Transcripts
1. Class Intro: Hi. Welcome to this class in Fine Art, black and white photography. Have you ever looked at a great black and white photograph either in a magazine, book, or maybe on the wall of an art gallery, and wondered, how did that happen? How did they capture such beauty in such a simple black and white image, and how do I get that into my photography? Well, that's what this class is about. In this class you'll learn what makes a great black and white photograph and how to go about learning to see the world in black and white and capture that beauty, and then use the tools available to us in Adobe Lightroom to convert your color capture to a black and white. Use those colors and use the tools to enhance your image, edit it, and bring it to that next level of beauty. Hi, I'm Rob Davidson and I'm a commercial photographer based in Toronto, Canada. In my professional career, I make food look really yum, but I also love teaching. I teach photography at Ryerson University, as well as hold workshops in my own studio and these days I'm teaching workshops by Zoom. I'm really looking forward to this black and white class because black and white is really the roots of photography. It's where I started in photography, but it's also where photography started. It's a uniquely photographic way of seeing the world. In this class, you're going to learn a little bit about what makes a great black and white photograph, and then we'll look at some settings you can use in your camera to assist you in seeing the world in black and white and making sure that you're capturing the best possible image. Then we'll bring your image into Adobe Lightroom, we'll explore various ways to get to black and white and the tools we can use to enhance your image and bring it from something like this, which is a very nice color image to that, which is truly a beautiful black and white image. Your project for this class will be to go out and capture some new images, or perhaps go through your archive and find some images you think will work in black and white. Then step-by-step, we'll go through some different ways to convert your image to black and white, and then explore some tools we can use to bring it up to that next level. So you'll end up with an image that you're happy to share with friends and family, perhaps make a print and hang on your wall. Welcome to the class, and I'll see you in the next lesson.
2. Project Intro: Hi. The project for this course is to create at least one, maybe more, absolutely stunningly beautiful black and white images that you'll be proud to share with your friends and family, and who knows, maybe make a print and stick it up on your walls. In order to get started with this, I'd recommend that you have a look at the first couple of lessons in the class. There's one on What Makes a Great Black and White Photographs, and I also have some notes in the project files for you to refer to some great black and white photographers for inspiration. Then you can look at the lesson on setting up your camera to shoot black and white so you can be sure you have your settings that you will see your image in black and white, but be sure to capture great data so you can convert it later. Alternatively, if you don't have time to do this right now, you can go through your existing images and pick some that you think will make great black and white images. Once you've done that, you can bring them into Lightroom and we'll score step by step through the various different methods of converting your images from what you've captured to a black and white image. You can try different methods and decide which one works best for the image that you have and what appeals to you. Once you've done that, you'll be able to further refine the image using some toning tools in Lightroom. Along the way, be sure to post some images into your project so that you can get feedback and further direction on where to go. Once you've achieved the final image which you'll do through the course, be sure to post it so that everybody can see what you've accomplished. So get ready to get going. We'll see you soon.
3. What Makes Great B&W: Hi. In today's lesson, I want to talk about some things that you can do to ensure that you capture really great black and white photographs. It's said that a photograph has to be seen in the mind's eye before you even raise the camera to look through it, and that is especially true in black and white because you need to look at the scene and imagine what this will look like as just shades of black, gray, and white. You need to look at what is the light and shadow doing because that's really what you're photographing when you're in black and white. See how the light is creating texture, shape, and form on your subject, and whether it's a landscape, portrait, or still life, it's all the same. It's light and shadow that gives you texture and form. I recall when I started photography as a young teenager, I went out photographing my first roll of black and white film. I was taking great photographs. I knew I had absolute magazine cover quality images. Then I got them back and learned to process them, make prints, looked at them and went, "These are terrible." Just because without any color in them, they were just really flat, boring shades of gray. So when you're photographing in black and white, you need to take everything that you do and amp it up to 11. Your composition needs to be more dramatic. Your lighting needs to be stronger. You need to do everything you do a little bit more to really make dramatic black and white images. So in terms of your composition, you want to look for some really strong elements. You can use things within the frame to frame the image and to guide the viewer into your image. The other thing you can do is look for really strong diagonals which will help to add drama to the frame and draw your viewer into your subject. Take the time to move around, slow down. I know that's hard these days. Slow down, move around, and try different points of view. See how that affects the composition. Try a higher angle or get low to the ground. See how the elements fall together and see whether you can make a more dramatic composition that will work in black and white as you imagine it in your head. You might also want to consider using a wider angle lens than you would normally reach for, either using a wider angle lens or dialing your zoom lens a little bit wider. This will tend to make you come a little bit closer to your subjects, but the wider view will also add some dramatic lines to the photograph and tend to make it more impactful photograph. In terms of your light, you'll tend to want to shoot with either very contrasty, strong light so say, early in the day or late in the day, or very, very soft overcast light. When you have strong light, you can use the shadows and the textures that they create to add drama to your photograph. If you have very soft light, you can make very beautiful mid-tone pictorialist types of photographs that are very, very delicate tonalities, but really beautiful. In-between, especially sort of a midday lighting, tends to be very boring in black and white because it's very uniform and everything just goes to [inaudible]. So I tend to look for either really strong light or very soft light, and in-between, maybe shoot color. The other thing I'd advise is have a look at some of the great black and white photographers that I included in my notes for this class. Have a look at their work and envision what it is that they did to create the drama and the power within their work. If you can learn from those, when you go out to photograph, those images can suddenly be floating in your head and will help to inspire you to create really strong, beautiful black and white photographs. So next lesson, we're going to look at some settings you can use in your camera to help you pre-visualize in black and white, and also make sure that you're capturing the absolute best quality image, so that you can make a really beautiful black and white rendition of it. I'll see you in the next class.
4. Camera Settings: Hi. We're here on location today because I wanted to talk about some settings you can use in your camera to help with capturing good black and white images. The first thing we want to do is set the preview in the back of your camera to a black and white image so that you can start to pre-visualize the world in black and white. In the case of the Fujis, you go to the image quality menu, film simulation, and you click on that and scroll down to the setting for B, which is a black and white setting standard, and select that. Now the back of your camera shows a nice black and white rendition of what you're capturing so you can start to pre-visualize in black and white. In the notes for the class, I will include the settings for Canon, Nikon, and Sony cameras as well for your reference. Have a look there if you shoot with one of those cameras. The next thing you want to think about is making sure that you get the best possible exposure, and the best way to do that is to look at the histogram. The histogram live on your camera, makes sure that the little chart, little stack of pixels is as far to the right as possible without pilling up on the right-hand side. Now, you can use any of the exposure modes; you can be in full automatic aperture priority shutter or full manual. If you're working on the automatic settings, you'll use the exposure compensation dial or setting on your camera to control the exposure and move that histogram to the right so that you get maximum shadow detail because you'll use that shadow detail when we convert the image to black and white, and that's what you want to be sure to get. Again, histogram to the right. Got your preview in black and white, and you're ready to go out and capture great images. In the next lesson, we'll look at those images in Lightroom and start to explore how we're going to convert your color captures, your raw data into a beautiful black and white image. See you in the next lesson.
5. Color to B&W: Now that we've learned what makes a great black and white photograph and how we go about capturing that, now we can look at working within Lightroom to convert our color captures even though we looked at black and white preview, we've captured Ra, which means that we have color to work with, and we can use those colors to help convert our image into a dramatic black and white image. Let's look at what's involved here. We're going to start with a really nice simple image, so we can see exactly what's going on. We have these nice bright blue, red and yellow balloons. I'm just going to click on the black and white button. In the basic panel, we have color, which is where we are and black and white. I'm going to click on that and it just does a straightforward conversion to black and white. Now we can see that the balloons are rendered into three shades of gray. But we can control how those colors get made into grays down here in the black and white panel. We have sliders for red, orange, yellow, green, aqua blue, purple, and magenta. These control how those colors get rendered. Let me show you. I know that one of these balloons is blue. It's this one and it's rendered a little bit darker gray. But with this slider controlling the blue, I can make it darker or I can make it lighter, almost white, and my red balloon, which is this one on top, I can do the same. I can go from almost black or completely black to almost white just by adjusting the slider. There's another yellow one here. That means I can control how my colors get converted into shades of black and white. I can use that to add drama to my photograph. Now let me just show you one tool that's very handy in doing that, and that's right up here in the upper left-hand corner of this panel. In many of the panels in Lightroom, there's little concentric circles that's supposed to represent a target, and it's what's called the targeted adjustment tool. It works like this. You click on it, and then when you come into your image, you have the little targeted adjustment tool. What you can do is you can click anywhere in the photograph and it will detect the underlying color. If you click and drag up, it lightens, and if you drag down it darkens that color, now it's working by color and it will work universally, so wherever you have that color in your photograph, it'll get lighter or darker. Here I can click on what I know was the blue balloon, and as I drag down, the blue slider moves all by itself. There's the yellow slider moving. I can work within the image because often, once you've converted an image to black and white, you don't necessarily remember exactly what color was in each area. The targeted adjustment tool allows you to work within the image to control the shades of gray that are rendered from each color. That's the principle of converting the image to black and white. Now let's go and apply it to an actual photograph. I'll see you in the next lesson.
6. The B&W Panel: Hi, now that we understand the principles of converting an image from color to black and white, let's apply it to this photograph of a nice vineyard in the South of France. So the way I like to do this is to start off with a good colored version of the image, as a point of reference so that I can compare my black and white conversion to my color and see which one I like or maybe both. Here's how I go about it. In the base with the basic panel open, I look up here in the histogram, and there are these two little triangles in the Window, and these are highlight and shadow warnings. So I'm going to click them both on. Now, I start with my white slider, and I increase my whites, slide it up until I see highlight warnings. You can see the red splotches in the clouds. Those are areas of blank white, which I don't want because I want full detail in these clouds. So I'm going to slide it down to those just disappear. Then I'll do the same thing with the blacks. If I bring the blacks down, you can see in the trees and in some of the vines I'm getting solid black, which I don't mind because I don't mind a bit of black. But I'm going to set it right about there. Now, all of these settings are very much personal taste, and as you work with it, you'll develop a feeling for how you like your images rendered. Now, I've set my whites and blacks, and I'm going to come to my highlights and bring them down. This is going to add particularly drama to my clouds. Those clouds are getting nice and dramatic. There we go. Now, I see a lot of tonal separation in the clouds, the sky against the clouds. I can play with my shadows, bring them up a little bit to get a little bit more detail in the trees. There we go. So now I have set my whites, blacks, highlights and shadows. Now I can turn off my warnings so that they are distracting me. I can use the Exposure slider to lighten or darken the overall image. I'm going to just lighten it a little bit, add a bit of contrast. There we go. Then down here in the presence, I have the clarity and dehaze sliders. They basically do the same thing, but to different extents. The dehaze slider is a bit stronger, so you have to be careful with it. But I can start off by adding some clarity to the image, which increases the separation in the clouds and then a little bit of dehaze. There we go. So now I have a nice rendition of this image in color as my starting point and reference. Now, to work in black and white, I want to start off by making a virtual copy of this image so that I'll have one version in color and another version in black and white. To do that, I'm going to open the film strip so you can see. I can go, "Photo," "Create Virtual Copy" and if I look here, there's a keyboard shortcut Cmd-'. I do this often enough that I have remembered the keyboard shortcut, Cmd-' or Cntrl-' and you can now see I have another copy of this file. The settings are exactly the same, they're identical. But this copy of the file has the little corner turned up which tells me it's a virtual copy. It makes no difference, I can work on either one. But I'm going to use this one for my basic conversion to black and white. To turn this into a black and white image, I'm going to come back to the basic panel and just click on "Black and White," which converts it to black and white. I'm going to get rid of the film strip. There we are. Here it is, the settings in the Basic Panel remain unchanged. But now I can go down to the black and white panel, and play with these color sliders to control how my colors are rendered into black and white. Now, I know I have a lot of blue in the sky. So I can grab the blue slider, and move it down to add some drama to the sky. You see the blues are getting dark, the whites are staying pretty much where they are, but the blues are getting much, much darker. Now, if I want, I could also grab the targeted adjustment tool to do the same thing. I click on that, come into the image, find an area that I know has the blue or the sky blue. I can just click there and drag down, and you'll notice the blue slider is moving because I clicked on a blue area. Right about their we've added some nice drama to the sky. We can see far more detail in these distant clouds, and these ones in the foreground are nice and dramatic. Now, I can play with the green slider to change the rendition of the trees and the grass, the green of the grass. I can click it and drag up to bring in a little bit more detail in the trees. There we are, or to come down to add a little drama. Again, it's just purely taste. Today, I maybe do it one way. Tomorrow, I may do it another. There we are. Then the other one component of this shot is the yellow flowers that are in this field. I can grab my yellow slider, slide it up, and now the flowers are popping out from the background of the greens. There we are. That's a nice rendition of this color image in black and white. We've used both the Basic Panel, and the black and white panel to control how our colors get rendered into black and white. In the next lesson, we'll look at some different methods of converting an image to black and white within Lightroom.
7. The HSL Panel: Now that we've learned the basic and most standard way of converting an image to black and white, let's explore some other alternatives that are built into Lightroom, and provide us some opportunities for different kinds of creative expressions. Going to go back to the original color image, and I'm going to make another virtual copy so that we can compare our results. Command or control apostrophe makes another virtual copy. This time, rather than hitting the black and white button, what I'm going to do is go down to the HSL/Color panel. Now, HSL stands for hue, saturation, and luminance. Now you may find that when you open the HSL panel, it may be set to color which looks like this, or HSL with a single hue, saturation, or luminance panel in it. I prefer to work in the HSL panel and click all. I have access to all the sliders to control the hue, saturation, and luminance. Now hue is the color itself, which color is being expressed, the saturation is how much color there is, and luminance is the brightness. What we can do here to create a black and white image is, we take all the saturation sliders and slide them down to zero which basically removes the color from the image. There we go. We now have a black and white image. Now we can use the luminance sliders to do what we were doing before with the black and white sliders. We have the same range of colors, and we can come in here for instance, and grab the blue slider and slide it down to the left to darken in the skies. You'll notice we can go a fair bit here. There we are. We can play with the green slider to affect the trees. The grass, let's make it a little more dramatic, and the yellow slider. Now you'll notice the sliders have a little bit less effect in this method, so we can push them a little bit further. We have a little bit more control. That's one of the reasons why I actually like this method, is it gives us a lot of control over the colors and how they're rendered into black and white. There we've played with pretty much the same colors that we did before. But what this technique has the option of doing, is now bringing back just a little bit of the underlying color. So, if I want to just bring in a little bit of blue into the sky, I can go back to the saturation slider, grab the blue, and bring in just a hint of blue into the sky. See if I bring it all the way up, the sky turns blue again, and that I find is sort of obvious and too strong. But what I like to do is just get it so that it's just barely tinted a little bit blue. I could do the same thing with the greens. Again, grab the saturation slider and just bring a little bit of green into it. Just a hint. You do want to be subtle with this technique. If I want, I can try a little bit of yellow too. There's those flowers glowing yellow, which is a bit strong, but I can just let a little bit of the native color. This puts us in a realm that's just sort of in-between, just pure black and white and straight color. I actually quite like this because back when we shot film, there was no option to do this kind of thing. I think the blue is a little strong at this point, but there we go. If you're subtle with it, it presents a really interesting alternative to just going to straight black and white. I quite like the look of this. That's another alternative way of getting to basically, a black and white image with some color in it.
8. Profiles & Presets: Hi. In this lesson, I'd like to show you two other alternatives that are built into Adobe Lightroom, that allow you to explore some more creative options for expressing your image in black and white. The first option is profiles, which are in the Basic panel. They are different interpretations of your raw data, which give different looks to the file. They don't affect the sliders within Lightroom at all. They're just an initial interpretation of the data, which you can then tweak with the sliders. Presets is another way to look at your files, and presets are sets of slider adjustments to create certain looks. We'll create a virtual copy, her image, and first we'll look at the profiles. Here in the Basic panel, just under the treatments, is this line for profiles. There's a few basic profiles, landscape, portrait, etc here. But if you click on these four squares, you get to the profile browser. In the profile browser, there's some Adobe raw profiles, your basic monochrome, but also a complete set of black and white profiles. These are interpretations of your raw data. They're not in any particular order. You can just scroll through and see what appeals to you in terms of black and white renditions of your file. There's black and white 5, which looks nice, six, which is even stronger, seven, actually seven looks very good. There's 17 looks in this file. Depending on your original image, some will work sometimes and some will work others. Seven happens to look really good with this, so I'm going to click on slide seven, close it. Then if I wanted to do any further tweaks, I can play with my highlights and shadows with my siders, notice my sliders have not changed. I can go in and still play with them. Now I have a slightly different black and white version of my file. The presets in Lightroom are in the left-hand panel in the Develop module. Let's have a look and see what's in there. Once again, let's make a virtual copy of our file. The thing with the presets, is they are adjustments to the sliders and various settings in Lightroom. What I prefer to do so I can see them, is reset my file, hit the Reset button and develop. I zero it out, so I can see just the effect of the preset on the file. Here in the Presets panel, we have color creative and black and white. If we open the black and white, we have various sets of settings that give us different looks to the file. You can preview them by simply scrolling over them. This is a quick way to get a variety of interpretations of your file. There's one that's got a punch which looks pretty good. We can see now in the Basic panel, it's applied, the black and white profile 1, and then adjusted a bunch of the sliders, to give us this particular look, which looks actually pretty nice. You still have the option of playing around with the sliders to customize it to your own personal taste. The presets are an interesting way of exploring different interpretations of your files. In addition to the presets that are included with Lightroom, there are many presets that people have created and made available online. Many of them are available on the Adobe website. If you look under window, find extensions on exchange, you can click there and that will take you to the Adobe exchange, where you can explore all kinds of different creative presets and extensions for Lightroom. Just to show you an example, I have some presets here, which give a wide range of different kinds of looks to the file. These are all kinds of different settings. These allow you to explore various looks for your file. If you click on it, you can then see what settings have been changed throughout all the settings, where the sliders have been adjusted to create the particular look that you're looking at. These provide an interesting way to explore various options for creating looks in Lightroom. Now we've learned about the various methods we can use to convert our images to black and white. In the next lesson, we'll look at some further enhancements we can do to take the image to the next level.
9. Final Touches: Hi. Now that we've learned various ways of converting our image to black and white, let's look at a few final enhancements that we can use to take it to that next level. Here we are. Let's look at our first version of the file where we convert it to black and white. Here in the Basic panel, there's a relatively new slider called Texture, which is designed to enhance texture and works particularly well in black and white. If I zoom into these trees and the vines and just slide the Texture Slider up, it will find additional texture and enhance it like that. There's before little, now it looks a little soft, and with additional texture, it just brings out a little bit more texture in the shot, which works very well in black and white. Then also in the Effects panel, will zoom back out again, we have two things we can play with: Post-Crop Vignetting, which is to darken the edges of the frame. It's an old darkroom technique. It basically helps to keep your viewers attention focused within the photograph. I like to use Highlight Priority. There's other ones, but these are basically made for color images. But Highlight Priority works well for black and white. Take the Amount slider and dial it down and you'll see the corners and the edges of the frame darken in slightly. You can control how far in that comes with the Midpoint slider, about there and the roundness, the shape of that, and how soft the edges. If you take away feather, it gets harder, it spreads out with the feather. I like to apply a fair bit of darkening because it works well in black and white just to contain your viewers' attention. Then there's the Grain slider, which applies a film-like grain to the image. I like to apply just a little bit because it helps to smooth out the gradations of tones in areas like clouds. Just a little bit of grain. It's not really going to be all that visible, but it does help with the transition of tones, and especially when you go to make a final print. The last enhancement we want to look at is the Color Grading panel, right Right. This panel allows us to apply color toning to the highlights, the shadows, and the midtones of our image. This works extremely well in a black and white image. It can be used in color to apply a sort look to an image. But in black and white, we could do something like a split toning or apply different tones to the highlights, midtones, and shadows. The way this works is there's a Midtones, Shadows, and Highlights, and there's a dot in the center of the circle. I can start with the Shadows, and if I grab the dot in the middle and move it towards a color, so if I move it down towards the purple tones, it applies a warm purple tone to the shadow areas. As I go further out, it gets more and more saturated. But somewhere in here, the trick to this is to be subtle. You can also grab the outside circle and move it around to change the color. I could go to a blue-green tone or a pure blue. I would want to go to just a slightly warm bluish color in the shadows. My highlights, I'd like to warm them up just a little bit, so I'm going to slide the middle dot towards the orange, brownish, reddish color. This is very much flavor to taste. There we go. The Midtones, I'm just going to cool them a little bit, so more towards a purish blue, just very, very subtle. Now, the Balance slider controls how much of the highlight and shadow colors where they crossover. If I slide it more this way, we get more of the midtone shadow colors. If I go this way, we get more of the highlight colors. You can just adjust it until you see an effect that you happen to like. The Blending slider controls how the colors blend into one another. There we go. Now, this panel can be used to create all kinds of different effects so experiment and play it well. Now, we have your fully finished, beautiful black and white image that's ready to share with friends and family and perhaps make a print, put it in a frame, and hang it on your wall.
10. Conclusion: Hi, congratulations on completing Fine Art Black and White photography. In this class, we've started out by exploring the beauty of the black and white image and how you can start to see the world in black and white and capture that beauty. Then the tools that you can use within Adobe Lightroom to convert your images to black and white and then further enhance them and bring them to the level of being a beautiful black and white fine art image. I hope you're as excited as I am. The creative possibilities of the black and white image and how you can explore this in your own work. Please remember to upload your project to the class project gallery and maybe include a before and after image so that people can see where you started and the beautiful art work you created, and you can get some feedback on what you've accomplished. Speaking of feedback, please leave a review of the class. If you enjoyed it, you can follow my profile, so you'll be made aware of any future classes that I create. Again, congratulations on completing the class and we'll see you next time. Thank you.
Rob Davidson, Food Photographer and Videographer
