A Scenic World

One of the questions that seems to get asked most often on the camera forums I frequent is the best way to convert to black-and-white. So many wonderful photos have been ruined by a terrible black-and-white conversion. The worst in my mind is the muddy grays that in-camera conversions come up with; a close second is what happens when you just move the saturation value to “0.” Ugh.

I spent a good deal of time looking at the black-and-white photos I like, and most of them have one thing in common: they have distinct blacks (the histogram goes all the way to “0″) and either stop just shy of the absolute-white mark or hit it full force (“255″ on the histogram, for those who are keeping score). With that in mind, I’ve taken a rather heavy hand with the contrast and curves on the photos I convert to black-and-white. Mine definitely don’t fall into the warm-and-fuzzy category, so please keep that in mind.

Rohan didn’t really want his photo taken the other day, and in typical Rohan fashion, he refused to look at me, forcing me to take pictures of his profile. I only got off seven shots before he got bored and ran away, but I actually ended up with two pretty exciting shots, especially after they were processed.

The photo looked like this straight out of the camera:

Decent light, nice background – the camera and the lens had done their jobs. Now it was my turn to put Lightroom to work.

As always, I just applied a preset and tweaked, but as always, I’ll walk through each step here – especially because the technique used for this photo hinges almost completely on the much-maligned and rarely-touched “Calibration” menu in Lightroom.

First, the white balance. The camera’s AUTO mode did a pretty fantastic job, but with black-and-white, you have to throw almost everything you know about color out the window. The most awesome black-and-white photos I’ve ever done look absolutely insane in color. And I’ll prove it. Here’s how the above photo looks with the white balance adjusted:

So that’s where we begin.

The basic tone settings are actually fairly pedestrian: a bit of exposure bump, a bit of an increase to the blacks. As you’ll see in the final version, the highlights are kind of strong, so I pushed recovery completely. A little kick to the contrast, and you’re ready to go:

The tone curve once again defies convention:

These values…

…give us this:

Yep.

I work a lot with the individual colors’ hues, saturations, and luminances, and that’s no different when I’m working in black-and-white. It’s one of the reasons you should NEVER do a global desaturation in Lightroom (the saturation slider under the Basic Tone – Presence menu). Otherwise you can’t tweak all those individual settings to make your photo pop. In this instance, all the tweaking I did ended up with this:

Next on the menu is split-toning and vignetting. And – surprise! – there’s no split-toning to this photo! Lots of times I add just a hint of gold for a shimmery effect, but this one really is straight black-and-white. Of course I added a vignette, though. How can you say no to that?

Now for the magic:

The calibration menu on Lightroom has two settings for each channel (as I like to think of them, coming from a Photoshop background): Hue and Saturation. You can desaturate each channel, which does some pretty amazing things to the colors you see. In this case, I desaturated the reds and greens, which happens to be the only colors that exist in the photo immediately above. The blue channel tends to control how all colors get expressed; for instance, if I want to make my freckles pop out like in this picture, I fiddle with the blue channel a lot).

Those settings coupled with everything else we’ve done to this photo results in this, our final version:

And remember those histogram settings? We hit them right on the nose:

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 17th, 2010 at 10:37 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.