You will have already realized that Black and White is not as easy as it seems, and that is probably why you are taking a look at this article ? Well, you are absolutely right. Black and white seems easy because you don't have to fight with color, but the truth is that when you get rid of it, you have to fight with many other things (pay attention! we make it easier for you with this mega guide for black and white photography black, with all the tips and tricks for stunning black and white images, and much more). As always, everything begins and ends with us. We are our main obstacle and at the same time we are the solution. You may wonder what I'm talking about, well, the first major impediment that we encounter as photographers is that the world is in color, and it is very difficult to shed what our eyes see and turn it into something completely different right off the bat.
When we see in color, consciously or unconsciously, the images are sustained based on it. When we think about converting it to black and white, having thought and visualized it in color, the only thing we achieve is to remove a good part of the soul from the image and we are left with a very boring, sad and gray photograph. Surely you have been in this situation more than once. Well, if you have been able to see that something is wrong or that something is missing from that image, you are on the right track, because no one else has the solution but yourself ? We call the solution learning to look in black and white , and it just requires some practice, enthusiasm and perseverance. Well, and some advice that I leave you in the lines that follow, I hope they help you to delve into this fascinating world of black and white photography.
HOW TO SHOOT BLACK AND WHITE
CAMERA SETTINGS
- RAW format: I would venture to say that you have a camera that offers the RAW format , right? So use it without delay. The RAW format preserves as much information as possible about the image in terms of tones, lights and shadows. This will give you many more processing options. In case you don't have RAW format, shoot in color . Shooting in color preserves more tonalities than shooting directly in your camera's monochrome option. I would only recommend using the black and white mode directly on the camera when you need to get an idea of the result before taking the final photo.
- ISO: Noise is more noticeable in black and white images than in color ones, so it is recommended, especially in black and white, to try to work with the lowest ISO.
EXPOSITION
The main thing is to expose correctly , both in color and in black and white, you always have to start here. While I've heard of all colors as to whether to expose for highlights or shadows, it really depends a lot on the processing program we use afterwards. For example, for some Lightroom recovers shadows very well so they prefer to expose for highlights. Others believe that black and white is too noisy when trying to recover shadows (and it is true, it is more noisy than color, or at least more noticeable) and expose for shadows. I think the main thing is to expose as correctly as possibleand once we have become familiar with our editor, our camera and ourselves, establish certain routines or processes that simplify our work somewhat ?
CONTRAST
There is no single way to shoot in black and white. Actually, there are as many modes as there are photographers holding a camera and interpreting a scene. Although, a priori, contrast and black and white is one of those great alliances that are sometimes established in photography ;-). Surely you have already realized that monochrome tolerates much more contrast than color, right? Too radically “tinkering” with colors (too much contrast, too much saturation) usually leads to unattractive images or images that are too far from reality. On the other hand, black and white, perhaps because it already starts from the base of being something artificial, allows more play with the extremes.
This does not mean that the images must have extreme contrasts ( high and low key, for example), on the contrary, images with low contrast and rich in intermediate gray tones are also interesting, which does not mean that they do not have contrast or are pasted, which We will see in the processing ?
All this is summed up in that all times of the day and scenarios can be good candidates for black and white photography. In the central hours of the day you will have a lot of contrast . In the first and last hours of the day you will have a less pronounced contrast and more intermediate tones with which to enrich your image, similar to cloudy days that I highly recommend you not to miss, for the same reasons.
POLARIZING
Another way to add interest to the image before taking it is to have a polarizer, especially if what we want is to photograph landscapes, a polarizer will help you darken the sky and increase the contrast, as well as avoid reflections.
GRAY SCALE
This is part of the work that you will have to practice, and that is nothing more than learning in an approximate way, in which shades of gray the colors in front of you will be transformed when modifying your image.
HOW TO PROCESS BLACK AND WHITE
I will assume that you use a program such as Lightroom, Photoshop or Camera RAW. They are all similar and have similar basic settings. And even if you don't use any of them, any editor has, if not all, most of the basic settings that I'll talk about here.
The first step is to convert the image to black and white . To do it I will base myself on Lightroom, which is the program I use, but you will see that they are all more or less similar. To convert the image you can directly transform it to black and white, remove the saturation, change it to grayscale mode, and so on. I recommend taking control of the image and making all the decisions ourselves, so I choose to transform it to black and white from the "Reveal" module and leave the values at 0, no desaturation or grayscale.
The second step is to analyze the result by asking questions about it. What do you think of the image? Does it have enough contrast ? Is a rich enough mid-range of grays? Does it have textures that enrich the image? Pure blacks and whites ? Or was this photo just a good candidate to be converted to monochrome, or was I wrong from the start?
Once we have analyzed the image, we proceed to adjust its basic parameters. Remember that the more correct the image is directly from the camera, the better results you will obtain in the final quality of the edition.
1. The first logical step according to the Lightroom interface would be to adjust the exposure and contrast . I leave it for the end but, as always, it's up to taste; everyone must find the workflow that suits their needs. Instead, I start by adjusting the highlights and shadows because most of the time the dynamic range of the scene exceeds the sensor's ability to capture it, meaning if there is too much contrast between highlights and shadows, the sensor will only be able to expose well one of the parties. Luckily this is the time we can try to fix that ;-). You will see that if you have shot in RAW and have exposed correctly, you will get more than acceptable results.
2. The next thing I do is make sure my black and white image contains pure black and white . To do this I use the black and white slider, which intensifies or reduces the blacks and whites in the scene. How do I know when a black and white is pure in the image? Well there is a trick ?
At the top of the Histogram of the editing panel there are two arrows, the one on the right corresponds to the areas of highlights of the image. Left to the shadow area . If we click on them, it shows us on top of the same image, all the areas of the image with pure white (in red) and pure black (in blue). In the following image I have over and underexposed so you can clearly see how it tints the black and white parts of both colors. However, remember that pure black and white are the extremes of the histogram , where information is lost .. That is, they do not have textures or other tonality, etc. For this reason I recommend that your image have a little (but little) of each of them unless you want to completely lose the textures of the scene.
3. The next step (always in my case ?) would be to adjust what we know in Lightroom as clarity . Clarity increases the contrast of mid tones without changing the extremes.
4. And now is when we can go back to the beginning and think if we really need the exposure and contrast values , which are the ones that head the settings. Most of the time you won't need them. We have added contrast by extending the tonal range from white to pure black (if we lacked these values in the initial image) and by intensifying clarity (midtone contrast).
5. With these simple steps you would have corrected the contrast, the lights and the shadows, the middle tones, etc. You could perfectly stay here or touch up the shades of gray in your image. This is done through the " Black and white mix " adjustment, which is nothing more than the possibility of increasing or reducing the saturation in each of the colors of the image. In other words, what was blue in the original image is transformed here into a gray that you can darken or lighten using the corresponding marker. And the same for all the colors of the image.
There is no recipe for editing the tones of the image, firstly because each image is different, secondly because you would surely never repeat the exact same edition from one day to another, because it depends on the day, the mood, the desire, the knowledge... the The trick is to try and learn.
By the way, if you double click on the markers, the values automatically go back to zero ?
EXPERIMENT
Experiment with what you have. Although Lightroom is a program that greatly facilitates the life of the professional and amateur photographer, the truth is that there are many programs , plugins, filters on Instagram, on your Smartphone, Picmonkey, Vsco, most of them free that will allow you to perfectly experiment with these values. .
How about? Easy, right? Amazing what can be done with a few simple tweaks, right? Well, thanks for the patience to read this far ;-). If you have found it useful, we would appreciate it if you share it on your favorite social network to reach as many people as possible. Thank you very much and until next time ?
