This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Creative color and black & white effects
As you work through your photographic exploration, it’s a good idea to work in black and white. According to famed environmental portrait photographer Gregory Heisler, black-and-white imagery “allows you to see the structure of the image in a way that color cannot.” While we often see photographs in black and white as nostalgic, the lack of color in the image allows the viewer to focus on stronger components of the picture—composition, structure, gesture, and so on.
Your digital camera may have a setting that allows you to make black-and-white pictures. These settings, however, are only for images shot in JPEG format. More importantly, allowing your digital camera to produce a black-and-white image robs you of the ability to target specific colors in a picture and decide how you want them to appear. Think of this as an opportunity to use your own creativity.
Taking this technique further, Lightroom lets you add individual colors to an image, creating a hand-tinted picture that can expand your exploration. These coloring techniques can start with a single color, and move on to several more to produce retro effects in a snap. You’ll start this section by creating a black-and-white photo, and then move on to other creative color effects from there.
Converting a color photo to black and white
As a general rule, you should adjust the image that you want to make black and white prior to the conversion. Often, I’ll oversaturate the image to better see the color representation of the photo. I also adjust Highlights, Shadows, Blacks, Whites, and Dehaze to make sure every bit of detail in the image is available. All of the color will disappear shortly, but it’s good to see this beforehand.
NOTE
In previous versions of Lightroom, creating a black-and-white image required you to go to the HSL panel to start. With the 2019 release, this option is now located in the Basic panel. Clicking Black & White at the upper right of the panel will change the HSL/Color panel into the B&W panel for you to adjust the black-and- white mix.
Select the clone-1.raf file we used previously in the Filmstrip. Adjust the image as you see here.
SOFTENING WITH NEGATIVE CLARITY AND DEHAZE
The Clarity and Dehaze sliders increase contrast and saturation. A negative Clarity adjustment can do wonders to soften skin and other elements in a portrait. You also can use Dehaze to fix a foggy or hazy photo.
What you may not realize is that you also can use a negative Clarity setting to produce a watercolor look and a negative Dehaze setting to create a foggy-dreamy look. To get your creative juices flowing, consider these examples, which you can try on the photo of the lone tree (you can use the Snapshots panel to see different versions of the photo that were prepared for you).
In the Basic panel, Clarity was set to –71 to make the photo resemble a watercolor painting. And in the Effects panel, Dehaze was set to –26.
While you obviously wouldn’t want to soften every photo, it’s good to know that these kinds of special effects can be performed in Lightroom.
Once the image is adjusted, click Black & White in the Treatment section at the top of the Basic panel. The image undergoes a basic black-and-white adjustment and the HSL/Color panel changes to B&W.
Expand the B&W panel, and there are a series of sliders representing different colors that you can mix. Dragging any of the sliders to the right will make any color in that range more white. Dragging a color slider to the left will make that individual color more black.
The biggest problem that we run into here is that we are attempting to adjust color sliders in an image that is now in black and white. This is where the Targeted Adjustment tool (TAT) can come in quite handy (it looks like a dartboard and is circled in the panel shown at right).
Click the Targeted Adjustment tool (TAT) at the upper left of the panel to activate it. This tool lets you make adjustments to specific colors by dragging up or down over the photo itself.
Click the darker blue area of the sky, and while holding down your mouse button, drag downward to darken all the colors beneath the tool, in the sky and wherever else they appear in the photo.
Click the Capitol Building and drag the mouse upward slightly to lighten the individual colors that make up the building, wherever they are in your image.
Finally, click the grassy area at the bottom of the picture and drag those colors toward black.
Assess your custom black-and-white work by clicking the panel switch at the upper left of the B&W panel to turn your adjustments off and back on again. This will toggle you between the regular black-and-white conversion Lightroom performed and your custom black-and-white conversion.
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After you complete a black-and-white conversion on your image, go back to the Basic panel and perform some additional adjustments to your image. Often I find that black-and-white images can do with a little more contrast, clarity, exposure adjustments, detail, and grain (which we’ll talk about later) to really finish them off.
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NOTE
If you decide that you no longer want to have this image as a black and white, simply click Color in the Treatment section of the Basic panel. The image will return to color, and the B&W panel will reset itself to HSL/Color once again.
Applying split-toning and retro effects
Lightroom’s Split Toning panel lets you add a color tint to the highlights and another one to the shadows in your photo. The best results often come from using colors that are opposite each other on a color wheel, such as orange and blue, yellow and purple, green and red, and so on.
To create a split-tone, follow these steps:
Perform a custom black-and-white conversion on your image. In this instance, we’ll continue with the image of the Capitol Building (if you’d like to save this work before tinting, simply create a virtual copy).
The Split Toning panel allows you to specify the hue and saturation you want to add to the shadows or highlights in a series of sliders. The Hue slider for each shows you a sample of the colors that you can choose in the slider itself. I prefer to click the color swatch to the right of Shadows to open the Shadows color picker, or to the right of Highlights to open the Highlights color picker, giving me a more direct way to select a color.
With the color picker available, you can use the Eyedropper tool that appears to sample the different colors you can use for your image. The image preview will show you how your tinted image is going to look.
Click a sample color for your shadows and highlights. In this case, I selected a Shadows Hue of 173 with a Saturation of 10 and a Highlights Hue of 296 with a Saturation of 15.
To redistribute the balance of colors, drag the Balance slider to the right to emphasize the Highlights color or to the left to emphasize the Shadows color. A value of –33 was used here.
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