Transcripts
1. Intro: Hi, welcome to this class in black and white photography with Photoshop. In this class, we're going to look at some of the amazing tools that are available in Photoshop to convert your images to black and white. And also to add some tonality and possible tinting to your images, as well as some of the local tools that we can use to enhance the sense of depth, detail, and texture in our image to create beautiful ripples of tone that engage your viewer and draw them into the image. This image is one that I shot in Spain a couple of years ago, and we'll actually use it as an example image in this class. So after that, we'll also look at a fun technique called solarization. It's an old darkroom technique, but it takes your black and white image to an abstract, almost surreal image, works beautifully with some images. So we'll be exploring the use of Photoshop to create an enhanced black and white images. Now this class is a bit of an extension of my previous class in fine art, black and white photography, in which we explored how to see, capture, and create black and white images using your camera and Adobe Lightroom. And you may want to go back and review a couple of the early lessons in that class about how to set up your camera. How to see in black and white and what makes a great black and white photograph. So you'll be prepared to delve into black and white in Photoshop. Now, it will help if you have a bit of working knowledge of Photoshop, because we'll be working in some layers and things and it helps to know the basics of how to work in Photoshop. But we won't be doing anything that's like super advanced. So I would say this is for intermediate or advanced Photoshop users. I'm Rob Davidson. I'm a commercial photographer here in Toronto, Ontario. But I have a really deep love of black and white photography. It's sort of the roots of photography for me and for all of photography, It's where we all started. I started out in a little dark room in my basement, tipping prints in trays and stuff like that. I really developed a love for black and white photography and it's what drew me initially to the art form. And now of course, we can create these beautiful images using Photoshop. And we don't have to get brown stains on our fingers. So enjoy the class and we'll touch base at the end and see, review and see what we've learned. Have a fun time. And I'll see you in the first class.
2. Project Intro: In this class we're going to be going step-by-step through converting your images to black and white and then enhancing them further with some of the great local enhancement tools available in Photoshop. Your project for this class will be to take one or more of your own images and follow along step-by-step, applying the lessons that we learn as we go and create a really beautiful black and white image from your own photography. And please remember to post those in the project section on our class. I encourage you to put a before and after image so that people can see how the image evolve. I would also encourage you to post images along the way so that you can get some feedback from me and others participants in the class as to how your image is progressing and possible improvements you can make. So feel free to post images, message me, I'm always willing to give feedback on whatever you post and help you along the way to create beautiful black and white photography. So see you in the next lesson. Have fun.
3. The B&W Adjustment Layer: And welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at a simple, straightforward way to convert your color image to black and white in Photoshop. And to do this, we're going to use what's called an adjustment layer. We're going to use a black and white adjustment layer. And adjustment layers are part of a non-destructive workflow in Photoshop. And what that means is that everything that you do in Photoshop, you want to be able to go back later and change your mind. Decide, oh, let's dark in this, let's lighten that, say so. So we do various things using layers and adjustment layers that allow us to constantly go back and we're never completely committed to what we've done. We can tweak it in the future. And this is known as a non-destructive workflow. And adjustment layers accomplish this. So we're going to work on this image, but before we do, I want to go to a much simpler image so you can see exactly what's going on in converting our image from color to black and white. So let's open up this nice simple bright image of a blue, a red, and a yellow balloon. And we're going to convert this to black and white and see exactly what happens. So you have a clear picture of what's going on under the hood. Now, here we have our background layer and above the layers palette, we see an Adjustments palette here. And there are various adjustments that we can apply as adjustment layers. And each one of these little icons is actually a button. Now, if you don't see this panel, right, You may be it may have just gotten turned off or closed, or you may be in a different workspace. Up here at the top of the Photoshop window. He's a little drop-down menu. And these are various workspaces. They're all sort of designed by Adobe for accomplishing different tasks within Photoshop. So there's one for 3D work, which has panels that you would use from working with 3D and other ones for painting, a variety of tasks. Now of course, we're doing photography here. So if you choose to photography workspace, what you get is the histogram, the adjustments panel, and then a nice big Layers panel, which is what we work in a lot. So this gives us a view of our adjustment panel. And so we have our background layer. And in this adjustment panel, there is a button for black and white adjustment layer. Now funnily enough, I can never remember which symbol is the black and what you think it would be simple because there's a black rectangle and a white rectangle. But my brain, I don't know. At any rate, this black and white one adds a black and white adjustment layer. So if we click on it, what you see now is we have our background layer, which still has the colors in it. And then above it, there's a black and white one adjustment layer, right. And this little panel has popped out with sliders that allow us to adjust each individual color, how light or dark it gets rendered in black and white. Now, Adobe has gone in and made a few adjustments based on what the program's saw. But each one of these, you can go in and tweak the adjustments to your taste, right? So when I look at this, now, again, the advantage of adjustment layers is we can turn them on and off to see what they're doing. So right next to the layer where it says black and white one. There's a little icon that's an, supposed to represent an eye and it turns the visibility of the layer on and off. So if I click it off, I'm back to my color image. If I turn it on, I have my black and white image. All right, so now I can see that in color, There's a really dramatic sort of visual contrast between the blue, the red, and the yellow. But when they get converted into gray, they're just slightly different shades of gray. So what I can do is go in with these sliders and build back that separation that we had between the balloons. So for instance, I can take the blue slider, which affects the blue balloon, and I can lighten it to the blue. The balloon turns white if I want, I don't want to do that. Or I can darken it. So I can bring the blue balloon down a little bit so that it looks a little bit darker. The yellow balloon, right? Because when we look at a yellow balloon, There's a certain brightness to it. So I'd like to lighten the rendition of the yellow balloon so I can tweak that a little bit lighter. There we go now it feels brighter. And the red balloon on the top, I can darken it down until it just sort of right in between. And I can, I can tweak to my heart's content. I could lighten a little bit more, dark and a little bit more. But now I've brought back a little bit of the separation between the colors so that the image retains its impact and it doesn't just go flat gray. And that's what lies beneath converting an image from black and white to color. And then using those colors and how they're rendered into gray tones to adjust the impact of the image. So now we can have a look at this photograph that I took a number of years ago in Thailand of these boats floating on the water. And once again, I start with my background layer and I click my black and white adjustment button. And now I have a black and white adjustment layer right on top of my background. I can turn its visibility on and off to see what I'm dealing with or what effect it's having. And generally I think this looks a little bit on the flat side. So what I want to do is go in and tweak a little bit. I'm going to take the blues, which are going to affect predominantly the sky and darken them down a little bit for some drama. And maybe even some cyan because that also affects the sky. Very nice. Now, I recall that this right-hand boat is mostly yellows, and I'd like to lighten it a little bit so it comes forward. One of the principles of particularly black and white imagery is anything that's light comes forward and anything that's dark sort of recedes. So I want this boat to come forward in the shot. So I'm going to lighten the yellow's a little bit to brighten that right-hand boat very nicely. So now it pops forward. And I know that the water has a lot of greens and probably cyan in it as well. So I'd like to see what happens if I if I lighten it, it gets a little too washed out. So as I darken the greens, I can see it gets a little more drama. And I can see the shadow of this boats that are floating above the bottom. So it brings a really nice set of impact. There we go. So now that water has a nice textural quality to it, skies have a little more impact. The right-hand boat is projecting forward a little bit. And I have a very nice rendition of this image into black and white. And again, I can turn the visibility on and off to see what I've accomplished. And I quite like it. Now, the black and white adjustment layer is a great, quick and easy way to have a look at your images in black and white. If you're working on an image in Photoshop and you think, hmm, I wonder if this would look good in black and white. It's really easy to just add a black and white adjustment layer. Tweak a few sliders and you'll get a pretty good idea of exactly how your image will look in black and white. So you can decide, Oh, maybe this is something on a pursue further or now looked better in color. So I tend to use the black and white adjustment there for a really nice quick view. Now in the next lesson, we're going to learn another technique to convert to black and white within Photoshop that gives you even more control and some other tools that you can play with. So we'll see you in the next lesson.
4. The Camera Raw Filter: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at a more sophisticated way of converting your image to black and white in Photoshop. And that method is using what's called the Camera Raw Filter. Now this is a relatively new feature in Photoshop. And what it is is a filter that you can apply to a layer which gives you access to all the controls that are available in either Camera Raw, or Lightroom. All of the adjustments that are available in the develop module of Lightroom or in Camera Raw are available as a filter. So now working just within Photoshop, you can convert your image to black and white and apply all the basic settings and a further adjustments, different panels, curves, whatever strikes your fancy, right in Photoshop. Now, the interesting thing is we're going to do it as a sort of new workflow called the smart object workflow. And again, this is all part of this concept of working in Photoshop in a non-destructive way so that you can always go back, change your mind, adjust settings. And the way this works is we're going to make our layer into what's called a smart object and then apply the filter as a smart filter. And this is something that's showing up more and more in Photoshop. This use of smart objects or smart layers and smart filters and various things. And basically what they do is they apply the settings in a way that you can go back, turn them on, turn them off, or tweak them. So you have the flexibility of creating a black and white image, but still being able to go back in and adjust it in the future. So let's look at how that works. Here. I've got this really nice landscape that I shot a few years ago in Spain. And I've always had the feeling that this would make a great black and white. So I thought this would be a great chance to just experiment with it and see what I can come up with. So right now we have this as our background. We are just, I just opened it up into Photoshop. So it's here as a background image. And over here under the filter menu, we have Camera Raw Filter. But before I apply it, what I want to do is convert this layer to what's called a smart object or a smart layer. Adobe has a number of names for it, but it's all the same thing. Now, I can do that here in the Layer menu. I can go Layer. Smart Objects, Convert to Smart Object. Or I find it easier to simply right-click on the layer itself and Convert to Smart Object. Now when I do that, nothing really changes to the image except the thumbnail now has this little indent and icon on it that indicates that this is a smart object thumbnail. So now when I go in here and go to the Filter menu, Camera Raw Filter, click on it. Now what this does is it opens up a completely separate window, right? Where I have all the controls available in Camera Raw have the basic panel, curves, detail, color mixer, a color grading. All of these different panels are all available here and they can all be applied to this image. And I can keep the flexibility of being able to go back in and adjust them in the future. I'll show you how this works. So when I'm working on a color image this way, one of my favorite ways to get started with it is to look under the profiles. Profiles are sort of starting points for images. There's a whole variety of them and they give you a set of a starting point with your images. It's especially useful for black and white. You can create different, a different look. And then you can go in and adjust individual swaps sliders to tweak that. So let's look at this. We'll go profile and go down to browse. And you can go, there's a basic color and a basic monochrome which creates a flat black and white image. But down here, there's a whole set of black and white profiles that we can apply. And if we click the arrow, now we have, I don't know, 12, 16, 17, different looks that we can apply to this image. And what I really like about it is all I have to do is scroll through the list to see them applied to my image. So I start off with black and white 12, which is sort of washed out. And three for now, which one you apply will very much depend on each individual image that you apply it to. But again, it's just a starting point. So this 56, that's starting to look interesting. Six looks interesting, seven looks interesting. And I've never figured out if there's any logic to them. They just seem to be different. These are with certain filters applied, but I like the look of black and white seven, that's adding some nice intensity to the image. 6, 7. Now I'm going to go with seven. Looks pretty good to me. So I'm going to click that. And you'll note that there's an amount slider which controls the intensity of how the preset is applied. So if I back it off, it gets sort of softer. And the preset is sort of dial out. And as I increase it, more and more of the preset is applied. And I'm soda liking somewhere, right? Because if I go too far, it gets like crazy intense. But somewhere around here it's looking pretty nice. So I'm going to click there. And when you're happy with the profile that you've applied, right, you hit the back button. Don't be tempted to go down and hit here and click Okay, because that'll close the whole dialog window. And we don't wanna do that yet because there's more things we want to do. We click the back button here, returned to the Edit panel. And now we can see the profile black and white seven as applied at a 107%. I can still adjust that if I want. But that looks pretty good to me. But now I have all my other Adjustment panels that I can apply. So I can come in here to the basic panel and play around with my blacks, see if I want it dark in the blacks down a little bit. And that's feeling pretty good right about there. And maybe the shadows. Yeah, that's looking great. My whites and highlights, of course, I can also play with bring the whites up and the highlights down to give some intensity to the clouds in the sky. Now, I should mention that my previous class on Skillshare was titled fine art black and white in Lightroom. And it runs through all of these settings in a lot of detail about how you can apply them to the black and white image. So if you're interested, you can look back at that class and see how the settings are applied in Lightroom. They're exactly the same here in the Camera Raw Filter. So I think the highlights can come down and the clouds are now starting to pop out of the sky. Now here I have texture, clarity and dehaze. Dehaze is great for an image like this where I've got these low lying clouds and missed in here. But I'd like to clear it up a little bit. It just feels a little mushy through the middle of the image. I can just dial in a bit of dehaze. And that, Oh, just punches up the image really nicely. You can also apply clarity to do a similar thing. So I'm, I'm liking where this is going. I have also my black and white mixer so I can adjust the lightness or darkness of individual colors. All right, same as we did with the black and white adjustment layer. But you'll notice we have a wider range of colors that we can play with. So I can take the blues at the sky and darken them down to intensify those clouds. I can play with the greens, bring them in a little bit more. And this is adding some nice drama to the shot. And the yellows as well, because the grass has both green and yellow in it. So that's adding some nice texture to the grass and the trees, which I really quite like. And we've got all of our other windows we could play in here forever. We could apply a curves to it. If we wanted to just build up a little bit more contrast, we could apply a little bit of an S curve darkening the shadows like that. That works really nicely. And once you're happy with the look of the image, all right? And i'm, I'm pretty happy with that so far. When you click, Okay. And this is what's really good. It will apply these. It's sort of similar to the adjustment Leary and adjustment layer up applies on top of the layer. But here we have, our layer are smart layer. And under here we have Camera Raw Filter. And again we have that little eye icon so we can turn it off and see our color image, or turn it on and see what we've done in black and white. Now if I wake up tomorrow morning and I look at the image and go, oh, you know, there's still a few things I'd like to adjust. If I double-click on the camera raw filter like that, what it does is it takes me right back to the Camera Raw window. And I can go in here and play to my heart's content. I can do whatever I would like to do, make changes. I can. Maybe I want to play with the exposure slider to just dark and a little bit more or lighten it. I think a little bit of darkening works, okay, and maybe add a little bit of contrast. There we go. And again, when I click Okay, it just applies those new settings to the image. So I can constantly go in here and adjust it. And I'm good to go. So in our next lesson, we're going to look at a method to both convert an image to black and white and also apply a color gradient to it to put some subtle colors into the image as well at the same time. So have a good time with this, and I'll see you in the next lesson. Bye bye.
5. Gradient Mapping: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at another technique to convert our color image to black and white in Photoshop. But this one has an interesting twist to it. We're going to be using something called gradient mapping. And what it does is if we do a black and white gradient, for instance, black to white, what it will do is it will apply black to darker areas of the image and whites and light grays to the lighter areas of the image, which will create a basic black and white conversion. But some interesting additional gradients that are available in Photoshop once we turn them on. And these are based on old photographic techniques that we used to do in the dark room using chemicals, things like sepia toning, which is a warm brown tone that you might be familiar with in sort of old style photographs or selenium toning even cyano types. These are all available for us to apply to our image in Photoshop. But first we need to sort of turn them on and make them available. So here's how we do that. Here we have our nice image of a Newfoundland fishermen, which I think would benefit from some gradient toning. So first we go into the Window menu down to gradients, which brings out this pop-up window of all the gradients that are currently available for us in Photoshop. And the photographic toning ones are not yet available. So what we do is up here in the upper right, there's these horizontal lines that don't. Some people call the hamburger. If we click on that, go down to Legacy gradients and click there. So now at the bottom of our list of gradients, we have a folder called Legacy gradients. We click the down arrow and now scroll down that list. And in here we have one called photographic toning. Click on that arrow to open that folder. And now we have a whole bunch of various toning gradients available to us. So now we can make use of that, close that window. And back here in our image, we have our background. Now we're going to apply a gradient map adjustment layer. But before we do that, we want to make sure that our color swatches are set to their default values of black and white, because that will be the initial gradient that's applied to the image. So if our swatches have been changed color BB using a brush tool or whatever, if we hit the letter D, that sets the swatches back to their default value of black and white. So then when we come up here to the adjustments panel, the gradient adjustment is the bottom right corner. So we click on that and it adds a gradient map adjustment layer to the image. And because we had our swatches set to black and white, we have a black to white gradient, which makes a very nice, very acceptable. Black and white conversion of our image. And we could stop there if we're happy with that. But we have some interesting options available. Right next to the gradient isn't down arrow. And if we click that, it brings up a window with all the other gradients that are available. And we can scroll down to the bottom of that list to the legacy gradients that we just made available. Click to open that, click the down arrow to open that folder. And in there is photographic toning. Click the down arrow again. Yes, I know we're, we're hitting a lot of down arrows in this process. Now we have a list of different tones that can be applied to this. So this is a platinum toning, which is just a very subtle light brown toning. Or there's selenium, which is a little bit more selenium to there's a sepia toning which has some cool blues. And you can see the cool grays in the mid-tones, warm, darker areas and warmer highlights. See PO2 is a little bit subtler. Sepia p3. Now if you'd like to see what the colors are that are being applied. If you go over here to the gear icon and change this from text-only to small thumbnail, then you can see the actual colors that are being applied to your image. So sometimes that helps to choose one that you particularly like. That one looks nice, That's CPS selenium three. And that has always been one of my favorite color toning ones. It seems to work on a lot of different images. So if I'm happy with that, I can click these two little arrows over here to just collapse that window. And now I have a really beautiful conversion of my image, black and white, but with a subtle tone to it. And of course, this has been applied as an adjustment layer. So again, it's part of our nondestructive workflow. I can turn the visibility of that on and off-site can see my image in color or in black and white. And if I decide now I'd like to try something different. If I double-click on this little half white black circle, it opens up the gradient mapping again. And I can choose a different gradient map. Whatever my heart desires. That's sort of interesting. And if I'm happy with that, close that, and I'm good to go. So this is another interesting way to convert our image to black and white and add some subtle or not so subtle color tones to it as well. So have fun playing with applet. And in our next lesson, we're going to dive into some local adjustment tools that we can use to further enhance our image and take it to that next level. So we'll see you in the next lesson. Bye bye.
6. A Burn & Dodge Layer: Now that we've explored your techniques to convert your image to black and white in Photoshop, I want to show you some techniques that we can use to further enhance the image. And really start to play with the sense of depth and shape within the image. And to do this, we're actually going to work in local areas. We're going to lighten and darken certain areas of the image to enhance the sense of light and shape. So I'm going to show you how to do that. We're going to start here with the landscape that we used in an earlier lesson. It's already being converted to black and white with the Smart Filter camera Raw Filter. And now we want to just enhance it a little bit more, right? So the first thing we're going to do is create a new layer on top of this image layer. So we're going to create a blank layer and we do that at the very bottom of the Layers palette. There's a little square with a plus symbol on it. And that creates a new blank layer, and it calls it layer one. Now, I actually like to label my layers in Photoshop as I make them. So I'm going to double-click on the word Layer 1, which makes it editable. And I'm going to call this light dark. Because that's what we're going to do with this layer. Now, in order for this technique to work, we need to change the blend mode of this layer and blend modes or something within Photoshop that control how layers interact. So by default, this new layer is set for the normal blend mode. So if I were to paint with the brush on this layer, it would simply show up over the existing layer, but I don't want to do that. What I want to do is change the blend mode of this. So there's a downward facing arrow. And I'm going to change the blend mode to soft light. Now what the soft light blend mode does is wherever I paint with a tone that's darker than mid gray, it will darken the underlying there. And if I paint with light something lighter than mid gray, it'll lighten the underlying layer. So that's what we're going to do. Now we're going to use the brush tool to do this. But before we get into that, we want to be sure that our swatches, our color swatches here are set to their default values of black and white because that's what we want to paint on this layer. So if we hit the letter D, that will set the swatches to black over white. And the letter x, by the way, switches the swatches, switches the swatches back and forth. So if I have black on the top, if I want to paint with white, I hit x. And now white is on the top. Hit X again, and it flips back to black. So now I want to get my brush tool, which is in the tool palette here. And I just click Brush Tool, select it. And I want to be very, very subtle with this technique. So the way that I'm going to do this is if I were to paint right now, if I paint with black here, it's going to get really, really dark. You can see it's darkening, but it's doing a lot. And that's too much. I'm going to hit Command Z to undo that. And we're going to change the flow of this brush to something a lot more subtle. So up here in the top control panel for the brush, I'm going to dial my flow down and I can do that one of two ways. I can click the little down arrow next to the flow and dial that down. Or if I just hover over the word flow, you can see the little arrow changes to a hand with two little arrows. Once I see that, I can just click and drag right to increase the flow or drag left to decrease it. So I'm going to keep my flow around 8% right now. And to control my brush, you can see the little circle that shows you the size of the brush. But if I want to see you in a little bit more detail, if I hold down control option on a Mac or, or Control Alt on a PC, hold those two keys down and click with the brush. I can see in nice bright red exactly how the brush is going to draw. And if I, while I'm holding everything down, if I slide sideways to the right, the brush gets bigger. Slide sideways to the left, it gets smaller. If I go up, it gets softer. And if I go down, it gets harder, right? So I don't want to do is make the brush little bit big and quite soft because I don't want to see the hard edges of what I'm drawing even though I'm drawing it a very low flow rate. So now let's see how I can enhance this image. First thing I can see is that in this lower left-hand corner, there's these sort of lighter tones that to my eye are leading my, leading my viewer out of the frame. So I'm going to draw with black. And just subtly, That's a little subtle. All right, I think maybe I'll increase the flow a little bit here and just draw in with black. And now you can see that's darkening in this corner. And that way this corner isn't, isn't a distraction. And I can do the same thing over here in the right corner. Choose darken it a little bit. And now my eye is sort of being contained in the frame. Now, I can also start to play with the light and shadow on the landscape. So back here where we have this sort of ripple in the land, I can darken this down a little bit, brings out some interesting details. And then if I want to lighten up the adjacent area, I can hit the letter X. To switch this to white. And I know from experience when I'm drawing with white, it comes in a little strong. So I'm going to dial my opacity down to six and just lighten up a little bit here. Just so that my landscape starts to show a little bit more shape and form. And then I can hit X again to darken down. And I, this tree feels like it's getting a bit washed out. So I'd like to just darken it down a little bit. There we go. Now it has a little more presence. Same thing for these trees, but I'm going to make my brush a little smaller. Hold down Control Option or Control Alt, click and drag. And it's nice because I can see exactly the size I'm going to paint in. So I'm just darkening these trees in a little bit. There we go. And as I go back, I can darken these trees and create a sense of light going back in here so I can darken these down and then darken this cliff face. And then maybe I want to lighten these clouds a little bit. So I'm hitting X and just lightening up those clouds. Barely go. Pen the same thing here. Just throw a little bit of light back into the background. There we are. And then I can hit X again and darken. So I'm adding local contrast really, to add some depth and shape. I'm doing it very, very subtly. So you don't really notice it. But if we now go over to the light-dark lair and look at the eye icon and turn it on and off. You can see now the landscape feels a little bit flat. When I turn it on, it feels like it's been sort of sculpted and there's a greater sense of light. Couldn't do. We can do a little bit more work in the clouds here, we can lighten these. There we go. Just bring out a little bit of light in the clouds and then hit X and dark and down the mountains here right in front of them. So we're adding local contrast to the image to enhance its sense of shape. Here we are before and after. And I'm quite pleased with that. And again, this is a technique that is part of our nondestructive workflow in Photoshop. So this layer can be turned on or off at anytime. And if you decide, I'm not really happy with it, you want to start all over again. You can delete the layer and make a new layer start all over again. So I can tell you from experience that this technique requires a bit of practice because it's sort of a drawing technique and finding ways to enhance your images. And it'll vary very much depending on the actual image. So you want to experiment, play a little bit and see what you can accomplish with this technique. So go and explore. And in our next lesson, we'll look at another technique using the actual burn and dodge tools to further enhance our image. So have fun and I'll see you in the next lesson. Bye bye.
7. The Burn and Dodge Tools: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to learn to use two tools to further enhance the tonal separation, that detail and the richness of our image. And that's the burn and dodge tools. And the names relate back to darkroom techniques that we used to use. But basically the thing to remember is the Burn tool darkens and the Dodge tool lightens. And that's really all you have to burn is dark. Dodge is light, right? So let's look at how we use these tools. So now we have an image open. And this image, I brought in as a color image. And then I added a black and white adjustment layer. And how little bit of retouching to get rid of some little distracting details. But I need a layer that contains all of this data on one layer so that I can use the burning and dodging tools on it directly. And of course, I don't want to work in a destructive way, so I want it to be a separate layer. So what I do is I go to the top of my layer stack and hold down the letters Command Option Shift and hit E. Now on a PC, that's Control Alt Shift E, right? And that creates a new layer, and that's called layer one. And I'm going to just name that burn dodge. There we go. And this is the layer that we're going to work on. This layer contains all the information of everything underneath it. And I can work on it directly and then I can turn it on and off to see the effect that I've had. So now here's how these tools work. I'm going to go to the Dodge Tool because one of the first things that I'm looking at working on is this birch tree over here on the left, right, which I can see it in the forest, but I'd like to bring it out a little bit more. But I don't want to affect the tree, the darker trees surrounding it. So what I can do is I take my dodge tool and you'll notice up here in the controls for these tools, I have a range control. And if I click this, I can affect just the shadows, just the mid-tones or just the highlights. So what I'm going to do since the birch tree is in the mid-tone range, it's a, it's a sort of a mid gray. I'm going to set the Dodge Tool to midtones, and I'm going to set the exposure to around 77%. Now the exposure controls how much lightening or darkening is going to happen. So I've got it at around 77. I'm just guessing and we'll see what happens. And I'm affecting just the mid-tones with the dodge tool. So now I'm going to paint over this tonight. I'm not going to worry about painting over the surrounding trees because watch what happens. There we go. The birch tree is getting lighter because it's in the midtones. But there's trees around it which are definitely in the shadows, are not being affected. And that's the real power of these burn and dodge tools. And I can do these other branches here, is that you can pick the range of tones that you affect. So now we have that birch tree sort of popping out from the surrounding trees. And there's other ones a little further down the coast here. Then I can just bring those out without having to worry about affecting the surrounding trees. Because the surrounding trees are definitely in the shadow tones. And because I've done this on a separate layer, I can turn the layer off and see there's the birch tree, but now it's just sort of glowing nicely or against the surrounding trees. Now, I can also use this tool in the water itself to enhance this. Some of the reflections of the white areas that I've got a nice reflection of these light skies here in the water, but I'd like to enhance those just a little bit more. So I'm going to use my dodge tool to lighten them, but I'm only going to affect the highlights. Let's see if the highlights does anything. There we go. So that's just adding a little sort of streak of highlights through this water. But then in order to enhance the texture a little bit more, I can switch over to the Burn tool and just affect the shadows and darken the shadows down the highlight stay light. But now if you look, I've increased the contrast and added sparkle and texture to that water. And I can do the same sort of thing over here on the right. Use the Dodge tool set to highlights and I can make it a little bit bigger. And just add some streaks of light as if the sky is reflecting in the water. There we go. And then switch back to the Burn tool. Affecting the shadows and just darken in and create additional texture and shape. There we go. So now that water, rather than being a flat gray, has a sense of reflections in it and also some enhanced texture. And there's lots I can do in these cloud areas. So I'm going to start out with my dodge tool, affecting the shadows and come in and darken down the sum of these foreboding clouds. He said of storm clouds rolling in, giving them a little bit more strength. And I don't have to worry about affecting the surrounding lighter clouds because I'm only playing in the shadows. And now I can come back with my dodge tool. Affecting highlights low, That's a little strong. There we go. Even that's a little much, I'm just going to go right there and just bring out some of these streaks of light coming down through the clouds by just affecting the highlights. There we go. So now we've added some nice depth and richness to both the water and the skies. So with this tool, I find that I tend to sort of go back and forth between darkening the shadow areas, lightening the highlights, and enhancing texture, contrast, richness and just sort of giving the overall picture a bit more glow and richness. So this is a tool I can guarantee you. It takes a little practice to work with. You can start using slightly lower exposure levels to get a sense of how the tool works and what it does. And as you gain experience, you'll start seeing more and more things you can do with it. And unfortunately, that means you're going to be diving down the Photoshop rabbit hole of time. But it really is worth exploring because it's a really wonderful way to bring out texture and richness within your photograph. So dive in and explore and joy. And I'll see you in the next lesson when we learn a really unique darkroom technique that we can apply.
8. Solarization: Welcome back. This last technique we're going to look at is once again, something that's based on a darkroom technique called solarization. And this was something that was popularized by the artist Man Ray. And if you Google either solarization or Man Ray, you'll see some great examples. Probably discovered by mistake. It involves turning the lights in your dark room briefly on and then back off again while you're developing your print. And it causes the print to do these very strange tonal reversals where blacks become white and the edges develop these odd effects. And it was highly experimental every time you did it, you got a very different result. But now I can show you how to create this look in Photoshop with all the mass of a dark room. So here's how we do it. We start off with our image. And this technique works particularly well with images that have nice curves and edges and soft tones seems to just work really well. So this shot of a callow lily is particularly nice. So the first thing we need to do is convert it to black and white. So we'll add a black and white adjustment layer. And I don't really need to do very much to it because we're going to be playing around with it anyway. So the next thing to create the solarization look to add now a Curves Adjustment Layer. And normally in curves, we move the line of the curve up and down to lighten or darken our image. But in this case, we're going to be a little bit more experimental. We're going to start right in the middle of the curve. And we're going of this, we're going to start right in the middle of the line, click and drag straight up to the top of the chart like that. And then we're going to take the little square on the far right at the top and drag it down all the way to the bottom. And look what happened to our image. Our background became black instead of white or some shaded gray. We have these interesting little line effects at the edges and all the tones are really interesting and it creates this beautiful, almost surreal effect. If you'd like to tweak it a little bit, you can click in the middle of the, we have this sort of inverted V. And you can sort of click in the middle of the legs and drag sideways or up and down a little bit to just affect the tones. And really just, there's no right way. It's just a question of experimenting until you see what you like. And there's two other techniques that we can play with that sort of enhance the look of this. So in order to do these, we have to go back to our background layer. So click on the background layer and I want to duplicate it so I can play with a filter on it. So I'm going to hit, in order to duplicate the background layer, I'm going to hold down the Command or Control key and hit the letter J, and it makes a background copy. And on this first one, what I want to try is we're going to go up here to Filter other and high pass. And then you can just play with the level of the high pass until you see something you like. Somewhere around there works particularly well for this image. And it's just, it's an unusual way to use this filter, but it just seems to work to enhance that sort of solarization of fact. And now you start to see these edges really clearly in this sort of glow around the flower. So that's one technique and this works great on some images. Sometimes it doesn't. If you want to try something different, we'll go back. We'll turn that layer off. So we're back to where we were originally, and we'll copy the background layer again. So Command or Control J. But on this layer, what we'll try is Filter, Stylize and boss. And what this one does is it enhances our edges. And again, it's a question of just playing around with the amount and the height settings. Oh, that's getting nice. Dial this up a little bit. There we go. So now we're just really bringing out the edge effects. So you can feel free to experiment with your to your heart's content. Try blending modes. You can also play with the opacity of the layer to combine it with the underlying layer. Like this works particularly nice. This is a highly experimental technique. It works on some images, sometimes it doesn't, but it's worth playing around with to get this abstract, almost surreal look. I'll see you in the next lesson. Bye bye.
9. Class Wrap up: Hi. I hope you have enjoyed the lessons in this class as much as I've enjoyed teaching them. I really love black and white and I love teaching it. And in this class, we've learned a couple of different techniques to convert your image to black and white, and even to apply a color gradient to them to give you a subtle toning effect. As well as some of the local tools available in Photoshop you can use to enhance the sense of light, depth, and texture within your images and engage the viewer so that they really see what it was that you saw when you saw that image. So I really encourage you to experiment, play with some of the techniques that we've used and then post the results in the project section of this class so that everybody can see what you've accomplished, especially if you put a before and after image. And you can get some feedback and maybe get a sense of other things you can do with your images. Also at any point, feel free to post interim images to get some feedback on your progress so far and maybe some direction on next steps. I'm always willing to give feedback as you go along in the class. So enjoy, and I'll see you in our next class.
Rob Davidson, Food Photographer and Videographer
