B&W Conversion in Lightroom
Lesson 3 from: Lightroom and Photoshop for Landscape PhotographyRandy Van Duinen
B&W Conversion in Lightroom
Lesson 3 from: Lightroom and Photoshop for Landscape PhotographyRandy Van Duinen
Lesson Info
3. B&W Conversion in Lightroom
Lessons
Class Introduction
08:18 2Luminosity Mask Image Enhancement
15:50 3B&W Conversion in Lightroom
04:48 4Using Lightroom and Photoshop for Great HDR Images
12:19 5Light Painting Processing
05:58 6Panorama Processing and Correction
10:12 7Sky Replacement
06:52 8Smart Objects
14:26Lesson Info
B&W Conversion in Lightroom
The next one we're gonna do is a black and white image. So, this is our image that we're gonna work on here. Now, I loved Ansel Adams, and I loved what his look and everything else, and I was, someone gave one of his books, "The Eloquent Light," and this was on the front cover of it. It's Half Dome in Yosemite, and I just enjoyed it, and so when I was out there, I took a picture not from the same spot because I didn't go hiking with the donkey out into the wilderness, but from another area that was similar to it to try to replicate what he did, and so we're gonna try to do that right here in Lightroom. So, let's go ahead and just start with basics, and I wanna go ahead and basically, let's just first of all take it to black and white. There we go, and that looks horrible. We need to do a whole lot of work to it. Well, like I said earlier, first thing I'ma do is bump up texture, and I'ma bump up clarity, both of those, and this one I will use some dehaze just a little bit just to help i...
t out a little bit more than what it is. So, I like kind of the texture that I'm getting there. I wanna set the black and the white points now, so let's go ahead, hold the option or alt key, and bring our blacks down till we start to see them. Like right there; that's looking good, and then our whites; let's set our whites. All right. Well, that's our whites, but that's way too much. So, this is one where visually, you just have to kinda eyeball a little bit. I think I like where that is right there with our white point. Now, when Ansel Adams did a lot of these shots in Yosemite he really darkened down the sky, and that really made the mountains pop, so that's what we're gonna do next. We're gonna start with the color temperature. Even though it's a black and white image, we're still working on a color image; it's still behind there, so we're gonna go ahead and take our color temperature and start to bring that down a bit, and I think I wanna bring it down about, I think, there. Now, that actually helped add some more contrast to it. It really started to get the sky a little bit, but it really worked on the mountain. But, now I really want the sky to be black around it, so I want to go to my black and white adjustments, and I'm gonna start with the blue and just gonna start bringing it down until I like what it's doing. Just like that; I think that's looking really, really good. I like that now; it's got that dark texture and that's the way Ansel used to do it, so I'm gonna do that the same thing. I also want to play around here with my yellow and my orange. The mountain was warmer; it was shot at sunset, so I'm actually gonna bring these guys, the orange and the yellow, up just a little bit, and all this is really doing is working on some of the whites in here to bring those a little bit brighter and add a little bit of contrast to it without blowing them out. I think I'll do something like that, and I'll take my blue a little bit more. All right. So, I got that where I want it. I now want to add a little bit of a vignette to it, and with something like this, we have to be careful. We're already working with a very dark sky, so we don't want to overdue this much. So, we're just gonna bring this over just a little bit bring our midpoint over and really feather it. We can go ahead and take a look, and if it's too much, bring it back a little bit, and I like what's going on here. I mean, this to me is very reminiscence of Ansel Adams in it. Only thing I'm not liking is we kinda blacked up some of our blacks here, so I'm gonna go up to the brush tool, double click effects to zero out everything and come up to shadows and just really pump it up so I can see what I'm doing, and make sure my auto mask is turned off. Auto mask will try to keep it within lines. I want this to be more flowy, so we're just gonna turn that off, and I'm just gonna come into some of these dark areas and see if I can get just a little bit more of the detail out of it, and there we go. I'm liking that. It's probably too much, so let's just take it down a little bit. And there we go. We went from a colored image to this one really easily, and I love how this looks. I mean, I haven't printed this one yet, but it will be printed because I really like how this turned out.
Ratings and Reviews
Tim Cooper
Fast paced but excellent demonstration of enhancement techniques