I’m sorry for being such a bad blogger lately. The last couple of weeks have been pretty rough, and blogging slipped below more important things on the priority list
Anyway, it’s now two weeks late, but here’s my long-awaited intro to black and white post production. And there’s a whole hour of Wednesday left as I start writing this, so it TOTALLY counts as a workshop wednesday
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different ways to convert a colour image to black and white. Just ask Google. Seriously. There’s a whole world of possibilities out there!
My approach, as always, is simple, Lightroom-based and not particularly earth-shattering. I hope it helps you figure out an approach that works for you
Here’s a colour image, straight out of camera, from Ainslie and Rohan’s wedding:
It looks OK in colour, but to my mind, the long shadows are begging for black and white treatment. This is the end result I was going for:
And here’s how I got there (just using Lightroom’s Develop module):
- White balance: avoiding proper colour correction by converting to black and white makes for crappy black and whites. Don’t be lazy! For this photo, I set my colour temperature to 7000 with a tint of +15.
- Grayscale treatment: I have Lightroom configured to apply an automatic grayscale mix as soon as I convert from colour to grayscale (Preferences > Presets). Usually it does a pretty good job (assuming my white balance is correct), but occasionally I might darken the greens, lighten the reds or make other minor adjustments. In this case, I didn’t override Lightroom’s defaults.
- Tone: Again, I usually start by auto-toning my photos, and tweaking from there. For this photo, I made the following adjustments:
* Exposure: 0
* Recovery: 34
* Fill Light: 14
* Blacks: 10
* Brightness: +109
* Contrast: +100 - Vignette: Finally, I applied a vignette to further draw attention towards Ainslie and Rohan.
Voila! A pretty dramatic-looking black and whiteI hope you found that useful … if so, please spread the word!
by luke
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