Lessons

Lesson Info

Signature Soft B&W

in this video, we're gonna create to 12th Masalit ease for our signature and are soft, black and white looks which are gonna take your image from this lovely little raw file to this awesome black and white in just a simple click. And the cool thing is, we're gonna create both. Mixology is in under 10 seconds. We're gonna process each of these photos as well in under 10 seconds to, well, at least the basic breast we might do some advance work, will see. All right, so let's jump in. I'm gonna select all three of these images and press control. Shift our command shift artist to reset the mountain. Let's talk briefly about when we would use the signature black and white versus soft, black and white. So Senator Black Away is really designed for any type of shot. It could be a close up couples portrait. It could be a well, not too close up, but basically these types of crops, it could also be a wide angle type shot like this. Soft, black and white is really more designed for newborns, for bo...

udoir, for close up portraiture. When we basically have a lot of detail. We have a lot of skin tone or on a soften and make that skin tone very flattering. So let's cover the differences between these two effects. And the cool thing is, we're gonna cover not only how to create the preset, but will also basically go through the settings that give each of these pre sex. There s a pre sex I think I bought SBI did say pre sex. That's okay. I meant presets. We're gonna go over the different settings that give each of these presets. They're kind of distinct looks. Let's start with this image. I think that was a Freudian slip with it. Not all right. So we're here on this image, and we're gonna be creating this signature black and white, which again is already created. It's in the LDP, black and white in the mixology folder for the 2015 process system. So all you need to do from here is just just in your exposure and it's done. You're good to go. So let's go about creating this preset using the foundation framework. And what we would do is let's first put 10 seconds on the clock, our exposure and temperature is good, so we don't need to worry about that. Were close to where we want to be with this image, and that's totally fine. We're going to start with a foundation with black and white and natural toning. We'll go over what each of these does. In just a moment. I'm gonna do a little bit more highlight recovery. I'm gonna add just a little bit of mid tone definition and boost contrast. Okay, and that's it. That is the signature black and white effect. Now from here, all we would do is just adjust the exposure to get to where we need to be based on the type of image we're working on and what this essentially does. So we look at the before and after we have a beautiful high contrast image has a really great black wine look that gives emphasis towards skin tones. So it's fantastic for portraiture. Okay, if we press J to look at the highlight clipping alert, you'll notice that we have beautiful contrast here. But we're not really blowing out any highlights, and we're not clipping much, if any, shadows just a tiny, tiny bit in those deep, dark areas So we're good there too. So you could say about this preset if you'd like. But let's go over what the settings have done. Basically, so there highlight recovery. We're pulling down our highlights. And are whites well preserving at shadows and we're boosting contrast quite a bit to plus with black and white. I like to have additional contrast now even boost my clarity over what I typically would when it comes to just a standard color image as well. Now, the special sauce years. Let me go ahead and show you this. I'm gonna create a virtual copy of this by pressing control, possibly of Commander, possibly on a Mac. And we're gonna do is I'm gonna reset out everything except for that exposure. So let's just press control, shift our and then I'm gonna dial in that exploded. You have to follow along with this. I just want to show you with that same exposure setting what the standard black and white conversion would be with leg room. So this is light rooms, black and white conversion. Right here. Same exposures, same everything. This is our black and white conversion, so you can see how dramatic a difference. It is. And a lot of that magic is happening over here in the black and white mix, the standard black white mixed four life terms black and white Effect is designed for basically overall image usage. It's not designed for anything in particular, just for overall black and white effects. Ours is designed specifically for portraiture. Okay, so we are lifting reds, oranges and yellows because those their skin tones want skin tones toe have a lifted quality. Doing that a little bit brighter. They're a little bit more just pleasing to the eye. Okay, we also have a standard contrast boosting tone curve that's drawn in here. In our detail. We have a standard detail settings. Again, If you don't, the presets you could positive could look at them. But I don't want to slow down for every single thing. Otherwise, this is gonna get redundant. And that's really it for that signature black and white look. So that's how it looks. Let's go ahead and go to the next image right here. Let's just process this one real quick. All we're gonna do is select signature black and white, and then I'm gonna tweak my exposure just to bring it up a little bit when get a nice, beautiful, timeless black and white image again, black and whites work ray over timeless images over images like this one, where you want to bring emphasis to kind of the detail and the textures and the image versus the actual color. Although this one would look fantastic in color too. So I'm just gonna change my crop by president are and just straightening out the horizon line a little bit. Looked like that was a little bit drunk. When I took that photo, he was quite sideways. Let's go ahead and press signature. Black and white. We get a beautiful black and white conversion here, and then all I'm gonna do is just dial up the exposure. Okay. Looks fantastic for the specific image I'm gonna put in a radio filter and just drawing attention, right? Indoor couple right there with a 0.5 burn. That looks fantastic. All right, so here is the before and after for that, and you saw the other image already control the before and after this, it doesn't really make sense to see before and after is when it's colored a black and white because its color to black and white. But what does make a lot of sense is comparing those two black and white conversions between light rooms, standard conversion versus the presets, black and white conversion. You could see how much better it is on the left side. All right, now, let's go to this soft black and whites. Okay, so let's show you guys how this one was built and basically the differences. So essentially, the difference between here is if we go in select soft, black and white, you see, it says close up slash newborn. What we have here is we actually have additional contrast. But you'll note that the clarity has been dropped significantly in the image. So clarity has been dropped quite a bit. We have the same black white mixed, but really the main differences in keeping We've dropped clarity basically, by 30 points from where it was in the last type of image and the common say we've raised contrast. Okay, so let's go back and we're gonna create this preset real quick. Let's just reset this out and this would be great. Creative. Very similarly, we go to black a white natural toning. We could basically do a highly recovery again. You can choose whatever based on you. Like if you want a dynamic range boost, you can do that as well. But here we're gonna soften mid tone definition and then to preserve contrast, we're gonna add back A contrast boost. You can go anywhere between medium toe heavy. It really you're just gonna depend on your style. I picked heavy because I like that look a little better. And from there we just dialing that exposure look. And with boosted contrast but pulled highlights, you can see that if I pressed Jay, we get to weaken, really bring up the brightness of the image without blowing out that highlight detail. And so what that gives us is very soft highlights over skin tones. Okay, again, once again, you can save that out. If you wanted to save these precepts, you click plus check. All except for white balance and exposure. Graduate filter radio filter de select all the lens corrections while selecting chromatic aberration. These are all things that we generally adjust on an image to image basis. Choose the fold you want to save it into and give it a name, and that's good enough. Okay, So selecting soft, black and white all were do from here basically is just a just in that exposure for what we want. Okay, this looks great right there. I'm gonna go to that next image. Let's do it on this image to and you can see, like, if I compare. So here's the soft, black and white. Let's dial that in, get our exposure right up to where I would want it. Ellis compare between Signature. So here's signature. You could see that signature still has a nice look to it, but as faras making it a little bit softer and more flattering soft does a really great job of kind of keeping the highlights bright blooming, some of the details. So we have less skin detail to really worry about. Okay. Same thing here, soft, black and white. Okay, I'm just gonna just up my exposure from there, and we're solid. So once again, let's do one last comparison to take this image creative. Virtual copy by pressing control a pasta for your commander pottery will reset this one out by simply we can either press control shift our or command shift our or click the reset button. Our exposure was at a 0.6. So just so we can have a before and after compare against I'm gonna choose 0.6, press V to switch this over to black and white. Let's once again compare the two black and white conversions here. So on the left, we have the lightning preset system on the right. We have the standard black of my conversion. Inside of later, you can see how far these presets get us in one single click. We can get to really great images with these black and white effects. Hopefully, you all enjoy this tutorial. I'll see you all in the next one.