Have you ever noticed that black and white isn’t as easy as it sounds, and that’s probably why you’re reading this article?Well, you’re absolutely right. Black and white seems easy because you don’t have to fight color, but the truth is that when you get rid of it, you have to fight a lot of other things and, as always, it all starts and ends with us. . We are our main obstacle and at the same time we are the solution. You may be wondering what I’m talking about, well, the first big obstacle we encounter as photographers is that the world is in color, and it’s very difficult to get rid of what our eyes see and turn it into something completely different from the good first.
When we see in color, consciously or unconsciously, the images are supported according to that, when you think about converting it to black and white, after thinking about it and visualizing it in color, all you get is to remove a good part of the soul from the image and keep a dull, sad and gray photograph. You’ve probably been in this situation more than once. Well, if you’ve seen something wrong or something missing in this picture, are you on the right track, because no one has the solution except you?The solution is called learning to look black and white, and it just requires a little practice, enthusiasm and perseverance. Well, and some tips I leave you in the following lines, I hope they will help you immerse yourself in this fascinating world of black and white photography.
- The main thing is to expose correctly.
- Both in color and in black and white.
- You always have to start here.
- Although I have heard of all the colors to know if exposing for highlights or shadows.
- Really depends a lot on the treatment program that we use afterwards.
- For example.
- For some Lightroom recovers the shadows very well.
- So they prefer to expose for the high lights.
- Others think that black and white produces too much noise when trying to recover the shadows (and it is true.
- It produces more noise than color.
- Or at least it shows more) and are exposed for shadows I think the key is to expose as correctly as possible and once we get acquainted with our editor.
- Our camera and ourselves.
- Establish certain routines or processes that simplify our work a little?.
There is no single way to shoot in black and white, there are actually as many fashions as photographers holding a camera and performing a scene, but at first glance, contrast and black and white are among those great alliances that sometimes occur. set out in photography ;-). You’ve probably already noticed that monochrome tolerates a lot more contrast than color, right?Loving colors that are too radical (too much contrast, too much saturation) often lead to unactive images or too far from reality. On the other hand, black and white, perhaps because already part of the principle of being something artificial, allows more to play with the extremes.
This is not to say that images must be of extreme contrast (high and low key for example), on the contrary, images with little contrast and rich in intermediate gray tones are also interesting, which does not mean that they are not ‘have no contrast or are plastered. will we see in the treaty?
It all comes down to the fact that all times of the day and environments can be good candidates for black-and-white photography. During the central hours of the day, you’ll have a lot of contrast. In the first and last hours of the day you will have a less pronounced contrast and more intermediate tones with which to enrich your image, similar to the cloudy days that I highly recommend to not miss, for the same reasons.
Another way to add interest to the image before taking it is to have a polarizer, especially if we want to photograph landscapes, a polarizer will help you darken the sky and increase contrast, as well as avoid reflections.
This is part of the work you’ll have to do, and it’s just learning roughly, what shades of gray the colors will transform in front of you when you change your image.
I guess you’re using a program like Lightroom, Photoshop or Camera RAW. They are all similar and have similar basic configurations. And even if you don’t use any, any editor has, if not all, the basic settings that I’m going to talk about here.
The first step is to convert the image to black and white, for this I will rely on Lightroom, which is the program I use, but you will see that they are all more or less similar, to convert the image you can convert it directly to black and white, remove saturation, change it to gray level mode, etc. I recommend taking control of the image and making all the decisions ourselves, so I choose to convert it to black and white from the “Reveal” module, and leave the values at 0, nothing to desaturate or no more grayscale.
The second step is to analyze the result by asking us questions about it What do you think of the image?Do you have enough contrast?Do you have textures that enrich the image?Or was I just a good candidate to convert it to monochrome or was I wrong from the beginning?
Once the image is analyzed, let’s adjust its basic parameters, remember that the more correct the image directly from the camera, the better results you will get in the final quality of the editing.
1. The first logical step depending on Lightroom’s interface would be to adjust the exposure and contrast. I leave it for the end but, as always, it will try; Everyone has to find the workflow that suits their needs, however, I start by adjusting the highlights and shadows because, most of the time, the dynamic range of the scene exceeds the sensor’s ability to capture it, that is, if there is too much contrast. between the high lights and the shadows, the sensor will only finally expose one of the parts. Fortunately, this is the time when we can try to solve this problem ;-). You’ll see that if you’ve fired RAW and exposed correctly, you’ll get more than acceptable results.
2. La next thing I do is make sure my black-and-white image contains pure black and white. To do this, I use the black and white cursor, which intensifies or reduces the black and white of the scene. How do I know if a black and white is pure in the picture?Well, is there anything?
Two arrows appear at the top of the histogram in the edit panel, the one on the right corresponds to the light tones of the image, to the left in the shadow area. If we click on it, it shows us above the same image, all areas of the image with pure white (in red) and pure black (in blue). In the following image, I have on and underexposed so that we can clearly see how the black and white parts of both colors stain, however, remember that pure black and white are the ends of the histogram, where information is lost, that is, they have no textures or any other tone, etc. For this reason, I recommend that your image have a little (but little) of each of them unless you want to completely lose the textures of the scene.
3. La next stage (always in my case?) I’d adjust what we call clarity in Lightroom. Clarity increases the contrast of midtones without altering the ends.
4) Now we can go back to the beginning and think if we really need the exposure and contrast values, which are the ones that direct the settings, most of the time they will not be necessary, the contrast was added by expanding the range of tones from white to pure black (if these values were missing in the initial image) and intensifying the clarity (half-tone contrast).
5. With these simple steps you would have corrected contrast, lights and shadows, midtones, etc. You can stay here perfectly or retouch the shades of gray in your image. This is done through the “Black and White Mix” setting, which is nothing more than the ability to increase or decrease the saturation of each color in the image, i. e. what was blue in the original image, here it transforms into a gray that you can darken or lighten using the corresponding marker. And the same for all colors in the image.
There is no recipe to edit the tones of the image, on the one hand because each image is different, on the other hand because surely you would never repeat exactly the same edition one day as the other, because it depends on the day, mood, desire, knowledge?The trick is to keep trying and learning.
By the way, if you double-click the bookmarks, do the values automatically return to zero?
Experiment with what you have. While Lightroom is a program that greatly facilitates the lives of professional and amateur photographers, the truth is that there are many programs, plugins, filters on Instagram, on your smartphone, Picmonkey, Vsco, most of them for free, that will allow you to experience these values perfectly.
What you think? Easy right? Amazing what can be done with a few simple adjustments, right? Well, thanks for the patience to read so far ;-). If you have found it useful, we would appreciate it if you share it on your favorite social network to reach as many people as possible Thank you and next time?