• 
• 
• 

Using Camera RAW Or Lightroom To Convert To Black-and-White

This Article Features Photo Zoom

When I began my career as a landscape and adventure photographer, I was heavily influenced by masters of color photography like Galen Rowell, David Muench and William Neill. I always was in search of that dramatic, colorful light at the end of the day, and I shot my scenes with the luscious colors of Fujichrome film. Now a little older and (hopefully) a little wiser, I realize that in some landscapes, color is not an important element, that the tones and textures in the scene are more compelling and that a black-and-white treatment is the way to go. Fortunately, with digital technology, shooting a scene in color and then converting it to black-and-white is easy and fun.

Of course, there are numerous ways to do this conversion. Talk to two dozen photographers and you’ll probably come up with a dozen different techniques. There are stand-alone programs like Nik Silver Efex Pro (http://www.niksoftware.com) that are excellent at this and are a good investment for photographers doing lots of conversions, but for the once-in-a-while conversion, I find the controls in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) and Lightroom to be easy, intuitive and quite powerful. I’ll outline how I convert images to black-and-white using ACR, but the controls in Lightroom almost are identical.

Open an image in ACR. RAW files work best, but you can edit TIFFs and JPEGs in ACR as well. Before making your conversion to black-and-white, first adjust your exposure and contrast sliders on the basic panel to optimize the tone of the image, then click on the HSL/Grayscale icon to bring up that panel (it’s the fourth icon from the left).

Photoshop users will notice this panel is very similar to the Black and White adjustment layer in CS4. I prefer using ACR for two reasons. First, there are two additional color sliders in the ACR interface, which gives just that much more control. Second, I like to add some tint (sepia and other colors) to my black-and-white images, and this is much more intuitive in ACR (using the Split Toning panel) than in CS4.

To convert to black-and-white, just click on the “Convert to Grayscale” check box. Now by moving the color sliders, you can adjust the luminance of those colors in the image. For example, by moving the blue slider to the left, blue skies will get darker. Don’t remember the exact color of each part of your image? No problem—the beauty of this technique is the targeted adjustment tool up in the tool bar (fifth tool from the left). Once you click on this, you just need to click on a pixel and drag up to lighten that color, or down to darken it. ACR figures out the combination of sliders to move to make the adjustment. Now you easily can fine-tune the look of your black-and-white image. You may find you want to make further refinements using the Curves panel or a little burning and dodging, but you’ll get most of the look you want just by making these grayscale adjustments.

Add Comment