one fine day photography

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):

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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

4. Vignette: Finally, I applied a vignette to further draw attention towards Ainslie and Rohan.

Voila! A pretty dramatic-looking black and white I hope you found that useful … if so, please spread the word!

It’s workshop wednesday again. My, how time flies! I was planning to walk you through how I create my black and whites, but:

1. I have too much post production to get through today.
2. It’s my mum’s birthday, so I can’t work back tonight. (Not that I’m a big fan of working back anyway.)
3. Doug Boutwell from Get Totally Rad released a new set of Lightroom presets last night. I’ve been busy checking them out.
4. Bobby Earle has already posted a before and after using a beta of the presets. It’s worthy of the time you were planning to spend reading my post production post.

Incidentally, I haven’t bought the presets yet. I’m not sure if I will, either … they look awesome, but I’m pretty happy with my own Lightroom presets at the moment. I’ll let you know. Either way, if you’re a Lightroom user, you should totally check them out. All the Totally Rad action sets and presets are well worth the cost.

I’ll do my black and white post next week!

As promised last week, here’s my first “before and after” post (with apologies to Bobby Earle, who runs an awesome series called “Before and After Wednesdays” on his blog … you should check it out ).

I’ve chosen a random photo from a recent shoot, and I’m going to show you how I moved from my “straight out of camera” image on the left, to the processed image on the right.

Note: for some reason, the “before” image has a vignette on it. It shouldn’t. Imagine it’s not there

A few points before we begin:

• You may or may not like this particular photo, or the way I’ve processed it. That’s fine! I hope you’ll get something out of my approach anyway.
• My approach to post production is just what works for me. Figuring out what works for you will take time. Be patient, and don’t waste time trying to imitate me or anyone else.
• To improve your photos, become a better photographer. Post production can only do so much

With that out of the way, let’s open our photo in Lightroom’s Develop module.

As you can see, the develop settings are all at their default values, and the photo is looking pretty dull and lifeless. Let’s starting by fixing up the white balance (WB).

How did I know to choose that particular white balance? Experience and taste, mostly. You’ll get the hang of it by practising

What I usually do next is click the “Auto” button in the Tone panel. Lightroom then guesses how best to tone the image. It’s never a perfect guess, but it can be a good starting point, unless Lightroom gets confused by strong backlighting or something else.

From there, I tweak the tone sliders to my taste. Again, knowing how best to do this with your photos and to your taste will come with a lot of practise. (And then, if your taste is anything like mine, it will change )

Finally, I usually add a vignette, and I’m done

Obviously there’s more to it when it comes to black and whites and duotones, but we’ll talk about those another day

I hope that was helpful! If it was, please let me know in the comments and tell your friends about workshop wednesdays. That way I’ll know to keep doing it for you

Oh, and please keep asking questions for me to answer on workshop wednesdays!

With the Australia Day holiday and the fact that I’m still trying to clear out my post production backlog by the end of February, today’s “workshop wednesday” is going to be a quick one. Sorry.

I’m often asked how I process my photos, and this will be a topic I’ll return to in the coming weeks, but for now, I’ll give you the one-word answer:

Lightroom.

Ok, I’ll say a little more than that Lightroom is one of the products in Adobe’s Photoshop family. You can buy it without buying Photoshop, and if you’re the sort of photographer who likes to get it right in camera and make minimal changes to your photos afterwards, you might not even need Photoshop (which is much more expensive). Then again, if you own Photoshop and don’t need/want the catalog and workflow smarts of Lightroom, the exact same photo processing tools are available to you via Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw, both of which come with recent versions of Photoshop.

Aside from occasional experiments with a few Photoshop actions (none of which I love enough to use every day, although there is some fun to be had with Doug Boutwell’s Totally Rad Actions), none of my photos leave Lightroom. All of my photo processing is done in Lightroom’s Develop module. Most of my “look” comes from getting the right white balance and my particular approach to manipulating the tone sliders. The rest comes from a small collection of split toning presets I’ve built up, and obsessive attention to detail (which means I rarely “batch process”, despite trying to speed things up that way).

In coming weeks I’ll post specific examples of how I get the look I’m after out of my photos. No time to post one today, sorry!

But to pretty up the post, here’s a sneak peek of a portrait session with another of Josiah’s potential wives, Charlotte