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How-To

B&W In The Digital Age

Talented artists are always eager to embrace new technology if it has the potential to enrich their art and bring forth their vision. If he had access to today's tools, what would Ansel Adams do?

A better method is to use the Channels palette. Click on the Red, Green and Blue channels individually to see which looks best. If one looks the way you want, go to Image > Mode > Grayscale. This method mimics the effects of shooting a black-and-white image through a red, green or blue filter (see the Filters sidebar).

	Black-and-white conversion via Photoshop’s Channel Mixer.
	Original color landscape. Photo by Rob Sheppard.

Original photograph of paintbrush scene. Photo by Rob Sheppard.
Using Photoshop’s Channel Mixer to do the conversion allows the photographer to adjust each primary color’s gray rendition individually, resulting in a black-and-white image with more impact

 

Probably the most versatile way to convert color images to black-and-white is by using the Channel Mixer (Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer, then click the Monochrome box). This provides lots of control over the resulting tones, but requires a lot of playing. Remember that the Red channel makes red tones lighter as the slide is moved to the right and darker as it’s moved to the left; likewise for the Green and Blue channels. A good rule of thumb is to make sure the percentages of red, green and blue combined equal 100 percent, although some images might work better with a higher combined percentage (for a brighter image) or a lower combined percentage (for a darker image).The new Photoshop CS3’s Channel Mixer even includes black-and-white presets to get you started.

Handy Digital Darkroom Tools

Photoshop contains lots of tools, but you only need a few of them to optimize a black-and-white photograph. Here are the best ones to use.

Levels. Generally, it’s best to begin work on a digital image by setting its black and white points using the Levels control. This is especially important for black-and-white. Adams said in his book The Print that "...a note of pure white or solid black can serve as a 'key’ to other values...but there is no reason why they must be included in all images, any more than a composition for the piano must include the full range of the eighty-eight notes of the keyboard." In short, set the black and white points to suit the image you visualized when you shot the photo.

Black-And-White Inkjet Printing Not long ago, you pretty much had to use special black-and-white inks to make excellent black-and-white prints with an inkjet printer, and this is still the way to go with older printers. In fact, a number of photographers have a second printer dedicated to black-and-white printing. With more and better inks, smaller ink droplets and better drivers, today’s inkjet photo printers from Canon, Epson and HP—especially the larger-format models—do an excellent job with black-and-white. These devices can turn out full-tonal-range prints with no colorcasts (unless you deliberately create a toned print). While any self-respecting aspiring Ansel Adams will do his or her own printing, there are some excellent digital labs out there for those who choose to have someone else make their prints. Check out "Working With A Lab" (Jan./Feb. 2007) on the OP website, www.outdoorphotographer.com.

A good starting point for Levels (Image > Adjustments > Levels) is to move the upper left and right sliders in to the edges of the histogram to turn the brightest and darkest pixels in the image pure white and pure black. Press the Alt/Option key as you do this to see where the blacks and whites actually are in the image. The Levels histogram is a good reference, but your eye should remain the ultimate arbiter: Do what looks right. Most images work best if they include a pure black tone and a pure white tone, but some don’t.

Curves. Adams used different developers and development techniques to adjust the midtones and contrast of his images. In Photoshop, this is best done with the Curves control (Image >Adjustments > Curves). Moving the middle of the curve up makes the midtones lighter, while moving it down makes the middle tones darker.

If you click on the lower portion of the curve, you can adjust that separately: Moving it down makes the dark tones darker, moving it up makes the dark tones lighter. Likewise, click on the upper portion of the curve, and you can move that portion up to make the light tones lighter or down to make them darker. You can click multiple times on the curve itself to add anchor points, but one in the middle of the curve and one at the middle of the lower section and the upper section usually will suffice. A tip: A little movement of the curve goes a long way.

Shadow/Highlight. This control (Image > Adjustments > Shadow/Highlight) can bring out amazing amounts of detail in underexposed dark areas and overexposed bright ones. It can help open dark midtones if used carefully. The default Shadow setting of 50 percent is usually too strong; try 30 percent as a starting point.

Layers. Photoshop’s layers and layer masks are features Adams would have loved. Layers allow you to make each change to your image independent of other changes and make it easy to keep track of them. Even more important, layers let you make changes nondestructively, without affecting the image’s pixels. None of the changes you make is applied to the image pixels until you flatten the image (Layer > Flatten Image) when you’re done; thus, there’s only one change applied to the pixels instead of lots of changes individually.

Filters When you shoot a scene in color, the colors make or break the shot. When you shoot in black-and-white, the black, white and gray tones make or break the shot. In black-and-white, those lovely red roses that stood out so dramatically from those green leaves in real life will blend together as middle gray tones in the photo. As a digital black-and-white photographer, you can examine the monochrome image on your camera’s LCD monitor right after you shoot it and see if the tones of different-colored objects merge. Ansel Adams, like most black-and-white landscape photographers, used colored filters to separate tones in his images. Digital photographers can do the same—in fact, a number of digital cameras have built-in digital colored filters. The basic concept behind using colored filters for black-and-white photography is that a filter will lighten tones of its own and similar colors and darken tones of its complementary color in the resulting photograph. The most popular colored filters used by black-and-white outdoor photographers include yellow, red and green. Yellow and red filters render a blue sky darker than it would appear in an unfiltered shot, which is useful when you want white cloud buildups to stand out strongly against a dark sky. A red filter renders red flowers lighter and green leaves darker, which is handy for shots of foliage, where the red flowers and green leaves, both reflecting about the same amount of light, would appear about the same shade of gray in an unfiltered photo (you also could use a green filter to get darker flowers against lighter leaves).

Adjustment layers (Layer > New Adjustment Layer) let you do Levels, Curves and other corrections. Duplicate Layers (Layer > Duplicate Layer) allow you to do just about anything without affecting the original pixels.

A good layer workflow might be:

Layer Masks. Layer masks let you apply changes to selected portions of an image rather than the entire image. When you create an adjustment layer, Photoshop automatically creates a corresponding layer mask. Layer masks make it easy to do what Adams did by dodging and burning. For example, to darken a specific area of the image, create a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Brightness/Contrast) and move the brightness layer to the left to a setting of -20 or -25. This turns the whole image darker.

Painting black on a layer mask conceals or hides the layer's effect, so the adjustment isn’t applied to those areas. Painting white on the layer mask reveals the effect below, so the layer’s adjustment is applied to those areas of the image. In our example, you can fill the darkening layer with black to hide its effect (Edit > Fill, choose Black) and then use a white Brush tool to paint over (reveal) the areas where you want the effect (darkening) to be applied.

Software For B&W The camera manufacturers’ RAW-conversion software provides basic conversion capabilities and sometimes more—Nikon’s Capture NX is a good example. Current versions of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements come with Adobe’s versatile Camera Raw RAW-image converter, and it also can be purchased as a stand-alone. Other good RAW converters can be found in Apple’s Aperture, Phase One’s Capture One, DxO’s Optics Pro, Digital Light & Color’s Picture Window and the B/W Conversion Filters in Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro 2.0. There’s also a number of plug-ins for Photoshop (and applications that use Photoshop-compatible plug-ins) that provide black-and-white photographers with useful tools. Among them are Alien Skin’s Exposure, B/W Styler for Windows from The Plugin Site and Black & White Studio from Power Retouche.

We don’t have room to go deeply into layer masks, but you can learn all about them at the Outdoor Photographer website (www.outdoorphotographer.com).

Finishing Touches

Once you have the tones of the image as you want them, there’s one more step Adams considered important. You want to keep the viewer’s eye in the frame, and bright areas near the edges draw the eye out of the frame. So Adams burned in the edges of his prints, darkening them.

You can do this in Photoshop. An easy way is to create a Brightness/Contrast Adjustment layer, darken the entire layer by moving the Brightness slider to a minus number (again, -20 or -25 is a good starting point) and fill the layer with black to hide the darkening. Then, using a large, soft brush, paint white over the edges of the image, revealing the layer’s darkening effect.

For more details on producing digital images, check out OP Editor Rob Sheppard‚’s book Outdoor Photographer Landscape and Nature Photography with Photoshop CS2, which provides information for the digital nature photographer, including a whole chapter entitled "What Would Ansel Do?"

Resources
Adobe (800) 833-6687 www.adobe.com Alien Skin Software (888) 921-SKIN www.alienskin.com Apple Computer (800) MY-APPLE www.apple.com Canon (800) OK-CANON www.usa.canon.com Datacolor ColorVision (800) 554-8688 www.colorvision.com Digital Light & Color (617) 489-8858 www.dl-c.com DxO www.dxo.com Epson (800) GO-EPSON www.epson.com	Hewlett-Packard (HP) (800) 752-0900 www.hp.com Nikon (800) NIKON-UX www.nikonusa.com Nik Software (619) 725-3150 www.niksoftware.com Pantone (201) 935-5500 www.pantone.com Phase One www.phaseone.com/photo The Plugin Site www.thepluginsite.com Power Retouche www.powerretouche.com X-Rite (914) 347-3300 www.xritephoto.com

 

 

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