Adobe Camera Raw & Lightroom for Lunch™ - Craft Great B & W Photos

1. ACR and Lightroom for Lunch™ - Craft a Black and White image - Introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of Adobe Camera raw and Lightroom for Lunch craft awesome black and whites. Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom for Lunch is a series of classes, each of which teaches one or two techniques that you can apply to photos using either Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop or the developed module in Lightroom. You'll get plenty of opportunity to practice your new skills in the projects you'll create. Today, we're looking at editing color photos and converting them to black and white. I am going to give you the two photos that I'm working on. They're both raw images so that you can open them up in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw and follow along as I work. Now as you're working through these videos, you may see a prompt which that you recommend this class to others please if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. First of all, give it a thumbs up, and secondly, just write a couple of words about why you're enjoying the class. Recommendations like this help other students to find my classes and to determine if they're the kind of causes that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments. I look at, and I respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now let's get started on crafting awesome black and whites in both Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom and first up, Lightroom. 2. ACR and Lightroom for Lunch™ - Pt 1a - Lightroom Basic B & W Adjustment: The first image we're going to convert to black and white in Lightroom, I've chosen for a few reasons. One is that I really want to get some of the fish that are in this fish case to be apparent and really visible in the black and white. That's a bit of a challenge there. There's also this gentleman here who's serving, and I want to make sure that I protect his skin tones when I convert to black and white. There's a risk that the black and white conversion is going to destroy those skin tone. So we need to watch that. Also, this is really big area over here that is really highlight, it's probably almost blown out. I'm seeing the histogram over here. There's a really good chance that that is blown out pixels over here. But there's also been some really interesting detail over here, so we may want to get that back. With that in mind, let's go ahead and work at converting this to black and white. Now, all the tools that you've got in Lightroom are also in Adobe Camera Raw. You could be using Adobe Camera Raw for this as well, of course. I'm going to start in the Basic panel because I want to fix this image as a color image before I even convert it to black and white, because there's some things going on here I want to start looking at. Particularly, this area across here. I'm going to check the exposure. This is a really well exposed image if it weren't for these blown out highlights over here, if I click on this Highlight clipping warning, you can see where I have clipped highlights over here. But basically, this is a good histogram. There is a good range of pixels all the way from the darkest pixels over here, which is the blacks, all the way to the whites over here. To recover this clipped area, I could work on the exposure, but that's going to change the exposure in all of the image and the rest of the image is just fine. It's really this area here that is particularly bad. I'm going to start by bringing down the highlights a little bit. If I turn back on my Highlight clipping warning, you will see that that alone has just brought back those white. So there's really light pixels back into the area of being white and perhaps even with a little bit of color in them. That's recovered the image without affecting the overall exposure. That's a really good way of trying to recover blown out highlights when you have them, and I've brought those highlights well back into the image. In particular, because it is a very light area of the image and there's some interesting things happening. Shadows, I don't want to get detail out of the shadows. That looks pretty good to me. I'm not really interested in what's happening behind the server here, but I am interested in this bit here. Let's check out black and white points. I'm going to hold the ALT key, and that would be the Option key on a Mac. I'm just going to click on this middle point in the slider and just start moving it up until I start seeing some pixels appear. Then I'm going to back it off because with whites I don't want to see any pixels at all. But I want to be just below the point at which the pixels appear. That's settled my white point, let's go and see my black points to see if we can peg to make sure that there are some black pixels in this image. Again, reinforcing that entire tonal range for this image, hold Alt or Option on a Mac. Here, I've got a few blacks, you're starting to see some pixels come in. I'm going to pick a point about there. I'm not worried about seeing black pixels or color pixels at this point. In fact, I do want to see some, because I want some blacks in my image, some true blacks. It's whites that are a problem because if you have blown out white pixels, that's not ink on paper, you wouldn't get any ink on the paper when you have those, that's to be avoided. Now, let's look at the Clarity situation. I'm going to boast clarity a little bit. That's mid-tone Contrast Enhancement. That's going to bring up a bit of detail in these mid-tone areas. That's in particular the fish and probably these fish around here are going to get a boost from clarity. It could also look at a little bit of additional contrast. It's going to burst a contrast with a little bit because I like my black and whites to be particularly contrasty. If you don't like that contrasty look then, don't add any additional contrast and perhaps not any additional clarity. Just use these tools with your own aesthetic in mind. You want an image that you're going to like to look at. We've now adjusted the image. I'm not worried about the color in the image because we're going to black and white. Now, let's go and convert it to black and white. I'm going to click here on B and W. You might notice that my panels are closing up. If I open the Basic panel, the other panels all close down. If I click on black and white, all the other panels close, that's done using solo mode. I'm just going to right-click here on just an empty area opposite one of the panel names. I'm just clicking here, you can see I have solo mode enabled. That means that only one panel at a time can be open and Lightroom will automatically close all the other panels as soon as you select one. That's really handy if you're working on a laptop in particular with only little bit of screen [inaudible]. So there's a tip for you on the way. Here's our black and white. Now, Lightroom has already made some choices for us in the black and white that I have created because I have this all high black and white option enabled in Lightroom. Now, yours might be different. I'm just going to hold down the Alt or Option key and click Reset black and white mix. This may be your starting point. So there are two ways that Lightroom can give you a black and white, either, just a standard black and white adjustment with all these slide is set at the exact same place, or this auto adjustment which takes into account something to do with the image. I'm actually going to use this one as my starting point, because what it's done is it's actually damaged this person's skin tones. Skin tones are in the orange area, and what's happened with this adjustment is that the skin tones have got very dark. So I am going to bring this server's skin tones back by just adjusting the orange setting because I want something more like this. The upshot is that I've destroyed my fish, there's fish here, orange as well. So enlightening his skin times to be more realistic, what I've done is I've killed my fish over here. I'm going to need to look at that in a minute. You could look also at the other sliders. I'll generally move them a little bit to one side or another and just see what they're doing to the image. In this case, the slide is either side of orange, that's red and yellow. You'll want to watch their effect on skin tones because they are close enough to orange to also be picked up in that adjustment. That's true for this person's skin, as the red adjuster is really darkening his skin. I'm going to want to bring my reds over here just to make sure that he is well adjusted. Let's look at the yellow as well. The yellows not affecting his skin tone, it is affecting his hair. I can look at where I really want the yellows to be for the rest of the image, like the effect on these bottles here. So that's in the yellow areas. I'm just going to make sure that they're a little bit on the dark side. Let's have a look at greens. Well, there's not much in the greens here, pretty much just in that bottle detail. Aqua. A little bit of the background is in the aqua area. If I want to remove the impact of the background area here through the window a little bit, bringing my aqua all the way up to the dark area would be really good. Let's check the blues. Let's take them towards the dark end and towards the light end. Well, they're having a really big effect on this image in part because the image itself was pretty blue to start off with, it wasn't a warm image. It's going to take them a little bit on the darker side. But I still want to see the contrast in his shirt here. Let's try purples. Again, it's affecting the background a little bit, interestingly up here. I think I'm going to go all the way with the purples. Let's have a look at magenta. Again, that little thing that's happening up here is being affected by the magenta. Very little else is. One thing to be aware of when you're using these black and white slide is, if you've got two sliders like these that are right over in the dark area and you take the middle one, the one that's between the two of them all the way to the lights, you run the risk of fracturing the image because you're going to have pixels that are fairly close to aqua, close to the blue, and you've made some dark and some light. You're likely to get this sort of almost noisy effect in the image. It's better not to have sliders going totally the opposite direction to each other, and a slightly smoother result will avoid the likelihood of getting that fracturing or that noise in your image. Then we are there, I've got a pretty good black and white adjustment. I just want to go back now because I'm seeing the black and white image and say, "Okay, well what do I want to see in the black and white image?" There's a little bit of work still to do. I'm going to do that in the next video. 3. ACR and Lightroom for Lunch™ - Pt 1b - Lightroom - FineTune the B and W: The basic black and white adjustment that we've got is really good and I would be quite happy with that, there are some other things that we can do with this image and I want to look at the effect that we can have on this image using, for example, the adjustment brush. I'm going to click on the adjustment brush. What I'm interested in here is to add some shine to this image. I like shiny black and whites, I'm going to boost the contrast with this. I'm going to increase the contrast and I'm going to increase clarity. Now with Lightroom, you don't actually have to make any settings for the adjustment brush before you use it with Adobe Camera roll you do so we're just going to do that here now and what I'm going to do is start brushing over the areas that I lost data in when I adjusted for the service face. The problem with that adjustment was that it was to the oranges and these fish down here in the front of this cabinet are orange. When I lighten the skin tones of the server, I ended up lightening these fish and that was not the result that I wanted to have. I'm just going to go over here and just increase the clarity. Now, if you want to say the mask overlay, this is what it looks like. What I'm doing is painting on with a large, soft adjustment brush here over the fish and if I want to erase it, I can either click to bring up my eraser brush, which is just a brush that erases that area, or I could stay on one of my brushes better, just to brush choices that you have, there is no real difference between the two except how you set them up. If I was to press the alt key or the option key on the mac, you can say that you just target the eraser about without having to go and click on the eraser and then click back on the other brush. I find it easier to learn the alt or option key trick for that so that you can switch between the two brushes. Let's turn off our mask overlay, and here you can say that we've got much more attention-grabbing fish here than we had before. Probably a little bit on the overdone side, some I'm just going to bring the contrast back just a little bit and try and reign my enthusiasm in a bit here. I'm going to click done. You could do the same on those fish over here. I would suggest that you ingest different areas of the image with separate brushes just so that you could come back and edit them if you wanted to. There's another fish adjusted here, and then I might hit some of the fish through here. Again, just picking up the adjustment brush, staying with the same settings, and as I want to change them and just bringing some detail into the cabinet. Each of these adjustments now has a pin. When I click the adjustment brush, you'll be able to see the pins, and if I wanted to adjust one of those that I've already worked on, then I would just click on its pin to pick it up, and then I could re-adjust it. I have show edit pins here, turned on to always, I find that's the best setting to use. Now the other thing I'm going to adjust is this wording here. I want it to jump off the cabinet so I am going to use that same adjustment, that contrast enhancement over the text here just to lighten it and brighten it and really make it punch so that your eyes taken to the center of the image. The only other thing I'm looking at is the slight flattening and the contrast in the image. I think we've lost a little bit of lightness here so I'm going back to the basic panel. Actually going to consider at this point adding a little bit of exposure. Didn't like that. I'm going to take exposure back. The exposure increase blasted this fish cabinet and didn't really affect the area I was most interested in so that being the case, let's go back and put in a graduated filter instead. I've clicked on the graduated filter, I'm going to bring it in from the top, but I want it to finish just across the cabinet and fairly steeply. I'm just going to click and drag because the cabinet is providing a natural line across this image where I can lighten above the line just a little bit with an exposure adjustment. I don't want these contrast and adjustments and clarity, so I'm going to wind those back to nothing but I am going to bring up the exposure. Now I've got my highlight clipping warning turned on. If I increase the exposure, you can say that I'm also affecting what's happening outside the window. Well, in later versions of Lightroom and in Adobe Camera Raw, I have a brush here that I can use. I'm going to click on the brush and I'm going to erase from this adjustment. What I'm doing is brushing either these areas to say, lighten all of this, but don't go and lighten this area. I'm actually going to bring it all the way through this area, not just the areas or the places where I've got that highlight clip warning, going to bring it all the way across this background data. Now, I've just knocked out a little bit of the wall up here, well, the ceilings, so I'm just going to put that back in. That's my adjustment here, I've brought down a graduated filter just clicked and dragged from the middle down so that this filter is working at full force if you like, up to the first line and then it's being reduced to no force at all, just below the last line. There very steep transition on this one and I've used it to add just a bit over half a stop of exposure to this image. We've got a few places where I'm seeing some highlight clipping warning can just go through those with the eraser brush and just remove them from the fix so that we're not blowing out highlights in the process, but looks like my highlight clipping is good now, so I'll click "done". Let's go back and see this image now from before and after, if I press the backslash key, I'll say the before image and then the after image. You know what's of most interest to me might be what's happened since I did the initial black and white conversion, the things that I did with the adjustment brush and the graduated filter. Let's go over here to the history panel. I'm going to wind back here to my black and white. This was the point at which my black and white had been created so this is a black and white. I'm going to right-click here and choose copy history settings to before and then I'm going to wind all the way back up to the very top of the history panel and click add brushstroke, now I can hide my panel. Now this time when I do my before and after comparison, I'm going to see as my before, which is this, this was a black and white conversion that we had and with the backslash press to see the after. This is the change that we've been able to make with the graduated filter and the adjustment brush. That helps you find tune your black and white. You're not needing to commit to a black and white adjustment that is in force over the entire image, you can actually be more discriminating and look down here at these fish here. This is the before and this is the after we bought some detailed back into the fish which we had lost because we were making adjustments for the service phase. There you have it, a black and white adjustment done in ightroom and you've got this image so that you can work on it yourself. 4. ACR and Lightroom for Lunch™ - Pt 2 - Adobe Camera Raw B and W conversion: This is the image that we're going to be working on in Adobe Camera Raw to series of buildings that I shot in Norway. Now to start off with this image opened inside Adobe Camera Raw, much larger than my work area. I just clicked on this down pointing arrow and chose fit in view. It would fit and I could see the entire image. The image is not straight so I'm going to start with the measure tool of straighten tool here and just click and drag along this line in the image. Now it's got a bow in it. But if I drag along the edge of the image, Adobe Camera Raw will go ahead and work out what it needs to do to straighten it. This is a couple of degrees off at least. Having made my selection I can now click another tool and the image is straightened. Before we go to black and white we need to fix this image because it's not very well exposed at all. There are no light pixels here and there are no dark pixels either. I'm going to adjust the exposure a little bit just adjusting it upwards to try and get some lighter pixels in the image. I'm also going to look pretty quickly at my black and white point. I'm going to the whites, I'm going to hold Alt option on the Mac and just drag on the white slider until I start seeing some white pixels appear. Then I'm going to back off. I want to be just under that point. There's my white point. Now let's set a black point again, Alt or option drag on the black slider. Well there are no blacks yet, so we're going in a negative direction. We're going to the left until we start seeing some black pixels appear. Unlike the whites I actually do want to see some black pixels here, just not a lot of them. This would be way too much. But this is a good amount. Now I have a better exposed image. It is a little bit below these buildings or a little bit blue but they're probably reflecting color from the sky and also from what I can recall there also on a waterfront too. There's probably some reflection from the water. I'm going to ignore the overall blue tone here because we're going to black and white so we're not actually going to see the blues. But I am concerned about contrast here. I'm just going to wind up the contrast a little bit. I'm also going to look at shadows. Here I have some detail lost in the shadow areas in the image that I'm actually interested in saying there are some reflections in these buildings. I can recover some of that reflection by increasing my shadows value here. To bring detail out of the shadows in the image. Now anytime you bring detail out of the shadows in the image you're going to flatten contrast. It's just unnecessary result of using this adjustment. Be aware that when you increase shadows to a positive amount, you're probably going to need to do one of two things, either increase contrast or increased clarity. The problem with clarity is it does tend to darken the areas that you've just lightened, but I think that we'll find that we've actually got more detail in here. I'm also going to hit it with a bit more contrast too. Since we're looking at contrast in this image and because it's buildings we can enhance the contrast. Let's go to the tone curve. I click on the tone curve and from the drop-down list here, I'm going to try medium and strong contrast. There's medium and there's strong contrast. I'm thinking that strong contrast is actually helping us here a little bit with this image and just improving it's christmas and it's shininess. We're going to settle for that. In this curves adjustment here, what's happened when we've applied strong contrast is the lighter areas of the image have been lightened and the darker areas in the image have been darkened. Anytime the curve dips below the straight line through this chart, anytime it dips, you're darkening these pixels and since these are the darker pixels in the image there being darkened. These pixels over here are the lighter of pixels in the image and this time the curve has been pulled above the line and that means they are being lightened. You can always test it by just dragging up and down on it and you'll see very quickly what's happening when you adjust the curve. What we've got here is what's called an S curve. It's a very shallow S and that's a typical curve for applying contrast to an image. I think it's time now to go to black and white. Let's click here on the HSL Grayscale tab. Then when I click convert to grayscale the image is converted to grayscale. This is our starting point. Because I want to be able to compare this later on I'm going to snap shots at this stage and I'm going to add a snapshot. I'm going to call this initial black and white and I'll just click "Okay". Lightroom makes it very easy for you to compare different states of the image Adobe Camera Raw does not. If you want to be able to look at how far you've come, then I suggest that you create snapshots as you go. I selected and created one for the starting image and here is our black and white. You can see that we've progressed a long way so far, but we still have further to go. Lets go back to our HSL Grayscale. What we have here is one of the two adjustments. Either you can have an auto adjustment where Adobe Camera Raw applies a considered adjustment to the image. Some of the colors are made darker and some of the colors are made lighter. There's also a default adjustment, which is a stripe down the middle. All of the colors are preset at a zero position. I'm going to set auto as my starting point. But I'm really aware of the blues in this image. I know that we had a heap of blue in this image. I'm going to get a lot of mileage in adjusting this black and white or crafting a black and white by adjusting the blues. You can see here that I can lighten the blues or I can darken them. That's having a very interesting effect on the sky as well as the buildings. This ability with just a single blues adjustment to create a really moody, moody image. Probably not what I've come here to make, but just be aware that with skies and buildings like this, there's a lot that you can do with this image. I'm going to settle for darkening the blues a little bit, but just not quite to the intensity that we did before. Alongside the blues, are the colors aqua and purple. There is probably some mileage in these colors since they are adjacent to the blues. In fact, most of the purples appear to be in the sky, so we can dark in the sky a little bit by adjusting the purples which might give us the ability to lighten the blues a little bit without totally killing that sky. In fact, at this point we probably have a choice. We can adjust for the buildings or the sky and leave this second one of these to be adjusted individually later on. I think the sky is going to be easier to fix later on. Right now I'm going to adjust for the buildings, which means I'm going to beef up the blues, lighten the blues a little bit. Let's have a look at magentas. Well, basically there are few magentas in the image. Let's look at the reds. There's a little bit of red in the image, but not very much at all. I'm going to make it lighter rather than darker. For the oranges, interestingly enough, this crane here is basically in the orange area, so we can remove it pretty much from the image or we can enhance it. Since it's a strong horizontal line amongst all those vertical lines, I actually like it. I'm going to leave it light. There's a good chance that some of the crane is yellow as well, which it is. I am going to take it again to a high plus value so that we're lightning this crane. For greens, pretty much the only green in the image is this flag here. I'm just going to adjust it for this particular area of the image and aquas because it's alongside blue, we may expect to see some mileage in the aquas. There is a little bit in the front of this building in particular, and a little bit over here. I'm actually going to take the aquas a little bit lighter. This is our custom conversion of the image. But at this stage, what we've done is just adjust for these buildings. We've lost a bit of detail in the sky. Well, we can get that back with a graduated filters, I'm going here to the graduated filter. I'm going to click on it. I'm going to click and drag downwards. If you're using the most recent version of Adobe Camera Raw and /or Lightroom, then you have a tool which allows you to add or remove areas from this Graduate Filter. Now whenever you grab a Graduated Filter in Adobe Camera Raw, you're going to need to have something set for it. Otherwise, you can't actually put down the Graduated Filter, but it doesn't have to stay there. I had something set, but I'm just going to zero them out for now. I've got my graduated filter with nothing set for it. I'm going to work at getting my sky back. For this, I'm going to drop down my highlights a little bit. I'm going to drop down my whites, a little bit maybe. I'm going to increase my contrast. I'm also going to look at Dehaze. Dehaze is a new tool in Lightroom and in Adobe Camera Raw. It does tend to Dehaze hazy areas of the image. That was an actual fact, one of the reasons why I chose to adjust for the buildings earlier and then leave the sky to be fixed later. Because this Dehaze filter can be applied using the Graduated Filter, which means that we can drop the the Dehaze filter in over the sky and use it to recover sky detail. Just going to reset that to zero. You can see the difference that this Dehaze filter is going to make for our sky. Now, there are some areas that we want to add to this. I'm going to click here on the brush, and I'm going to click the plus symbol. I want to see my mask as I work. This is the area that's now being fixed by the filter that we just applied, including the Dehaze option. What I'm going to do is add some areas to it. I want to add the remainder of the sky. I've got Auto Mask turned on, which will make it a little bit easier for me to probably select the sky than it would be if I didn't have it on. I'm just clicking on these areas just to sample the areas under that plus symbol in the middle of the brush. I'm going to do it over here too, making sure that I keep away from the buildings as I'm painting here. I can get a minus brush, which will allow me to do the opposite and remove some of the buildings from the effect of this Graduated Filter. Graduated Filters are linear filters, so they work in a line, and not always is the area that you want to fix in a straight line. These brushes, which were added very recently into Adobe Camera Raw and into Lightroom, allow us to craft a graduated filter that has bumps in it. According to whether we want to include an area or not include an area in the filter effect. Let's turn the mask off. Now, we've bought in these areas of sky that now have this Dehaze filter applied to them. Think it's probably a bit as much as I really like it. Perhaps, just error on the side of caution and bring my Dehaze down just a little bit. Now that we've finished with this adjustment, I'm just going to click another tool to turn it off. Let's go and create a snapshot for this and see how far we've come. Let's call this final black and white. This is our starting color image. This is the initial black and white that we created just using the Adobe Camera Raw options, and here is more crafted version of the black and white. Let's flip between these two, this is the original and this is our crafted version. A whole lot more data, a whole lot more exciting things happening in this image. It's all because we took that little bit of extra time to craft a really good black and white. We didn't just take the default. But we said this is what we want our black and white to look like. There you have adjusting for black and white in both Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw of course, the tools in both these applications are pretty much identical. You can get the same results with this image in Lightroom as you can in Adobe Camera Raw. Your project for this class is to take a color image and to convert it to black and white to create an aesthetically pleasing black and white according to what it is that you want to see in your black and white image. There are no rights and wrongs in black and white. There's just a black and white that you like and when that you don't like. I hope that you are able to create black and whites that you actually like as a result of watching this video. Post an image of your completed black and white conversion in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about converting images for black and white in both Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom. If you did enjoy this class and when you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please do two things for me. Give it a thumbs up and write just a few words about what you enjoy about this class. These recommendations help other students to find my classes and also to determine that these might be classes that they too would like to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments. I look at and respond to all of your class project. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom for lunch, crafting a black and white image. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode of Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom for lunch soon.