A Scenic World

I took a jaunt through South Carolina recently and had the distinct pleasure of taking photos of my cousin’s beautiful children. They both respond enthusiastically to having a camera pointed their way, and were more than happy to make sad faces and mad faces and smiles that didn’t show their teeth (harder than it sounds!). I processed almost all of them in black-and-white; here’s how.

This shot was taken with them sitting on their grandfather’s old Mercedes. They adopted the back-to-back pose and gave me their best Bond girl glowers. Here’s the original:

Let’s start with the camera calibration. By reducing the saturations of the various channels to varying degrees (red: -2, green: -79, blue: -69) and adjusting their hues, we’re already halfway to making the photo black-and-white:

I coupled this with a rather odd white balance that tended toward the blue and the green ends of the spectrum. The white balance applied by itself looked like this:

When we add that custom white balance to the calibration settings, the result is this:

Color, even in a black-and-white photos, still plays a huge role in terms of the luminances and hues of the colors that are present in the initial photo. As I’ve said before in previous posts, rarely is it a good idea to universally desaturate a photo or choose grayscale; you get the most creative control by desaturing each individual color so that you can then make other adjustments as needed. For instance, here’s a screencap of part of my color panel in Lightroom:

Note that the colors themselves are desaturated, but the hues and the luminances are adjusted for impact. After I made the calibration and the white balance changes, their skin became more yellow and green, so by boosting the luminances of those colors, their skin appears to glow. For what it’s worth, this is a shot of the original image with only the color adjustments made (you’ll see pink here because I forgot to desaturate reds in the color panel, but with the white balance and camera calibration, there’s not much red left).

Once these settings are added to the changes that were already made to the white balance and camera calibration, however, we get this:

Nice enough, but no drama.

Some quick work with the basic tones – exposure (increased to almost a full stop), recovery (used extensively to help guard against those highlights on the left girl’s face), fill light (not used), blacks (increased moderately), brightness (increased, although to be fair I don’t know what the difference is between this and exposure), and contrast (bumped down a tiny bit) – gives us the following:

You can further fine-tune this using the Tone Curve section of Lightroom. Conventional wisdom says to use an “S” shape, but mine is more like a suicide ski slope. See for yourself:

What these seemingly-insane values do to the photo is this:

The whites are blown in this edit, but they weren’t blown in the original photo, which means that we can recover the parts we want using the brush tool in the newer versions of Lightroom. I set the brush to a value of -.50 exposure with a generous brush size, maximum feathering, and about half opacity (it blends much better that way) and was able to create a much more dramatic look for the younger girl on the left. I used to brush tool on the older girl on the right as well, but I actually brightened the right side of her face and then used the graduated filter to emphasize the light fall-off there (although you won’t be able to see that until I add the vignette in the next step).

And as promised and as I’m sure you could have guessed, I used the vignette tool on its maximum settings to get rid of that bright thing on the left side of the smaller girl and to increase the depth of shadows around the older girl:

And there you have it!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 9:56 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.