LS 54: Editing Black & White

In This Session

In LS #52: The Art of B&W Photography I talked about what makes an image a black and white image, and in this session I wanted to actually show you the thinking, so I take two pictures from RAW all the way to finished. We look at how much the profile you choose decides before you touch a single control, how the color sliders still move your tones after you’ve converted, and how an object mask and a couple of points on the tone curve let you put contrast exactly where the picture needs it. Along the way we get into fog, depth, and why shadows hold an image up.

Key Takeaways

• Black and white isn’t the absence of color, it’s the presence of tone as your only tool. Every decision you make about where to add contrast, where to hold back, and where to build depth is now riding entirely on how the tones relate to each other, which is why the thinking matters more than the sliders.
• Depth comes from separation, not from darkness. I build a foreground, a midground, and a background that each sit at a slightly different tonal register, so the eye reads distance and dimension even though the photograph is completely flat.
• Fog wants a light touch. Fog lives in the low-contrast, compressed part of the tonal scale, so crushing your blacks or forcing contrast is exactly what kills it. Lift the shadows, keep the mid-tones open, and let the fog do the talking.
• Tonal range and contrast are not the same thing. Tonal range is how many distinct tones you have from black to white, contrast is how different two neighboring tones are, and you can have plenty of one with very little of the other. Knowing which your image actually needs changes how you edit it, and how your viewer reacts to it.

Q&A Highlights

Could the Depth mask in ACR select your subject trees for you? (39:05)
Possibly, but a depth-based mask picks everything at the same distance, so you’d get the trees in one plane plus whatever else rides along at that depth. I mask objects manually because I’m targeting specific elements in the scene, and that way I know exactly what’s selected.

Do you use Silver Efex, or do the Lightroom profiles get you there? (42:05)
I have it and I’ve used it, but I stopped. The payoff wasn’t worth the hassle of an extra plugin when I can get more or less what I want in Lightroom. Silver Efex gives you good formulas for reaching certain looks faster, but nothing you can’t do in Lightroom, and doing it myself means I know what’s happening under the hood.

How do I get fog to look the way it felt standing there? (45:05)
Fog in an image is low contrast and low dynamic range. It’s light, it floats, it’s scattered light. Don’t darken it: keep the blacks well short of solid, lift the midtones and shadows, and resist the temptation to add contrast. Let the fog do the talking.

Would you push the blacks that hard in a color image? (66:05)
Maybe, or maybe not. In black and white, tone is the only tool I have to evoke a feeling; in color, I have the richness and powerful emotion that color can convey, so that adds another layer of communication. It’s a style decision as well. But ultimately, it always depends on the specific image and what it’s about.

Is shooting in monochrome a good way to train the eye? (82:05)
Yes, it’s a great exercise, and easier to do than ever. Set the camera profile (or just your phone) to black and white and walk around seeing the scene in tones; do it enough and your brain learns how colors and light translate.

Do you adjust color before converting to black and white? (85:05)
The majority of the time, yes. I’m usually not sure an image will end up black and white, so I start with basic color adjustments and convert after. And remember that the RAW file is always color underneath, so color adjustments keep shaping the tones even after you convert.