other variations, which is probably the most exciting thing about black-and-white conversions; you can change the tone and mood much more easily than with color. So here are some other variations:

This entry was posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 10:35 am and is filed under Lightroom Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.