Transform Your Black & White Photos: Create Drama & Intensity

1. 1 Introduction: Welcome to my class on transforming your black and white photography and how to make really compelling and dynamic black and white images. I'm sure there's been times when you've looked at other people's black and white work and you're really marvel at what they've done, that images are really rich. The blacks are very deep and there's lots of detail in the shadows and the lights are bright with lots of contrast and where the whites aren't blown out and stuff. And then you go to make your own conversion just comes out kinda gray and dull and you kinda wonder, why is this happening? So in Photoshop, there are lots of ways to make a black and white image from a color photo, and some are really simple. There's some one-click conversions you can do. You can just go into Color Mode and make it into grayscale. You'll have a black and white photo. It may not be the best or the greatest, but it will be a black and white photo. But by trying out other methods and ways of doing it, you'll see that you can yield much greater images out of your files. You can create really dynamic photos that have those rich blacks and bright whites and in a real sense of, of texture and contrast that makes for a really compelling photograph. And there's no one way of doing this are lots of different methods and techniques available. And we're going to explore a few of those. So the best way to go about this is for you to try out these different methods and see what works best for you, for your manner of working in for your type of work that you're trying to create. And you can mix and match these techniques and borrow from one and go to the other, or even come up with your own. But it'll give you insight into how to create a really great black and white image. So we're going to begin by looking really briefly at some of the icons of the black and white medium, people against the Latins or Edward Weston and people like that and see what is it about their images that makes for such a great black and white photo? Then we'll look at creating, starting to create our own by looking at our color file that we're going to work with. And does that color file have the full range of tone and value that we're looking for and how can we adjust it to make for an easier transition into black and white? And something that won't be frustrating or disappointing. We, we want to, when you started at the beginning like this, you can really lay the foundation for creating a great photograph. Then we'll go on to looking at the histogram and looking at using curves and levels and other ways and means of creating tonal enhancement and contrast adjustments and things like that. In the end, to create a really dynamic photograph that you'll be proud of and be really happy with. So grab some of your photos, maybe even photos that you've tried to convert in the past that you haven't really been happy with or I've just been kinda dull and lifeless. And let's try to make some really compelling and great art out of these photographs. 2. 2 Inspiration: When embarking on a journey, It's always good to have an idea of where you want to end up or what your goal is in terms of creating black and white photography. It's the same thing. If you have an image in mind are some idea of what you're hoping to create. It makes the whole process a lot more sensible and in a way a lot easier because you know what you're going after. So we're going to talk about that now and give you an idea or give you some examples of other people's work to really inspire your thought process and your creative process to think about what it is you are hoping to create. Ancillary items, was famous for the whole concept of previsualization, the whole sense of pre visualize in your image when you're first capturing the image, are taking the photo. In the old days of film and paper processing, that kind of process or that kind of thinking helped inform your decision-making further down the line in terms of beginning with the exposure, but then leading onto how you develop the film and how you made the print and decisions like that, even in terms of what develop a you would use or what chemicals and things like that. So it's an important thing to think about. And even today in terms of digital work, It's the same thing if you have an image in your head starting out. It helps your decision-making going forward and how you're going to approach the image processing all throughout until you come up with a final P3 or final photograph. Angela ions also was known for the zone system. This whole concept of a gray scale, from zone zero to 100 being your pure black in zone ten being a pure white. And all the tones in-between or gradations of gray going both ways. The idea of this is that looking at your photograph, generally, you want to keep detail in all areas, both in the deep shadows and also on the bright whites. To be cognizant of creating really deep blacks where you lose detail or blown out whites where again, you have no information there. It's a good thing to keep in mind in terms of your own photograph and how you make a conversion that you want to retain as much detail as you can throughout the process and the end. If you choose to create a complete black like a silhouette or, or complete blown out white area, at least then it's a conscious decision that you can do. And you still have all the information to work with going either way whether you wanna do that or not. So it's certainly something to think about at the outset of creating images. So at the beginning of this video, I showed a few of my photographs. But now we'll take a look at some of these other older masters or current people who are known for doing great black and white work. And hopefully this will inspire you and spark your creativity in terms of what you can create with your work. And after this, what we'll do is we'll begin looking at how to create a file that'll make the process of this easier and more amenable to creating the black and white work you want to, you want to do and all the different processes that we can use going forward. And also in terms of looking at other photographs, That's a good idea just to google fine art, black and white photography and take a look at other people's work. There's a tremendous amount of work that's available to look at online. And it will really inspire you and make you think about why I could do this or that are different ways to approach a subject or just simply to create your own image. So it's a great way to educate yourself, to inspire yourself, and to really spark your creativity. 3. 3 Contrast Adjustments: When working with an image in Photoshop or Lightroom, many times will make an adjustment and see a change in the image and not have a real deep, we're clear understanding as to how this change is coming about. Yeah, we'll make a change, let's say to a black point are like a clarity filter or something like that. And see a general change in the image, but not really understand totally what's going on. So by playing around with this, with something like a gray-scale file like this, it can give you a better understanding as to what's going on and how these changes come about in Photoshop or Lightroom. And hopefully lead to greater insight into how to work with these with your own images as you move forward in this process of converting images into black and white. So download the file that's associated with this and try it out yourself. And I think you'll find it helpful. It's very quick, doesn't take a lot of time and it can be really eye-opening. I thought it would be interesting to look at how making various tonal adjustments in Photoshop or Adobe Camera Raw and really affect the values in your image. So I created a gray scale here going from 00 is zero, which is black, all the way up to total white to 55. To 55 to 55 representing the values in the red, green, and blue channels. We're going to see what happens to these values when we make various adjustments. So let's bring this into Camera wrong and open up the camera raw filter. And here you see the same thing and we've got all our controls as we normally do when you see the histogram, but up at the top and we can click, click on our clipping, which will show here's our dark value clipping, which as it should, it show zeros, zeros, zero is being being clipped because it's total black. And the 255 is showing clipping as total white as it should because there's no other value in there. And then you can see on our histogram just big spikes for each of these squares or rectangles of tone, because it's just a total value in there. There's no variation within each block of tone here. Like 10 to one or 21.2, we have the RGB value of one or two is constant throughout the whole thing. There's no gradual change from the 1A2 up to the next slide or one of one-ninth, it's an abrupt change. And so that's why we're showing just as spikes of value in the RGB values on the histogram. So if we start making a change, Let's take our black. If I start bringing the black slider down, which we would do an image when we want to increase the level of blacks and an image, you can see what happens. We're starting to get clipping now all the way up to our third or fourth grayscale rectangle because it's moving those values from where they were into basically a complete block of zeros, zeros, zero. And if I do it the other way, you can see how it lightens the values where we had before, 17, 17 here. Now it's reading 303-30-3303. So let's lighten the value from 17 up to 33, increase the black. And we can see the same thing happening on bringing this back to zero. The y channel, if I bring the whites down, it's going to make those lighter values grayer. We're at 02:38 here now it's 212 across the board, signifying a darker gray or darker white. And if I bring the whites up the other way, you can see now, it will get clipping across these other white area or lighter areas that initially showed some tonal value change now is just showing complete white and that's what we would expect. So again, it's just an interesting way to see what's going on. And the same thing, if I increase my shadow values. It's lightening up those darker gray areas. In this area of the histogram, you can see they move to the right. And again, it's just a way to see what's really going on and something to keep in mind. And you can play around with these other sliders and you'll see the same thing. Interesting thing to look at is our texture clarity and dehaze filters, because these are essentially contrast filters or contrast adjustments, the Texture slider will affect our change from a lighter to darker area, very acutely around the border area there. So when I bring that up, you can see we're getting kind of an abrupt change right at the border of, of a color change or our total change, where it'll get darker on the left side and then lighter on the right side of that. And you can see the same thing. If I slide that Texture slider to the left, it almost becomes blurry because it's sort of softening that change area from dark to light. So it's softening the contrast. And if I go to clarity, it's got sort of a broader effect on each, each rectangle of tone where you can see it'll make it lighter on the left side of the rectangle and darker on the right to create more of a contrast change to the adjoining rectangle of tone. So again, play with this and you'll see what's going on. And it can be really enlightening to see how these contrasts, adjustments can affect the tonal value in your image. And the same way, we can look finally at the Dehaze, which as we would expect, if I bring it to the left, it's lightening. And if I bring it to the right, you can see how it starts to dark and all the total values while creating some contrasts. So again, it just gives you a real understanding of what's going on when we make tonal adjustments. So I encourage you to download this gray scale and play with it and see what happens. And we'll give you an idea of what's going on when you make your tonal adjustments. 4. 4 Camera Raw Pt 1: One of the more useful tools in Photoshop is the Camera Raw Filter. It can be used to bring in raw files from a digital camera, but you can also use it to work on other files that can open up in Photoshop such as jpegs, tips, or just regular Photoshop files. The nice thing about the Camera Raw Filter is that there are a lot of tools that are contained within this one filter. So in this first part, we're going to look at the editing tools which encompass tools to adjust, tone, contrast, color, geometry, and things like that. And there are a lot of tools within here, which can also be done outside of the filter. But it's interesting and useful to see how they can be done within this one filter. This is a JPEG from a cell phone. It's just, it comes in as normal as a background file here. But what I'm going to do is if I right-click on this and I say Convert to Smart Object, and you see there's a little icon that, that goes on top of the thumbnail. Then now this is identified as the smart object. And what this means is that any of the filters that I apply to this now are completely editable in the future, I can do whatever I want to. This pretty much. Nothing is really permanent. It's non-destructive and it's not going to affect the original image at all. So I have it set as a smart object. So now I'm gonna go here up under Filter, go to Camera Raw Filter, which can also be accessed by hitting Shift Command a. And you can see the image opens up in the camera raw filter, which has a whole bunch of different controls and adjustments that are available. So all this is available within the Camera Raw Filter and it replaces some of the other ways of doing this within Photoshop where you would have to create layers. This way you can do a lot of it all in one place and it can be a little bit easier for adjusting your images to do it all in one place like this. So I'm just going to run through this rather quickly. This is not a real in-depth look at the Camera Raw Filter, but just to introduce you to it and to hopefully get you to try it out and use it. Because there's a lot here. On the right side you see I have a histogram, as we've talked about before. Bell could just go over this very quickly as well. The left side of the histogram or my blacks, the right side is white, so goes from black to white on a gray dated scale. And you can see there are highlights as I move my mouse over it. And the black relates to the black slider here, the white relates to the white slider, the shadows. And you can see because it all comes up underneath the histogram here. Shadows Exposure is up on top here. So I can click in any area of this, Let's say the blacks here. And I can move my mouse to the right. And you can see it moves the black slider up. Or if I move it to the left and moves the black slider down showing that blue areas where the clipping occurs, where it shows I've so much black that there's no detail there anymore. And you can see the left side of the histogram. The values all go way up on the left side showing that I've got all this completely blacked out area. So I'm going to move it back pretty much to the middle because I don't want it blacked out. You can see the same thing on the white. I can click in there, move it to the left, moves my white stone. You can see I get start getting a little more detail in the sky. Or if I move it to the right, it becomes completely blown out with those red areas that are signifying white areas that no longer show any sort of detail or gradation of tone. So I'm going to bring my whites scan and you can do the same with the shadows. If I click in the shadow of the histogram and move right, it's going to move all those values, values to the right, which is lighter. If I move them to the left, it's going to make them darker. So I can just move it a little bit just to open up my shadows a little bit. The highlights, the same thing. If I move it down, you can see I start gaining a lot more detail in the sky, which is important. Let's bring that down. And exposure or my mid values, I can move them left or right to adjust the density of it. Maybe a little bit to the left just to bring more tonal area in there to work with the texture clarity and dehaze filters or adjustments are contrast adjustments. Texture affects my change from dark to light and very small areas where there are abrupt changes from dark to light. Clarity effects over longer periods like in the clouds here we have a gentle change from dark to light. And dehaze is pretty much what it says it is, it will affect the haze in the area and will essentially darken the sky a bit. So if I move the texture up, you can see I'm getting more definition in the water and the ripples of the ways here. But it also brings up more grain in that image or brings up more of the visual noise. You can see more of those random colors coming up. So you can see the clarity as I bring that up, it brings a lot more definition into the sky. But you do start to see a little bit more grain in that area as well. So you have to be careful, especially with an image from a cell phone where it's not going to be of the highest fidelity to begin with. And the D Hayes also, if you bring it up, you can see it darkens the sky, makes things more intense. And I can always go back and adjust my blacks to bring that up to eliminate the block up areas, linear vibrance and saturation, which are both saturation sliders, the vibrant slider affects mostly the mid-tone values. So it's a little, little more gentle and how it works. As opposed to saturation, which will just saturate all colors you can see. As I bring them up, the colors get fairly unrealistic, so we're going to leave that at zero. Then we have a curve adjustments here, which we've talked about before as well. And I can make more nuanced adjustments for this as well. If I want to say bring down my shadows, raise the light areas a little bit. We can get a little bit of an S curve which adds contrast to an image for this, so this is a handy way to add contrast to an image as opposed to just working with the contrast slider. You can see we've increased that quite a bit already. The next one down is the detail. Sharpening increases the contrast basically between pixels between light and dark areas. It'll make apparent sharpness in the photo look more acute. But a will also bring up more noise so you have to be careful with how you use that. Wouldn't overdo it at this point. And noise reduction, that's our visual noise. The best way to look at that is to bring an image up in size. So if we bring it up and look where the noise is going to be in the shadow areas for the most part you can see we have some random color. You see the purples and the greens and the blues in here. A lot of that is color noise in the image. And if we bring up the noise reduction, it'll soften the image because it'll smudge over it. So you have to be careful with how you use that. It will get rid of the noise, but the cost of doing so is going to make the image a bit softer. You're going to lose sharpness of the image. Color noise will affect the color noise and they can reduce some of that random colorization that goes on in here. So again, you have to play with it and see what works best for your image. It's best not to overdo these things because they can just make your image rather mushy and take away from the overall sharpness. Here we add a little bit of noise reduction that does seem to help here in the waters in the foreground of the picture. But you can see it definitely did make it a little bit softer, but I think overall it looks better. And then we can go into the Color Mixer where we can adjust these individual colors in the image in terms of hue saturation and luminance. Hue is the color saturation is the intensity of the color and luminance is the color value, is the lightness or darkness value of it. So you can see in the foreground we have this red bone which is rather strong and color. So if I take the red here and I bring that down, you can see reduces the red saturation of it. I could go to the luminance as well if I wanted to darken it so you can see what that did, or if I just want to change the color of it overall and make it a little bit more orangey. I could do that too. So there's a lot of adjustments. We can do color wise within Adobe Camera Raw, and I can do that for any of the colors here. If I want, let's say my blues, I want the sky to be a little bit more intense blue color. I can bring up the saturation. If I want to darken it, I can bring the luminance down and things like that. So you have a lot of control over individual colors. It's a good thing just to play around with that and you can see how it works. Color Grading will sort of work in the same way, but over a broader range, it's split up into mid tones, shadows and highlights. And this is sort of like a color balance adjustment if I wanted to make. So in other words, if I found that the overall feel of this was a little bit too blue, especially let's say in the shadows here. And I want to warm it up a little bit. I can move this into the warmer spectrum here, like in my reds or oranges. Just to take away some of that blue, I could do the same, let's say with the mid tones, then it gets a little bit too warm. So maybe I want to keep it more blue so you can see how you can sort of play around with this to get the color effect. You want, the highlights. If I want to keep those kinda warm, I can move that into the reddish orange area, maybe move the shadows back into the blue to get a little contrast between my shadows and highlights. Shadows will normally be cooler and the highlights will be warmer from the sun. So you can see how that works. And also I can work with the blending of this here, the balance of my various tones, you can see here going all the way to the ground and getting more, almost all the worms and moving the bounce over to the left, it pretty much is all cool. So again, you can play around with these sliders to affect the overall color balance. Bring it back to where you start by just zeroing out these parameters. If I just bring this back. And then we go to optics and we can effect a story for you. If this was taken with a wide angle lens and there was a lot of barrel distortion. I can adjust that like so. Or if I want to create vignetting your light or dark around the edges, you can use this. You can also do it manually. So either way, in geometry, if, let's say if my horizon line stilted, this one looks a little bit tilted, I can adjust it like that to straighten it out. That looks a little bit better. And these are other adjustments. I want to if you're want to straighten out a building shot or something like that. This is one way you can do it. Then we have effects here. Grain if you want to add grain to your photo or vignetting, just like we saw before. We can do it here as well. We can go to calibration, which affects the red, green, and blue channels, which are the primary color channels in any image you see on your screen. And so I can affect the rate if I wanted to make the whole red channel, let's say a little more towards the yellow, a little more orangey. And if I want the green to be maybe more towards the yellow. So you can see the yellow gets more intense here. And you can see what happened to the red. It became orange. So it's a very effective way of making global color changes to your images as well. 5. 5 Camera Raw Pt 2: We're going to look at some of the other tools that are available within the Camera Raw Filter in these includes some slides, some light retouching tools like Content-Aware Fill, healing and cloning brushes. And although these brushes are available in the main part of Photoshop, they are operating a slightly, slightly different way within the Camera Raw Filter. So you might find this easier to work with are just better for your manner of working. Then we'll get into looking at the masking options that are available within the filter as well. And these enable very targeted adjustments of color tone in contrast within your image. And again, these adjustments can be done outside of the filter and in the main part of Photoshop. But this is just another alternative that's all under the same umbrella of the Camera Raw Filter. Within the Camera Raw Filter, we're also able to do some retouching and some masking and things like that, things that we normally do in the main part of Photoshop. The cloning brushes operate a little bit differently than they do in the main part. Probably not as much flexibility or ability to really retouch, but you can do some of it here, so we'll take a look at it. So if I click on this second icon down from the top, it says healing and we have three brushes here. We have Content Aware, healing and a cloning. So let's say we start with the cloning brushing. We can adjust the size of the brush here and the feathering and the opacity of the brush, whether we want it to be 100% or something less. So just for our purposes here, we're just going to make it 100% so we can see easily what's going on. And we'll include a little bit of feathering. Let's get the size down. Let's try to, I'm going to try to just take out the flag here. We're using the cloning brush. Then as soon as I paint in there you see there's a circle and a line with an arrow showing where it's sampling from. Photoshop automatically just determined that it's going to sample here. But if I don't like that, I can click on it with my mouse and just drag it. And I can change the sampling where it's coming from. And if I wanted to see what it looks like without the icon and the circle on your argument. Click off of Show Overlay. And it will show what it looks like. I can click on the Show Overlay to get rid of this so I can see what it looks like. Then if I'm happy with it, I can just move on. If not, put the overlay back on, I could try a different brush and I can try a different brush with the one I already just did. Instead of cloning, I'm going to say, well, let me try the healing and see if that works any better. Now I tried to healing and you see we get a different result. It's still showing the sampling area. And I can again move that around at will to see if I get an effect that I like. And again, I can shut off the overlay to see what it looks like this, if I'm happy with it are found not. Then finally we can move on to the Content Aware, which sort of like how it works in the main part of Photoshop where we're Adobe Camera Raw or Photoshop will determine some other areas of the photo to use as a source material to replace what I, the area that I defined with the brush. And we can work with this a number of different ways. I can hold down the command key and click and drag. And this will be a sample area that it's going to use. And you can see it changes slightly. It's trying to blend it into the background. It doesn't really look so great. Or redeemed us hit the refresh button and it'll change also just seemingly in a random fashion. You can see each time I press the refresh, I'm getting a different result. So you can see, you can use this and I can use multiple spots within the image if I want, I can, I can go hit the clone and just create another one right here. Let's say if I want, do the same thing so you can add as many as you want. But like we saw before, it doesn't quite have the flexibility of working with these tools and the main part of Photoshop. So just keep that in mind. So, and also, if I hit this little icon here with the arrow, I can just reset everything and remove everything I've done. I could also I could have also clicked on it. Like let's say if I put this back and let's say I'm not happy with it with just, with only this brush. I can click on it and hit Delete and removes it and nothing, no harm done. The next icon we come to after the healing is the masking. So if I click on that and you see we get subject sky and background. And in this case, in this photo, we probably want to deal with the sky first. So in this case. Photoshop will automatically select the sky for me, which is real handy. If I just said sky, you see I would get this red area which is signifying the active area of the mask. As opposed to the main part of Photoshop where the red will signify the masked off areas, the areas that are not affected. So in this case, it's showing the sky and then I can go in and make whatever adjustments I want. I can lower the exposure, increase contrast. Let's say bring up the shadows, lower the blacks. But I want to change the color temperature a little bit. I can make a totally different colored sky by eliminating the blue here. Want to bring up saturation, can do that as well. And so you have a full menu of the adjustments that you can work. You can apply a curve to this area as well. So there's a lot that can be done. Even with these contrasts, adjustments of texture, clarity and dehaze. If you want to bring up the dehaze being that sky, it will cut through it a little bit and darken the sky. Clarity will add a little bit more contrast as well, as well as texture. Although it may bring up a little more grain into the sky as well. Then we have further adjustments of sharpness, noise reduction, etc, that we can deal with. If I want to add a new mask to cover another area of image, I can just hit the plus sign and it gives me the whole choice of types of mask I can create. So let's try a brush mask. Let's say I wanted to darken this area of the image so I can paint in with the brush. And the brushes is I can change the size of it, the feathering, the flow, the density so you have full control over how the brush x. And so once my mask is in there, I can go and change it just like anything else. So I can lower the exposure. Bring up the contrast if I want. So again, you have full control over the mass to make any kind of adjustments or enhancements that you want to do and you can keep on adding more mass. I can go do another one. Let's say do a linear gradient. If I want to darken the bottom of the photo a bit to lead the eye into the center. I can do a linear mask like that, which is a gradient, lower the exposure and you can see I've darkened it considerably and I can keep on going. You can add even another one. Let's say, let's do just one more. I'll do it from the side here and the mask. And even one can overlay over the other. And I can do the same thing. So you can see you can make pretty dramatic changes into the image all through the use of the masks and Adobe Camera Raw. So after that, we come to red-eye reduction, which in this case obviously we don't have a need for. But if you have a portrait photo, you can use that. And then we have presets. And there are many, many presets available in Camera Raw. You can see all these changes and we have black and white color. There's all different. You can try them all out to see what will work for you. And some can be interesting. And you can use this really as a basis for moving forward and you can adjust the intensity of the preset also appear on a slide. Are you here right now it's set to 100. I could bring it down or I can bring it up to make it really intense. So just another way of working with your photo and you can get some pretty interesting effects here and just try them out and see what works. And then once all your settings are done here, I can go back to my original edit menu. I can click on the three dots here and I can save my settings. I could save it here. And I'll asked me what do I want to save? I can either check all or just uncheck whatever you don't want. And then I can hit save. And you just say, give it a name, it'll save it in the settings setting on your computer. We're going to cancel out of this because I have no reason to. So there's a lot you can do here. It's a very powerful tool to use in Photoshop. I can do really massive changes to your image, and it will require probably a bit of playing around with it to see what you're comfortable with and what you feel really works for your images. 6. 6 Richmond Photo Prep: As our foundation for creating a great black and white photograph, we have to begin with a color image. That's what we all typically have in the intention with, with creating a good file to work with is we want to follow that retains the full values of the image. In other words, going from black to white, with all the detail in-between, we really want essentially a kind of a flat imagery. We want all the tonal values that we can possibly get and the image because that gives us the most to work with going forward. That way we'll retain as much detail as possible, and it gives us a lot of room for making contrasts and tonal choices going forward. If it looks a little bit flat, that's okay, because that means that it's got all the values that we need. We can always make a dark area darker or lighter area lighter if it's already at the lightness or darkness than that means we don't have any room to move on it. And there's not a whole lot that can be done other than just dealing with the file as it is. So if we began with a high contrast image that already had really deep blacks and really white whites. That would really limit our options as we go forward and creating a new image. So let's take a look at a couple of different photographs, and let's begin. We'll begin with this image of Richmond, Virginia. It's a pretty straight-forward shot. You can see the buildings in the background. Sky is a little bit light and the trees and the right hand side here seem a little bit deep. Maybe just in comparison to the sky and the buildings. But we'll try to work with this image to even things out and give us the most work with and creating black and white file. So the first thing we'll do is we're going to do this by going into Adobe Camera Raw. Camera Raw. You can either bring in a raw file or in this case, we're going to use a JPEG file, but either way will work fine. So if we go under Filter and go to Camera Raw Filter, you can also use Shift Command a will bring it up also. And that will import the file into Adobe Camera Raw. Here you see our image. We've got a histogram at the top, and we've got our basic controls here on the right-hand side. Working from the top we have exposure contrast highlights, shadows, whites and blacks, color, temperature and tint, and white balance. We're just going to keep it as is shot just to keep things simple. And you can see in the histogram here that when I mouse over certain parts of it, you can see the, all the way on the left-hand side, it comes up as blacks. This first section here. Then when I moved to the right, that brings up shadows than the middle is exposure than highlights and then whites moving to the right. That corresponds to our sliders down in the controls here as well. You see blacks, whites, shadows, highlights, contrast and exposure. The only other thing to look at here is we have these boxes at the top left and top right. And these will show our clipping for the highlights and shadow areas. So when these things get lit up, these areas that'll show either shadow areas are blacks that are completely blocked up and don't have any detail or completely blown out whites that also are losing all detail and sense of grace. So let's begin with our blacks. We can even just go into the black part of the histogram. Click in there and mouse, if I click my mouse, slide to the left or slide to the right, you can see I can move my histogram and it can change my sliders. So even doing that, you can see I can lower the blacks trying to get our ultimate black point. But I don't want to lose any detail. That's where you see that blue coming and that's showing areas that are completely blocked up have gone beyond. The black is black and so they're just flat black areas without any detail. So let's move that out and let's try to get rid of most or all of the blue because we don't want it. So that seems to be about a plus two. We can bring it down about a zero. So I'm not changing the black, so I'm just leaving it as is. Then we can move on up, starting from the bottom here, I can move to our whites. And again, we don't want to lose detail in the clouds here. We want to retain as much as possible to make as dramatic, dramatic clouds as we can. So if I move that slider all the way to the right, let's click on our little box here showing clipping. You can see the red areas show white areas that could just completely blown out. And we don't want that obviously. And you can see it in the histogram where the graph goes right up the right-hand side that's showing lots of white values. That are completely white without any detail. So if we bring that back towards the middle, eliminating any of those red areas. And you can see once we've done that at about a plus 11, we've also eliminated that graph going all the way up on the right-hand side. So we've retained our widest white values. So we've done our whites and blacks. So let's go look at the shadows. And that would be the next area of the histogram right here. And the shadows, we can open up a little bit just to give us a little bit more detail in there. So we have something to work with in creating our black and white. And you can see as I move the shadow slider to the right, all of a sudden we start to see color and the trees and really opens up quite a bit. So we're getting a lot more detail in there than what we began with. Opening it up, even up to, let's say, we'll go plus 78, which seems kinda high, but we're getting a lot of detail in there, so that's good. So that gives us a lot of tonal values to work with going forward. And you can see a really punched up the color as well. And the highlights, that's gonna be the next set of lights down from the white area. So that's gonna be our area right over here. And you see we have quite a bit in that highlight area. Just as we did with the shadows, we want to get detail in there. You can look in the clouds. As I slide that highlight down. It's moving those light areas more to the center of the histogram. So it's making those really light values a little deeper. But it's given us a lot of detail in the shadows. If you look in the sky there, all of a sudden now we've got all kinds of clouds there that are going to be really nice to work with in creating our black and white. So bringing the highlights down like this really works well. Lastly, we have the exposure, which is our center area, that controls our mid values. And you can see moving it to the right makes a whole image kind of light are moving to the left, makes it dark. In this case, it's sort of in the middle. We can open it up maybe a tiny bit, but it really seems to be okay. So here you can see we've got our image as shot. We're leaving the temperature and tint alone. We don't really need to bother with that. And you can see we have a full range of value without anything being blocked up. So we have a lot to work with. Next, we can go down to our texture clarity and dehaze filter. So these are essentially contrast filters. The texture will affect the contrast between very small areas. So it's just as the name implies, it would bring up a lot of contrast. Let's say in this case as we move it up, you can see a lot more detail in the ripples of the water here and in the rocks, but it can get a little bit overdone. As opposed to Clarity, which is going to work over wider swaths of tone. So if we bring our texture back down to zero and I bring up the clarity, you can see. It brings up more general contrast areas, mostly in our middle tones, you can see what it does to the clouds. It really gives a lot more detail in there. And D. Hayes, we'll do something similar. Just as the name implies. It will sort of get rid of the haze in the sky. But it does it by deepening the tones. It's actually making things a little bit darker and a little more contrast. We can revisit these texts, these sliders further down in the black and white process. So we'll just work with it a little bit knowing that we can always come back and add more to it as we need. So bring up the clarity a little bit, bringing the Dehaze, just to give us a little more contrast in the sky texture. It's nice to see the ripples in the water. So we'll bring that up a little bit as well. I'm not going to get real crazy with any of this stuff. Next we come to vibrance and saturation. Vibrance affects the saturation of colors, mostly around our mid-tone values, not affecting all colors across the board. So we bring that up. In this case, you can see it makes our blues a lot bluer and makes the trees little more saturated and just makes it look nice. In this case, because the color will be important in terms of how we make our black and white image. Let's bring that up a little bit to give us a little more saturated color to work with. Again, as we go forward, we can adjust that and work with it and create more saturation. If we feel the need, I can do the same thing with the saturation layer. It can get really intense and very unrealistic. But again, we can do that later on in the process if we feel the need. So we'll just leave that. Maybe this a little bit enhanced but not too much. Then That's pretty much all we're going to do for the rest. We're not going to change any of the values here, just simply because we can do much of this later on if we choose two, depending on how we do the black and white conversion. Of course, at this point we're ready to bring the image into Photoshop. In Photoshop, as with most things, is also an option. At the bottom here it says open, but if we hit on that arrow, it says open or open as an object. If we open as an object, it opens the file as a smart object. Which means that this can always go back into the camera raw filter to make any other adjustments that we think are unnecessary. The little thumbnail here as an icon on top of it. This signifies this as a smart object. So if I double-click on it, it brings us right back into Camera Raw. And I can make any other adjustments I want here or add new ones. So it's really flexible way of dealing with our file. And especially as we move forward and create black and white adjustment layers on top of this, we might feel that there are adjustments that need to be made in this way we can do it and they're very non-destructive manner. 7. 7 Beach Photo Prep: Here's another image of the Swiss shot in Martha's Vineyard in the fall. You can see the lighting is kinda flat. There was a storm moving in, I think rainstorm. So you can see when we don't have a lot of definition in the clouds, the whole images is really rather flat and flatter than we would really like. Even though I said previously that in developing a black and white photo from a color file, you do want a somewhat flat image, but this is a little bit too flat. You can see in the sky, we've really got very little definition and very little sense of the cloud cover that in the image. So let's begin as we always do looking at our blacks and whites, we can start with the whites. You can see we have some blown out areas up in the sky here that's showing our warning. If I turn it off, you can see it's just really white, not much going on there. So we can start with that where we'll bring the whites down. You can see on the histogram, the wave is spike all the way on the right-hand side, which, which confirms what we're seeing visually. So if I bring the whites down, we can get rid of pretty much all of the blown out areas except for a tiny little bit here. And you can see we've brought back more definition into the Cloud, so this is certainly helpful. And then looking at our blacks, we have a lot of dark area here, not a lot of definition in those. Either. In these dark areas. We can see if we can bring our ultimate black down a little bit without blocking anything up. And you can see we're starting to develop a little bit of clipping and the blacks. So we can bring it down a little bit. And that just lowers our total black point down. So that seems okay. Let's raise up the shadows so we can see a little more light into these dark areas so they don't appear so blocked up. So if I bring up the shadows, all of a sudden you can see a little bit of color, especially that warm red colors starting to seep into those shadows. And it's certainly looking a little bit better. So we bring up the shadows a little bit, highlights and looking at it on the histogram here. We can bring that down also to bring in a little more definition in those clouds. You can see as I bring it down, the clouds, gain a lot more detail and we have a lot more sense of what's going on in the sky there, rather than it just being in a white blob. Exposure wise. Again, we seem to be okay. Maybe seems a little bit deep. You could probably open it up. Just a hair. And that seems okay. Again, we can go back and change this if we like texture. You can see if we bring it all the way up, we get, again a lot of contrast, a lot of local contrast in the water in the foreground of the image, as well as in some of the smaller clouds up in the sky, will bring it up a little bit. We can go back and enhance this more later on in the process. But for right now, I don't want to go too much with it. And the same with clarity, we can bring that up and you can see that helps quite a bit in gaining some more detail, even in the sand and the clouds. So bring up clarity, dehaze. We do have a lot of haze in this image because there's a lot of water vapor in the air. So if I, if I bring that up, you can see you really gain a lot of detail, but it darkens the image a bit. So let's just be a little careful with that as well. I don't want to go too much. And then with Vibrance and Saturation, we can bring up the vibrance. That'll give us a little more color to work with in terms of making tonal differentiation when we're making our black and white. So that helps saturation. Can leave where it is. We can bring it up a little bit, intensifies the blue in the sky more and a little bit more of the red. Again, I don't want to go overboard. And if we save this as a smart object, we can always go back and change it anyway. So I'll openness, save as an object. And it will open up in Photoshop. We see we have a Smart Object. If I double-click on it, brings us right back to Adobe Camera Raw. So we're ready to go with this image as well. Now. 8. 8 Camera Raw Part 1: At this point, we've we've brought the file into Photoshop, who was a raw file straight out of a digital camera. And so it came in within the Camera Raw environment in Photoshop, we had made some adjustments to it with the intention of converting it to black and white. Now we're going to make the conversion and there are a number of different methods we can use. Some are within Photoshop itself, but this one is going to be all back within Camera Raw, under the Camera Raw Filter again. So we're going to bring it back into Camera Raw. And we'll make a conversion. And even after making the conversion and we can make adjustments to the colors, which will change that conversion and change the grays and the contrast and the blacks and whites in the image. After that, then we'll look at making more targeted adjustments, looking at targeting the sky and other parts of the photograph and seeing how we can enhance those to even make it a more dynamic and a more impactful image. Then finally, finally, we will export the file out of camera back into Photoshop where we can make some further adjustments as we see necessary. And when it comes into Photoshop, it's going to come in as a gray scale, not as a color image anymore. So we won't have that color information available to work with. Although because it's coming in as a smart object, we can always go back to camera and make whatever adjustments that we think are necessary. This was the unadjusted photo. And then here's the raw photo that was adjusted. And you can see we have a lot more tonal variation available. Things aren't blown out, so this will convert much better to a black and white. The previous one, which is this. And we can see that if we just do a quick switch to black and white in Camera Raw, you can see that that's the plane original. Then if we go to the adjusted file and switch it over, you see we have a lot more tone to work with. So that's our base for starting at this point. We can begin by looking within Camera Raw at this array called profile. Do you see it says Adobe monochrome and then it has another icon here. This is browse profiles, and we can do that. We can also browse profiles by hitting this as well. So either way, it'll come up with the same thing. And you say, once we do that, we have a lot of presets here. And we can look at the black and white ones and you can see they vary quite a bit. You can see the histogram change as we just mouse over each of these varieties. And you get down to the bottom ones where they're labeled yellow filter, orange filter, red filter, blue filter. These try to mimic the result of putting a colored filter on a camera when you were shooting film. So a yellow filter with light, warmer colors and darken the opposite colors, the cooler colors. Yellow filter will lighten yellows and reds and dark and blues and greens. And the same with the orange and the red filter to a greater extent. We could use one of these as our beginning setting to adjust the black and white. And there's really no harm in doing that. Let's select the red. And we select the red filter. We also have an adjustment for the amount that it's applied. So you can see the histogram changing as I slide this slider back and forth. So you have a lot of control over this just as a base image. So if we just select this and then go back, you see here it says back, and you're back to our original set of adjustments that we could do that adjust the parameters of the Blacks going all the way up to the whites. And we can make adjustments here again, even though we had previously done that in the color version. But if we see things we want to change, I could make slight adjustments. So like here, I can bring the exposure down a little bit. I don't really want to bring the highlights up too much because I don't want to lose detail in the sky. Shadows can open them up a little bit to maintain detail on the rocks. The blacks, we don't want to bring them down too much. You see, we get the clipping and the dark areas so we don't want to. Here we have clarity, texture and dehaze. Clarity will adjust the contrast between dark and light over a broader area. Whereas texture, we'll do it over a much smaller area where you have abrupt or a two changes from black to white. Areas like probably in the water in the foreground here, or in the rocks here. Bringing up the texture, texture will bring up more of that detail you can see happening in the sand also when I bring up the Texture slider. So we can leave that up for now, does bring up some detail. And we don't seem to, seem to be getting any ill effects from it. Dehaze is what the slider says. It'll remove haze in the distance. And you can see it's pretty effective at darkening the sky and adding a little drama to it. So we can go with that as well. And you can see we've already made some real improvements here. But we can go further if you go into the black and white mix. So you see we have red, orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue, purple, and magenta. And these are sliders for adjusting each of the colors in the image as they convert to black and white. So there's not really much in the way of red in this photo. So the red slider is not going to do much. You can see sliding it back and forth really doesn't do anything. The orange, a lot of orange in the rocks here. So you can see as I bring it down to the left to make it darker, the rocks get a lot darker. If I branch to the right, they get much lighter. So this is a way of adjusting targeted areas of the photo according to whatever color they are. And it's pretty effective. We can make the orange a little darker. This is just according to your taste, whatever you wanna do, the yellow affects more of the sand, a little bit of the rock as well. We can bring that down a little bit just to get a little more dramatic tone going on. Not a lot of green in this photo, so it's not gonna do anything awkward and blues, you're going to see more in the water and the sky. If I bring the aqua down, you can see the sky is getting darker in the far off distance right above the horizon line. And the same with the blue. If I bring that down, these two, this guy gets, gets noticeably darker and a little bit more dramatic. So it's certainly helps a little bit purple, not a lot of purple on this image, not gonna do anything. And magenta, the same thing. There's really no magenta in here, so that's really not going to affect anything. Colored. Grading really doesn't come into effect here because we're dealing with a black and white. It's really not going to make any real changes. Optics, That's if we wanted, this was a raw image so you could apply corrections for specific cameras and lenses. That's already been done. And I would check off, remove chromatic aberration. That's always a good thing to do. Geometry. We seem to have a pretty level horizon line, just a little bit just to really straighten it out. And so we adjusted the horizon line plus 0.4 degrees and then effects, we're not going to use no grain or vignetting at this point. And calibration will affect color, which will affect our black and white. But according to the total channel, so let's say the blue. If we bring that up to the right here, you can see it's making the sky lighter. If I bring it to the left, it's actually making quite a bit of darkness in the sky. You could use that as well, seems to have some positive effect on it. And then we can affect that saturation as well. So you see by adjusting colors here, adjusting the black and white, this is pretty effective in making adjustments to the sky, which actually looks a lot more dramatic now. So I think that was actually pretty effective. Green channels not going to be quite as much. We can go back to the basic adjustments after we made these color adjustments and we can make it any further global adjustments, but it's not a lot we can do there right now either. 9. 9 Camera Raw Part 2: So now we're done doing our adjustments within, within Camera Raw and we're bringing the file into Photoshop. We did color adjustments, we converted it to black and white. We made adjustments to the color to enable the best tonal result in black and white. We did contrast adjustments and we also did some targeted modifications through the use of masks under the camera raw filter. So now when it comes into Photoshop, it's coming in as a gray scale object. It's not coming in as an RGB file because everything was converted within Camera Raw, which is really outside of the regular Photoshop environment. So now what we can do is we can add some contrast layers or tone adjustment layers using curves to make adjustments to the darks and the lights. And we can add vignette. And we're also going to use a filter and we're going to do it as a smart filter, which will have the same attributes as a smart object in that it's non-destructive. And we can go back and revisit it at anytime to make further adjustments to it if we're not happy with how it looks. So we've brought the photo in from Adobe Camera Raw. It's opened up as a gray-scale file in Photoshop. And I'm thinking maybe we can soften up the foreground where the water is coming in over the sand to give it a little bit of a blur over the water and over the sand just to direct the eye to that rock, big rock in the middle and to the horizon we have a nice diagonal working along the rocks leading up to the center rock there in the middle. So maybe we can enhance that a little. So I'm gonna make a selection with the last Lasso tool and just draw a quick and dirty selection of the water going around the rock. And I don't have to be terribly exact here because you'll see that I can make adjustments to it. So I have my selection here and I would like to feather it, but since I already already drew the selection with a feather zero, I can adjust it with the original tool so I could go under selection here, modify it feather, and right now it's set for 15. Let's make it maybe 45 pixels. And I can feather it there won't can see how that looks. So now I have a feathered selection. I can go under feather and go into blur and hit surface blur. And I get the dialogue box for the surface blur. Surface Blur is interesting because it'll blur in area, but try to leave the edges clean. In other words, it's not going to blur all the edges so you just get a soft mess everywhere. It's going to leave the edges so that way you still have a sense of focus in detail. So you can see if I adjust the threshold, let's say if I bring it all the way up, you can see it starts to soften everything including the edges. But if I bring that threshold down, it's going to preserve the edges. So you can see I've still got an edge here and I can adjust the intensity of the blur also by adjusting the radius. We can bring it up because it's a smart filter. I know we'll be able to change it in the future anyway. So I'm going to bring the threshold down a little bit and radius up. And that looks pretty good. I'm just going to hit Okay. And you see underneath the layer or smart, smart object layer, we have smart filter and I have an icon of a mask that shows our selection and the white area. Then it shows Surface Blur. And I've got another little icon to the right showing sort of control sliders. If I double-click on surface blur, it brings up my original dialogue box and I can make changes to it again. So if I want to adjust it, I can or if I double-click on the Control sliders at the right side, you see it brings up Blending Options. So I have my blending options here. And I can adjust the opacity of the layer as well. So if I want to have very little effect, I can adjust the opacity like this. I'm going to leave it at 100 for now. We can always go back and change it. And then looking at our filter, looking at are rather on the mask layer for the filters you see if I click on that in the Properties menu, it brings up the density and feathering of the menu. Now if I bring down the density, remember the area that's masked off is the area that we really didn't want affected by the blur. So if I bring down the density of this mask, it starts affecting the entire image. You see how everything is getting kinda soft. So I want to bring the density up, but the feathering, I can bring up the feathering of it even more so that it's more of a gradual change from the area that's affected to the area that's not affected. So then I could also invert the mask if I wanted to create a blur in the area that I didn't want it before. You have a lot of capabilities here and a lot of ways to change what you're doing if you decide that you do or don't want something. So it's very pliable and very workable to anything you wanted to do in the future. I could even go into the mask here. Grab the paintbrush. Let's say I'm going to paint with, let's say I'll paint with white. I want to add to the area that's affected. So if I bring up my opacity of my paint brush, let's say at 80% or so. And I start painting along the left side here you can see I'm adding more blurred area. And I can do the same thing in the background here if I want to blur out the sand a little bit, so anywhere that I paint white is adding to the affected area. And I can even go into the ocean water here or on the right side as well. If I want to soften this water and not have it be so crisp and clear and it's kind of a neat effect. You can see what's, what's happened. Now we have more softness in the foreground here, and your eye is directed more towards the rocks. The rocks really stand out a lot more if I don't like it, I can turn it off. I can just roll back the opacity on it to change it. So we'll leave it for now. We can always adjust it more later on. I want to try to increase the drama and the sky and trees, the blacks and whites. We did a little bit of that when it was in Camera Raw. But let's see if we can do a little bit more way that I like to do it is to add a adjustment, adjustment layer using curves are levels. We're going to use curves. In this case. You see it brings up the curves dialogue box and the difference now, because we brought this in as a grayscale black areas now the upper right-hand corner and the whitest white is down in the lower left. So it's kind of opposite of what it was before. So if I want to darken the darks, let's say in the sky here, I have to go to the upper right and pick that up and you'll see it starts getting darker. And if I want to preserve the wider areas, I can put another point on the curve and bring that down more to the 45-degree line to keep the whites as they were. And so you can see that, does that. Now, you can see also see I have a mask layer on this curve. It's showing all white, which is showing that it's affecting the entire image. If I click on that icon for the mask, it brings up my mask adjustments in the Properties menu and I can invert the layer. So this way it's making the whole layer black now, so everything's masked off, so it's not showing any effect. If I turn it on and off, you're not going to see any difference. But if I go click back into the mask area, grabbed my brush, I'm going to paint with white. I can start bringing in some darker areas into the clouds just by painting it in like this. And it's kind of a nice way to paint. So you can see that it's adding a little bit more intensity to the sky and you can certainly overdo this, which I probably will, but I'm just trying to demonstrate what is possible here and you can go back in here, make further adjustments in with white into this mask layer to undo some of the stuff I did if I want to even, let's say, create a little bark darker sky in the back here. Then I can even go into the rock areas. I can bring down my paintbrush size and bring up some of the cracks and shadows and the rods because there wasn't a lot of sunlight when this photo was taken. So by going in like this here, I can add a little bit more relief to the rocks and give a little more sense of light and dark. And I can go around and do it all over the place if I want again, I'm just going to kind of touch on it, go really quickly because I don't want this to get boring. And that looks a little heavy-handed, but we'll go back and get rid of that. And same thing here. I can bring down the opacity of my brush and probably, probably improve things a little bit. But you can see I can bring up some more sense of shadow and light. And it really begins to give a sense of relief and texture to the rocks, which is really what I'm after. I can do the same thing here and even this big rock in the foreground you can see I can add to some of the shadows in that. So it gives it more of a sense of texture and a little more tonal range to it. So we've got that. If I turn it on and off, you can see the difference and we can label this dark curves. So I can add another curve layer. We can label this light curves. You can see if I bring that down, it can make everything lighter. And I can do the same thing. Click into my mask layer, brings up all the parameters and the properties menu here. And I can hit Invert, and now it's totally black, so nothing is being affected. And I have my white paint brush set at 49% opacity, which I guess is okay. Let's bring up the size a little bit. And I can just go and paint light areas of the clouds, but want to bring up little more contrast and the clouds. And it's just the same as we had done with the blacks. And so you just kind of go in here. It will rather quickly, you can definitely take more time to do that. Even on the rocks here. If I go, let's say this rock in the foreground, you can bring definitely more of a sense of light into here, especially this rock here. So you just go around and just play with it. It's all reversible. You can take a lot more time than I'm doing here just to get it exactly as you want. Let's just look at that. So now I have my light curves, my darker, if I turn them off. You can see that's what we began with. And this is what we've got. Now I could go in and take the light curves. I can adjust the curve itself if I want, if I want to lessen the effect, or I could just deal with the opacity of the layer, bring it down or bring it up. Either way it'll do the same thing, the same with the dark curve. I can make further adjustments to it as I want. So if I bring it up like that, but then bring the opacity down, sort of lessens the effect also. So you see there's a lot you can do. So we'll do one more thing. I'd like to add a little bit more of a darker vignette around the edges just to draw the eye in more towards the center of the photo. I'm going to grab my Lasso tool again and just draw a very haphazard kind of amorphic selection around the edges here because I don't want it to look like it was done by me. That was actually done with a 50 pixel feather, so it is already feathered, but let's bring it into a curves layer again. And if I bring it up, and that's the opposite of what we want. I want to darken the outside, not the inside. So all I have to do is click on my mask icon, hit Invert. And now I've got the vignette around the outside the way I want it, but it's still rather kind of a severe selection. I can go and feather this even more to make it really pretty soft so you can't really pick up on it at all now. And then I can also go into the dense, into the opacity of the layer itself and bring that down because it's a little heavy right now. And to make it a little bit more subtle, and now you see what we've got that sort of got a nice vignette. We have a lot of drama in the sky. We created a sense of black and whites with the blur filter. It sort of gave it an, another look, another effect, and we can go in there and make further adjustments to it if we want it, if you don't like it or if you do like it, you can add to it. It's really a cool way to work. So just for the fun of it, we'll try bringing our image back into Camera Raw and see if we can do any other adjustments to the color or to the contrast adjustments of D. Hayes and clarity to see if we can make any further and further improvements on the image. So before I do that, I'm just going to create a layer that's gonna be a composite of what we've done so far by hitting Shift Option Command E. So now we have a layer that is a composite of everything we've done to this point. So now, when I make an adjustment to the Camera Raw and we bring that back in, I can see a before and after. So we'll just turn this off for now. Double-click on the Camera Raw and we're back into Camera Raw again. It's now I can go in here, go to the black and white mix, and I can adjust my colors again to see if I want to make any further changes or enhancements. So in other words, so I can go to the orange, I can maybe bring it up a little bit later if we wanted to get a little more contrast, the yellow, we can bring it down, maybe just a hair. The blues is going to affect the sky. If I bring it down, it can darken it a little bit. Same with the aqua out to us. We're just doing minor adjustments. We can go to effects and add a little bit more vignetting. I can bring that down just to bring a little more dark around the edge to really lead the eye in. And then we can go to the texture and clarity and dehaze. Let's see if I bring up the clarity. Can bring it up a little bit to add a little bit more contrast. Let's see if D. Hayes gets a little too dark, we can bring it up a little bit. Texture. I don't think we need much of that really. Then what I could do is go maybe to raise up the blacks a little bit just to get rid of some of that clipping. And I think we're okay, we'll just go with that, but just to show that you can go back in and make adjustments, I'll hit Okay, and we'll go back. It's updating the smart object. So let's click on the top layer and I'm going to hit Shift Option Command E again. And that's gonna give us our composite image with the changes that we just did. So here's what we had beforehand before I went back into Camera Raw. And this is what it is. After going back into Camera Raw, you can just see we can continue to make changes and maybe it's improved. Maybe it's not, it might be a little bit too dark, but certainly dramatic, and it's certainly an improvement and just a dramatic interpretation of the original image. So let's just recap what we've accomplished so far. We started off with a color image was brought into Adobe Camera Raw. We did some color adjustments with the intention of making a black and white conversion. Then we brought it back into Adobe Camera Raw and did the conversion there rather than, rather than doing it in Photoshop. So we converted it to gray scale, made some tone and contrast adjustments. Then we exported out of camera back into Photoshop as a smart object so that it stayed editable. We can always go back, which we did. And we added some further enhancements through the use of some curve layers. We added the special effect of the blur in the foreground. We added a vignette, all with the goal of making this a more dramatic and more intense black and white image, clicked on the Camera Raw layer again, went back in and made some further color adjustments and some contrast adjustments also then came back into Photoshop and we have our final image. And again, you could always go back and make further adjustments if you feel it's necessary. Though, we've made a nice black and white image out of a color image, which wasn't all that exciting to begin with. 10. 10 B&W Adj Layer Part 1: In this video, we're going to use the black and white adjustment layer in Photoshop to create our black and white from the color image. And in working with this, you'll see how important color is in determining the dynamic range that we can get our black and white photograph. So along with this adjustment layer, we're also going to be using the hue saturation tool, the Color Balance tool, and the selective color tool. And using all these in concert with the black and white conversion, you'll see how they all work together, together to create a really dynamic black and white photograph. This is the photo from Puerto Rico of some boats and our harbor. This photo was used in the previous video on camera raw filter, where we adjusted the colors and other things in the image. So it's brought into Photoshop now as a smart object, which you can see on the icon that sitting over the thumbnail here. And then you can see the Camera Raw Filter under Smart Filters, I tried another filter on this also a Surface Blur. You can see that also the advantage of the smart object just to go over this very quickly is that these are not permanent and I can apply them or change them I will without affecting the original image. So it's completely non-destructive and it's completely editable at any point in the process. So it's a great tool to use in crafting your photos. So let's turn on the camera raw filter so you can see it's a lot more intense. We have a lot more color. So the point is, and creating our black and white, we want a lot of color because it gives us some options going forward into how we're as to how we craft the black and white. If there's a lot of color in here, you'll see that that gives us a lot of leeway into how we can make the black and white look and appear. And it just gives us a lot of room to move. So we've got a lot of color here. We've got this reddish orange boat and the foreground and green one back here. Some yellow house is on the left and some yellow in the sky. And the right-hand side here, which goes to paying more in the center. So there's a lot going on. So the first thing we're going to do is add a black and white layer adjustment layer. So I can do this a number of different ways. I can go to the bottom of the Layers Palette. Click on this round half white, half black. Icon. Click on that and you can see we get black and white right here. Or I can go to the adjustments panel. And on the second row, third one from the left is the black and white layer right here. Or I can go under layer, go to Adjustment Layer and hit black and white. All these will do the same thing and I can even rename, and if I want black and white or assign a color to it, which will do just for the fun of it. Now, we turned it into black and white. And you can see from making a color image with more saturated colors and intense colors, it translates into a more dynamic black and white just simply by doing that, but we're going to go further. So in the black and white panel that you can see, we have adjustments for all the colors here, or we can go in and adjust each of these colors separately to make them lighter or darker. I can also locate these colors by hitting on this finger icon and going anywhere in the image if I wanted to, let's say that red boat in the foreground. If I want to adjust that, I can click on that and slide left or right. And you can see I can adjust all the reds that way. It immediately tells me that this is in the red color channel, and in the same way, I can go elsewhere, like in the sky here, let's say if I want to darken this part of the sky that comes into the blue channel. And I can do the same thing. So we can, we have a lot of flexibility to go in and adjust each of the colors as we see fit. So I can, as we already did, I can adjust the blue's a little darker to get a little more intensity into the sky. The cyan will do. A similar thing is a lot of cyan and the sky and the reds. We can adjust as we want to. There's various reds and the boats and in the buildings that are on the way. And here in the photo. And I can go through each of the colors, yellow. Remember we had yellow and the sky darkening. That maybe brings in a little more detail into the sky. We can go back into the reds and just darken that a little bit as well as we want. Now we can go even further now so I can add other color adjustment layers to give us even further control over, over the black and white. If I click on our base layer, then go down, add an adjustment layer. I can add hue and saturation. And that'll give us even further control over the colors where you see I've color, I can adjust each of these colors separately. Red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and magenta. So even starting with the red, I can change the hue of the color, which is essentially the color I can make it. I can just change a totally so that it affects the black and white and a very different way if you want to see how it's looking, turn off the black and white layer, adjust, adjust the hue and you can see we can make it anywhere from from turquoise to purple, to red to yellow, green. So you have full control over the colors. And then I can also raise or lower the saturation here, colors is supersaturated. Want to see what that looks like in black and white? Just click on our black and white layer again and you can see what happens. Again. It gives us a lot of control over the color and over the black and white. By having control over the color. You have control over the black and white as well. And we can go through and do this for each of the colors. I can go into the cyan which was, there was a lot of that in the sky and a bit of it in the water as well. By changing the color variation here and change the saturation, I can greatly affect what's going on in the sky. So you've got to play around with this to see what effect you liked the best and how it works for your black and white. We can go even further. Not only with hue and saturation, I can go into color balance, which will affect overall red, green, and blue channels for the whole image. We can adjust it according to our shadows, mid tones and highlights. So starting with our shadows, if I want to bring a little more cyan into it, it's gonna make it darker because we had made the cyan darker in the black and white adjustment layer here we had made it a little bit darker. So you can see how we can just continually control and refine our colors. And in so doing, we can adjust and control our black and white. If I turn this off, you can see what's happening. We can go back to our color balance, go back to the shadows. That was where we had raised the cyan. I can bring it back and change it at will as to whatever we want. So you have to play around with is the same. What really works for your particular image, depending on what kind of colors are already present in there. Besides that, I can go in and further refine it by adding a selective color adjustment layer, which is also available on the adjustment layers here, if you say Selective Colors, second from the right on the bottom line here, I can go into there. And again, I can adjust each of these colors as I see fit as well. So go through each of these colors if you feel the need. It has a tremendous change in the black and white because the black and white adjustment layer sees all the colors below it. 11. 11 B&W Adj Layer Part 2: In this second part of the video in which we're doing a black and white conversion in Photoshop using the black and white adjustment layer. You'll see how we can take this even further beyond the base that we created in the first video. Through the use of curves and other adjustment layers, we can really further enhance the dynamic range that we can get in our black and white photograph. We can even go further. If I go on top of the black and white layer, I'm going to add, I'm going to add a curve layer here. And I want to create a darker vignette going around the edge just to, just to lead the eye into more of the center of the image so that the eye is in bleeding off the edges. So I'm going to create this curve layer, bring it down a little bit just to create some dark. It's going to look too dark right now, but that's okay. Then I'm going to take the lasso tool and draw a very rough vignette. Going around the edges here. When I'm on the curve layer, you can see I have, it already has a mask layer here that's all white, which means everything is showing through. And I just created this selection here. And I'm just going to fill that with black. So you can see what that does. That that masks out the center of the image. So the center is not being affected by the curve. And I'm going to de-select selection with Command D. And the selection that I had drawn had a feather, as already said, here, I didn't realize it was separate, was 50 pixels, so it was already a feathered selection. So you can see that already came in. Rather soft, which is good, which is what we want. But I could even go further into that if I click on my mask layer here in the curves adjustment layer and I click on the mask. I can go and feather this even further. And so you can really soften up the mask or I can even lower the density of it so that more of it affects the center of the image. Remember our mask is in the center of the image, not around the edges. And you can see what's happening if you look at the little icon or the little thumbnail here, as I bring the density down, it gets a lighter gray showing that it's not as opaque as it was before. So you have a lot of flexibility in doing this. And then even after doing that, I can click on this layer and then bring down the opacity if I want. Just to lessen the effect of I feel like it's too heavy handed. So it's a cool way of making adjustments to your image. Again, everything's completely non-disruptive and you can always go back and either remove it or change it or really do whatever you want. And so then I can even go further. If I wanted to get a little more drama in the clouds here, I can add yet another curves layer. Let's make this one litre. And I'm going to label this light curves. And I'm going to click on the mask. I want to fill it with black. We don't have it. Then I'll grab a brush and make it a kind of a smaller brush, slightly smaller by hitting control and option together than sliding my mouse left or right, I can make the brush larger or smaller, as you see here, is going to adjust the opacity of our brush out and let's make it around 60%. Let's see how that looks. I can go in here and just sort of painting just lighter areas if I want just to sort of bring up a little more contrast in the clouds. You can just randomly go in there and do this. I'm probably not doing a great job with this, but you can see how this works. We're just trying to add a little more drama into the clouds here. Just make a kind of random. If you use a larger brush. Sometimes that'll work better where you can't really pick up what's going on here. So it doesn't look quite so fake or manipulated. So that looks pretty good. And I can go in and do the same thing with creating dark. So I can create another curves layer. And instead of raising the curve, I'm going to bring it down to make it dark. We'll do the same thing. I'm going to fill it with black. And I can go in here and paint with white with the same brush just to bring some darks. And I'm going to make this brush a little bit smaller. You can see I'm just creating a little more darks. And here, again, just to add a little more contrast, a little more drama to the sky. And you can just sort of randomly go around. You can always go back and change it and go back and paint black over the white. Just to get rid of anything you did that you don't like the name of you. In fact, I know I want to make this a little bit darker over here just to leave the ion. So even though we had done a little bit of that with the vignette, I'm going to add a little bit more. So that looks pretty good. I'm gonna do the same thing on the left-hand side too. Because I just wanted to lead the eye in towards the center. So you can see if I take those away. We've added a little more contrast to the sky. And I can go in like in the light curves. I can lessen it by adjusting the curve here. Or I can go in and adjust the opacity of the layer, which will lessen the effect of it as well. So you can get really subtle effects. And it's all changeable as you go forward. So it's a great way to work. I'll label this one dark curves so we keep track of what we're doing. And let's try one other thing. I have this area in the center here that's empty. And I want to see what it will look like if I add some clouds into here, I'm going to select my base layer that's got the image on it. And I'm going to grab my Lasso Tool. And I'm going to copy some clouds. I'm going to grab these clouds because they're next to the area that I want to work with. Maybe I'll include this as well. Go back to my selection tool. I'm just going to do a copy and paste, so I'll copy. And then we'll do a paste. And so would that create a new layer, Let's call this new cloud's. Going to go back to my selection tool and grab these clouds and then remove them roughly into place where I thought I wanted to fill them in and to make it look a little bit more natural, I don't want the viewer to be able to pick up that this is, these are cloned clouds from elsewhere in the image. I'm going to change a little better know that tilt to maybe make it a little bit smaller. I can even go and distorted a little bit more if I want. Just so the shapes change a little bit. So it's really not so obvious what I'm doing. Rotated a little bit more. That looks good. I'm going to hit Return to accept. This doesn't look too bad, but I'm going to add a mask layer, painting with my brush with black. Just to get rid of some of the edges here. Just to make it blend into the picture a little bit better. And I don't want it to cover up any of the boats here. There we go. And you can see that by doing this here we added some clouds and it's not so obvious when you first look at it that these are clouds that were copied from elsewhere in the photo. And if I want to refine it even more, e.g. this bit of cloud right here is kinda similar to this one. So I can either go in here and lighten them up or just get rid of them. So Lisa doesn't pick up that it's so much of the same as the other ones, so it's not so obvious and I think it improves the image, it looks a little bit better. There are a couple of other things we can try doing on this image. I mean, we're pretty far along, but let's go under Window and bring up our histogram just so we have a frame or reference here. And the first thing you'll see is that on the left-hand side of the histogram, we've got a lot of black and it's not necessarily getting buried, but were really pretty black over here. And we might want to try to give this a little bit of headroom. So I'm going to add another curve layer. And I'm going to pick up the black point, the lower left-hand corner, and just going to click on that. And then I can hit my up arrow a few times just to bring it up just a little bit. And that gives us a little bit of headroom in the dark blacks. So they're not going to get blocked up, especially if we're, if we're going to go into print on this, this can certainly help a bit and giving a little leeway into those dark shadows. So that's one thing. And then the next thing we can try doing is and adjusting the contrast. You see the overall contrast is fairly high in this image right now, we can make local contrast adjustments through the use of the camera raw filter on top of this. So if I press Command Option Shift and then the E k, the letter e, That'll give me another layer that's a composite of all the layers below this. So it's sort of a finished MA. So if I turn this on and off, you're not going to see any difference. So if I click on this, on this layer and then I go under Filter Camera Raw, that's going to open up another camera raw window. I can go back to my texture clarity and dehaze filters just for a little bit of push on this. And I can bring up the texture if I want just a little bit. It's going to affect you see, especially around here and the water, the highlights come up a little bit stronger. I don't want to go too much because then it'll start getting strange halo effects. I can do the same thing with the clarity and see the clarity really affects the clouds a lot more. So if I bring the clarity dehaze, I'm not sure I want to do much with because I'm afraid just going to darken everything too much. But I can go a little bit. Remember, I can always scale this back so I'm just going to hit Okay, and then we're back here, back to the beginning. And if I shut this layer on and off, you can see the difference right now it's on. And if I take it off, you can see the difference. So it just built up a little bit of extra contrast in the image. And if I feel like it's too much, I can always bring the opacity down on it if I want to scale it back. Great control over this or I can just leave it off and just forget it. So you see, we've gained a lot of control over the contrast of the image, both the broad contrasts and also the local contrast of all the tones as they go from black to white and vice versa. So in conclusion, you can see where we've gotten and we can turn all this off. And I'll even turn off my camera raw filter. This is what the image began as. Then we added our first camera raw filter, which intensified the color and just made it a more dynamic color image. And we also straightened it out a little bit. And then we started adding. We began with the black and white adjustment layer here, and then we add up the hue saturation, the color balance, and the selective color. And then we went and created a darker vignette around the edges. And then tried to bring in a little more lightened dark dynamic range into the clouds by just creating these curves, layers, and painting in them just to create a little local contrast and to make it more dynamic. And then we added some extra clouds in here which you may or may not like, but you can always take them out if you don't like them. Then in the end, what we did was we finally adjusted our black point a little bit, just brought it up. But Attorney here just to open up these really dark areas, just a tiny bit. And then the last thing we did was we created a composite layer of all the layers below. Then applied another camera raw filter to this so that we could affect the clarity and texture and dehaze adjustments on this image. So you can see we've, in the end, we've created a pretty dynamic black and white image from something that didn't quite have this range of tones at the beginning. 12. 12 Gradient Map Part 1: In this video, we're going to use the gradient map adjustment layer to make our conversion from color to black and white. And you'll see that this method differs a little bit from what we've done previously, in that the gradient map adjustment layer doesn't really see color in the same way as the black and white adjustment layer does, or even as Camera Raw does. So we're going to lose a little bit of our ability to target adjustments and create contrast and total differentiation through the targeting of color. Instead, we're going to have to use different methods to try to do this. But then we'll go ahead and combine this method with the black and white adjustment layer and save. This gives us a broader range of tools and greater ability to really make changes to our image. And that's something to keep in mind as you move forward in this process. Everything you see or learn in Photoshop or Lightroom. Many of these methods can all be combined or you can pick and choose parts from each one and use them together or whatever really works best for your manner of working. There's really no one way of doing anything in Photoshop and Lightroom. So it's a good idea to learn all these different methods and see all the different possibilities and use what works best for your work. This is the photograph from Richmond, Virginia that we've worked on previously. But before we add the gradient map adjustment layer, I want to check to see what gradients are present on this computer. So if I go under Windows, gradients, it'll bring up a dialog box with a bunch of different folders, each of which contains gradients. The one I'm looking for isn't here. So I'm going to go to the top right corner, the hamburger menu and hit legacy gradients, which adds funny enough, another folder called Legacy gradients. And if you open that up, you'll see that it has yet more folders of gradients. But the one we're going to be particularly interested in is one called photographic toning. You see it's got a bunch of different gradients in here with names like Selenium, sepia, gold, et cetera. In each one of these refers to a traditional toning solution or method that was used back in the film days. These various solutions would add different effects to a print. They would essentially increase contrast and add a slight coloring to a silver print. But it was really a magic solution that would really enhance an image. So these gradients mimic those solutions and they can really provide very interesting effects. And we'll explore that later on in this video. For now, we can get rid of this now that they're loaded up. And we can go and add the gradient map adjustment layer. So the first thing we'll do is we can do it a number of different ways. I can go into the adjustment panel here, click on the bottom right hand icon, which is create a gradient map adjustment layer. Or it can go to the bottom of the Layers palette to the black and white circle, click in that and that can bring up the gradient map. Or you can go to Layer, new Adjustment Layer and then go to Gradient Map. And here it brings up if you want to rename it, we're not going to, we don't need to rename the gradient map adjustment layer at this point. But the interesting thing is if you go into the gradient in the properties menu, if I just click in here, it brings up the gradient editor. And we can go in here and make really any change we want to this gradient. So I can click on the green marker at the left-hand side of the gradient, double-click on that and it brings up the color picker. And you'll see that I can make changes to this collar, can darken it or change the hue of it. You have infinite possibilities here and you see the immediate effects on your image and the window behind it. I can even go in there. If I cancel here, I can go and just add another color. So if I wanted to add a color, we can do that as well. So there's infinite possibilities here of what you can do with this editor and you can easily create your own gradients if you feel the need. So let's cancel out of this. And the gradient that we're going to work with initially is the black and white. And so once I do that, you can see what happens. So looking at that gradient, it goes from a deep black, which is a zeros, zeros zero in RGB, to a white that's 255 in each of the color channels. So this will map according to the luminous values that are present in the color photographs. So the deepest colors or the deepest tones in the image, will be assigned this black. And then as the tones get lighter, will get increasingly lighter tones of gray that'll be mapped into the image, will just cancel out of that and we have it. So the first thing that we'll check out is, let's see. Changing of the color will affect the gradient map. And we can add a hue saturation level layer in there. And being that the sky looks like it's got a lot going on. If we were to darken the blue in the sky, that would bring out a lot more drama in the image. So let's go to the blue channel, tried to increase the saturation. And you see it takes quite a bit to make any real noticeable change. And even when it finally does make a change, we start getting kind of artifacts and weird stuff going on. So it's really not a great way to try to, try to adjust it. We can try to cyan channel because that'll be a lot of that in the sky as well. And it's really the same problem where we're just not getting much change out of adjusting the colors. So as you can see, the gradient map doesn't really see color a whole lot. It's just looking at luminous value and really not the particular colors. So we really can't use the colors much. So in that case, we're going to have to use other methods of adjusting the tone in contrast in the image. And that leaves us using things like curves or levels or brightness controls things like that. So let's add a curves layer. This. And you can see, even though this will affect the entire image, just look at the sky for now. If I, if I bring down the dark end of the curve a little bit and just bring up the white, the lighter end of the curve. Just a little bit. You see we get a lot more drama going on in the sky. It's adding contrast, S curve in a curves in it curves dialogue will always add a little bit of contrast. So you can see that's pretty effective, but you can see also that it's really blocking up allow the blacks in the rest of the image for basically two-thirds of the image that sits below the horizon line. So let's click into the mask on the curves layer to try to mask off the area that where we really don't want it to be effective. So I clicked into the mask layer. Let's go over to the gradient. We're using a lot of gradients here, but we're going to use a gradient fill into the mask. And you can see by the gradient picture I have here up on top, you can see it's going to go from black to white. I can go from about the horizon line. Put my cursor there. I'm going to hold down the Shift key. And I'm just gonna go straight up right to the top of the image. You can see what that does. It starts off at black, and then as it goes up, it's a constant gradient until it hits white all the way up at the top. And look at it even better to get a better idea of what's going on, I can click into the channels palette and click on it. And you can see the red, which is signifying the black where it's completely masked off, gets a little bit lighter as we go up to the top of the frame. And what I can also do is I can take this channel and click on my selection tool and just drag straight down. And you see it lightens up the sky. That means I'm moving my mask down to get more effect into the sky area. We can turn that off, go back to our layers, turning this off and on. You can see the effect of what we've got. So it's pretty effective, maybe not as effective as using the color with a black and white adjustment layer, but still it's pretty effective. And you can see the trees and the water in the foreground here is still pretty dark and blocked up. So let's try something else that we can use. I'm going to first go into the color image layer, right-click on that. And I'm going to convert this to a smart object. So I want to add an adjustment to this, but I don't want it to be permanent. I want to want to be able to go back in there and make changes are eliminated, or adjust the opacity of it, whatever. So now that this is a smart object, I'm going to go under Image, go to adjustments, and go to shadows highlights. You see this brings up a new dialogue box. And you can see the shadows highlights is split up by shadows highlights and then adjustments. And the shadows says each one of the wall, the shadows and the highlights each have three sliders. And the first slider is the amount which decides the amount of shadow that we want to bring out and in the image. And the tone will decide which of the shadows. In other words, how, how dark of a shadow it's going to affect. And radius will determine how far from these shadows, how many pixels out. It'll continue that adjustment. So let's say if we go into the shadows and I, and I bring the amount up a lot, which is not something really want. But you can see that if I bring the tone all the way down to zero, there's really essentially no effect. And as I bring that tone up to the right, it's going to capture more and more of the, of the shadows. It's going to go from complete black to somewhat of a lesser gray as I move up the slider. For the shadow, for the amount, it's usually best to keep this between about 10.40 per cent. So let's just keep it at around around 30. And for the tone, usually you want to keep that probably somewhere around 50, maybe a little bit less. We can go back in and adjust this anyway. So let's, let's say it's 40. The highlights is sort of the same thing. If I bring it up all the way, It's going to have the opposite effect. It's essentially darkening the highlights a little bit. If I bring it up to 100%, it's capturing all the light values and then sum. If I bring it all the way down to zero, it's not hitting any of it. It's saying even the whitest white is not going to get captured by this. So it's kinda similar to the shadows just working on the opposite end of the spectrum. Again, you could keep this around, let's say I don't know, 30% or so. And the amount, we want to keep this down a lot, we really only want maybe ten to 15%. I'm going to keep it at ten. And we'll keep the radius is, the radius will really change in effect depending on the size of the image. So the more, the higher the resolution of the image, the higher radius number you're going to need to, to see the effect. Color and his senses in this case not going to have any effect because we're really not dealing with a color image. So we can just keep that as it was in the mid tones is going to affect contrast. So you see if I bring the mid tone up to 100, were getting extremely high contrast. And if I bring it all the way down, we're getting low contrast. So I don't really want to adjust contrast right now with this tool. So we'll just leave that at zero and I'm going to hit Okay? And like I said, if I wanted to, I can shut this off. If I hit the eyeball on the shadow highlights, it, turns it off and we're back to where we were. Or I can hit on these slider icon here. And it gives me my Blending Options. And I can go and just bring this down, Let's say the 40%. So it just has a minimal effect. But you can see what it does. It opens up a lot of detail in the trees here. So it kinda helps to create a little more detail in our image and to keep things from getting too dark. So right now we're at about 70%, would just leave it at that for now, we can always go back in and change it. 13. 13 Gradient Map Part 2: Welcome to the second half of my video on using the gradient map adjustment layer for creating our black and white. So, so far, we've, we've added the gradient map and we've added a highlight shadow adjustment to try to get more shadow detail out of the image. And one adjustment layer using the curves that's been added as well. So in this video we're going to add a couple more adjustments using some more Curve layers. And then we'll go back in and add the black and white adjustment tool to take advantage of the color information that's in the file to see if we can create more drama and just draw more information out of the image to create a great black and white photograph. And then finally, we'll go back and revisit the gradient map and try to use some of those other gradients that we saw at the beginning under the photographic toning to see if we can get something a little bit more interesting going and add a little bit of color variation. And in an effort to kind of mimic what was done in the dark room using various toners to create a more compelling black and white photograph. Like I said, we added some contrast to the sky. We used a curve layer on that. Maybe these trees in the mid section here, and maybe I'll try to lighten that up a little bit. So let's just add another curve layer. And I'm just going to bring it up like that. It's affecting the entire image. But what I'll do is I'll go back into the mask on this curve layer and I'll hit invert, so it's all white. Now it's all black. So that means nothing is being affected. So now I could go in with a brush and paint in white. I'm going to use a softer brush right now. This is set to hard. Hit a big brush, It's set to white. You can see that over here on the side. And my opacity and my brushes kinda high. Let's bring that down. Let's get rid of that. Now if we just go with a brush at about 40%, you can see we were able to lighten up the midsection of the photo here a little bit and I can go in and and try to do the same with the buildings here. Just to try to bring a little more detailed back out in the image that might've gotten obliterated by using the curve on the sky. And so we can just go across and make those adjustments. And that looks pretty good again, you can go back in and targets various areas of an image if you want. You can add as many layers as you feel you need. You can just keep on going. And then afterwards you can go and either turn the layers off our scale and back whatever you have ultimate control over this. So I'm going to grab the Lasso Tool and I'm just going to draw a rough line around the perimeter here. Very kinda random line because I don't want the eye to be able to pick it up too easily. Because what I wanna do is I want to create a vignette to draw the eye in towards the center of the photograph. So I'm going to create a another curve, curve layer. You could use levels too if you'd rather. And I'm going to bring this down to make it darker, but that's opposite of what I want. I want the darkness on the edge. I don't want it in the middle. So I can do the same thing as I did before. I'll click into the mask layer, hit invert. Now we've got it around the edge. But even though I had drawn the last so with a feather of 50 pixels, as you can see up here on top, It's really not enough. I can see too much of a border on the edge. So I want to feather that even more. So if I click on the mask layer and go up to the Properties menu, you see I have a slider for feathers. So now I can feather this even more. And I can bring it up quite a bit. Let's say about 500 or so. And then I can go back and adjust the curve just to lighten it up a bit. And if there are areas that I feel are too dark, I can go in and paint with a black paint brush to just to touch it up. If I bring up my paintbrush, switched from white to black, you can just hit the X key, that'll do it. And like I feel like this is a little bit too dark over here on the edge and the same with the trees here. So you can go touch it up and you can make as many adjustments as you feel are necessary. So now that we've done this, I'd like to see if there's more that we can do to this image. So. Since I would like to use the color information in this file, let me add a black and white adjustment layer. So I'm going to go down to the icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. And I'm going to add a black and white filter to convert it. And you see it comes in as default. But I know that a big part of this image is the sky. And I know the sky will really come to life a bit if I use like a yellow or red filter. So let's go to a yellow filter and you can see what happens. It really darkens up the blues and lightens the red and yellow. A yellow filter will darken cool colors. The blues and greens enlightened the warmer colors, the yellows and reds. And you can sort of see what's going on with that. And I can make further adjustments or if it's too much, I can hear I'm scaling back the cyan a little bit and maybe the blue too. So you can see it. It added quite a bit of difference. If I turn it off, lightened the buildings and especially the trees. So now I could go back and make other adjustments to my curves layers in case now that they don't work the way it really intended. E.g. the mid section that we had like lightened. It could probably just turn that off and that seems to work a little bit better. And the same thing with the sky if it turned that off. Well, we can leave a little bit, but maybe we'll just bring down the opacity of that channel just so that things don't get too black. So you see it gives you a lot of controls. Now we've brought back in the use of color. And I could go in and add another hue saturation level layer again. And let's say if I want it to affect the sky here are the blues. And I could bring up the saturation. And you can see that brings a lot of drama into the sky and the same with the science. So again, we've got tremendous control and you can use all the color adjustments now using both the black and white adjustment, adjustment layer and the gradient map. And if we didn't, if we weren't happy with the Shadow Highlights. Adjustment though we added earlier on, I can go back in and just that too, if I wanted to, I could bring that down or I can bring it up either way. So you see, we can do quite a bit. Nothing is permanent. And we can really come out with a really interesting photograph. The last thing we'll do is we'll go back to our Gradient Map and I'm going to click on that. When we began, we just use the black and white gradient. But remember, we had looked at, or we had loaded up all those other photographic toning gradients. That really interesting. So let's go back to photographic toning. I'm going to click on that. And let's change it. Maybe let's see if we got a Selenium. It's kind of interesting. Or maybe CPU L1 or sepia too. Let's try CPI three. Let's try a sepia too. So now I've got that into my gradient. Maybe it now we can shut off the shadows and highlights because everything looked a little bit light. And we could do is we can go into the gradient map and I could lower the opacity of that. And so now we get a little bit of color coming from the toning. And if I turn that off, you can see the difference. Just a little bit of warmish. Right now we're at about 60%. I can bring it down a little bit more. And if I feel like it needs a little more, I can add back in another curve just to bring contrast backup. And there we have it. So you see by using all the tools available, we can be very creative and add color in. And again, we can go back in and change this set will, like I said. So I can click on my gradient map and go to another if I want, let's say selenium, I can use that are, let's say a blue. So we can go in and make any changes as we want. Or I could even go in and edit the actual gradient. So let's say if I slide that over, you can see it makes a pretty dramatic change. So you can see it. The possibilities are really endless. So I encourage you to try to experiment and play around with this and you'll discover some really cool things. So let's go over what we've done here because we've done quite a bit. We start off with our color photograph, the one that we adjusted in a previous video. The first thing we did was we added the gradient map. Not happy with the tones and the sky. And in the foreground, we started adding adjustment layers using the curves we attack the sky and then we did the mid section where the trees are. And then we added a darker vignette around the edge just to draw the eye in towards the center or the photo. Converted the base color image into a smart objects so that we could go back and edit it. And we added our shadow and highlights adjustment. Double-click on that and I can continue to make adjustments to that if I want to. We're not going to write now. We had adjusted the opacity of it by adjusting these sliders here, where we could bring it up basically to 100%, which opened up a lot of our deep shadows. Not satisfied with that, we went back to it again and added another black and white adjustment layer so that we can take advantage of the color in the image. So we added the black and white adjustment layer here. And we went and we added the yellow filter. And we made some further adjustments to that to lighten up the sky a little bit. And we went back and even adjusted the Shadow Highlights because now we didn't need it as much, so we brought that down to about 70%. Then we added a hue saturation layer to take advantage of the color information and beefed up the blues and cyan is a little bit in the sky to make it more impactful. And then we went back to our Gradient Map and change the gradient that we used. And we went into legacy gradients and then photographic toning added, I think it was a sepia to or sepia three. Maybe it's a sepia too. And we brought down the opacity of that layer just to have a little more subtle effect. The idea is to learn as many tools as possible. There are multiple ways to accomplish things in Photoshop and Lightroom. And through the combination of these various tools, you can pretty much attain any luck in any sort of photograph that you're looking to create. 14. 14 Thank You!: Thanks so much for taking my class on black and white photography and how we make a conversion from color in Photoshop. I hope you've gotten something out of this and you see that there are lots of ways to bring drama and intensity into your photographs. We looked at a lot of different methods of doing this from making a simple black and white conversion, a one step process in Photoshop, to looking at using the Camera Raw Filter and all the different tools that are available within that one filter. And how we can save that as a smart object and bring it into Photoshop to work on it further. And being then it's a smart object. We learned that you can always go back and make further changes at any point or reset to what you back to the beginning. Then we looked at using, using the black and white adjustment layer. We saw the advantages of that, or that it sees color. That we're able to use various color adjustments to further enhance the black and white. So once we have the black and white adjustment layer in place, we could add things like a hue saturation layer or a selective color layer, or a color balance layer or add all three and really draw out a lot of nuance and contrast and intensity from adjusting the colors. And then we looked at using the gradient map adjustment layer and saw that that offers some other capabilities. How we can bring in various gradients, especially the ones that sort of mimic traditional black and white toning processes like using Selenium or gold or platinum. And how those gradients spring color and contrast and in a different sort of intensity to the photograph. And then finally, we looked at combining all these various methods to create what you're really looking to do and what you're, what you're really hoping to achieve. And how you can sort of pick and choose from all these different methods and just play around with and experiment and see really what works best for your manner of working or for the work that you're trying to create. We also looked at using adjustment layers like curves and levels and adding shadows and highlights command and saw how that can really open up deep dark areas of our photograph to bring out more detail. Again, lots of different tools to use, experiment with everything and you'll really enjoy it and see some real difference in your images. The more you get into this. I realized that this was a pretty deep dive into this. I hope that you get something out of it and you see that there's lots to experiment with and lots to try out. Hoped you can also post your photos, your black and white photos on the website so other people can see we can all share and what you've done. And also please leave a review of the class. I appreciate any feedback on it so that I can go on and make more and better videos as time goes on. So thanks a lot for everything. I hope you enjoyed it and I look forward to seeing your work.