done this episode I'll be showing you my abbreviated version of the zone system
for shooting black and white photos. Adorama TV presents
Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace. Hi everybody welcome to another
episode of Exploring Photography right here on Adorama TV.
I'm Mark Wallace in the city of Puno Peru and my altimeter says that I'm
just shy of 13,000 feet and so I’m having a tough time breathing on this very busy
street.
Well I was out shooting today with my 5D Mark III, my 24-70 millimeter lens
and there is not a cloud in the sky there is just a lot of shadows and
contrast and that means it's a perfect setup
for shooting black and white photos and that's what we’re gonna be talking about in this
episode.
Shooting black and white photos using the zone system that was originally
created by Ansel Adams.
I'm going to be showing you my abbreviated version, my interpretation of
his own system,
specifically on how to do post-production and get really contrasty,
dark, moody
images. But before we do that I wanna talk to you about the contests that
Adorama’s hosting right now. They have awesome contests and you can win some
great prizes.
So click the link can you might win today.
Now when we're shooting black and white photos were not actually just shooting
black-and-white,
we’re shooting black a bunch of shades of grey, all the way to light grey to white.
Now back in the past we only shot film, there was a system called the zone
system that Ansel Adams created
and system was used for seeing light for processing negatives
and going into the dark room to process your prints so you'd get these really high
contrast, beautiful prints. We
don't talk much about this zone system these days because well
film and digital photography are a little bit different. But in this episode i wanna
talk to you about my abbreviated version of the zone system.
Instead of using 12 stops of light like Ansel Adams did,
we’re gonna use 5 zones. Now don't send me an email saying this isn’t the zone system. I
know it's not the zone system, but it's
rooted in the zone system. Well let’s talk about those five
zones of light. Those zones are black,
shadows, mid tones, highlights
and whites. Now to understand all of this stuff better
we really need to dive into Lightroom and take a closer look. So let's do that
right now.
To get started let's take a look at those zones again we have black,
our shadows, mid tones’s, highlights
and whites. Now they are not distributed like this in this top bar.
If we looked at in evenly distributed from black all the way to white.
A gradient. The black’s really take up just a small portion or the very darkest
the greys. Our shadow’s take up a lot larger portion.
The mid tones are right in the middle.Our highlights take up another large
portion, and our whites really are the very very
edge, the absolute whites. Now we can actually see these
in our develop module on the histogram. So take a look here
you can see it says blacks, shadows,
exposure, now that's mid tones and we’ll explain that
later why thats called exposure in the histogram, and then we have our
highlights
and our whites. We can see on the histogram we actually have spikes here
that shows us that this lines up to what our zones are.
We have two spikes over here in the highlights because we have a highlight
here
and then I made this little background it’s a little bit lighter and so that shows up as the
second spike.
We can also see that these show up here. We've got exposure or
our mid tone’s.
We’ve got highlights, shadows, whites and blacks. We're gonna be using need to
adjust
our images. Now what we want to do, we have a goal,
and our goal is to create high contrast black and white
images using these zones to manipulate the total values
in our images. We want blacks that are absolutely black,
and we what whites that are absolutely white and we want to adjust
everything else according to our artistic vision. The process works like
this.
First we adjust our mid tone’s. Then we set our black
and white points. Next we adjust the shadows and highlights according to our
artistic vision. Then we make color conversion adjustments if we need to
and then last, we do some fine-tuning. Well now that we know the basic steps to our
process let's put those steps into
action by editing 3 images. The first image we're going to edit is this color
image.
We're going to learn how to identify where the different zones are
and then convert this to a high contrast black and white image. This will give us
the basics
of our editing process. The second image is this
image of this lock. We’re going to do something I like to call zone
shifting, where we set our black and whites and our mid’s. Then we’re gonna shift
some of those
shadows and highlights zones into other zones to create a really
high contrast sharp image. Then lastly
we're going to take a look at this image, where we shift some the color conversions
to see how color
impacts our black and white conversions. it’s really important.
Let's get started by editing this wall. So I will go over into the
developed module.
Now before we get started on this I wanna show you a little trick that Lightroom
has for us.
So I’m gonna open up our chart that we started with. We need a visual
cue to show us where the absolute whites and the absolute blacks are
when we begin to edit our images. Now to do that what we can do is there are
these little
triangles up here in the histogram and this will show us our clipping.
So highlight clipping and our shadow clippings just click on that.
Anything that absolutely white will show up as red.
Anything that's is absolutely black will show up as blue.
I can turn it on and off by hitting the ‘J’ key.
Or by clicking these little triangles in histogram.
I prefer the ‘J’ key and so that will really help us out.
Alright so let's get started on this wall here.
The very first thing I want to do is set my mid tones,
and do that, actually very that first thing I want to do is convert this
from a color treatment to a black-and-white treatment. So let's do
that right now.
Now the first thing I want to do is to set my mid tones.
Now I do that by using the exposures slider.
What I can do is if I slide this to the right my mid tone values
will increase and if I slide this to the left they will decrease. In other
words in luminosity they'll get brighter or darker.
That way I can say, you know what do I want this to be my mid tone or this to be my mid tone?
If I want this to be my mid tone well, I need to sort of slide that to the right.
If I want this to be by mid tone I need to slide that to the left to bring that
into my mid tone values.
That's the very first thing you want to do is, say where your midterms are and you
get to choose. This is something Ansel Adams was a big about
saying you choose where the middle gray is
and then work your way out from there. So I want my middle grey to sort of be
this bottom area and this door, this bottom door.
I don't wanna lose a lot of details in the blacks up here where the shadows
are in the door. So I'm
gonna bring that back pretty close to where it was because I thought we had a
pretty good starting point. So
right back to 0. This image we have a good starting point.
Right next let's set the black-and-white points. To do that I'm going to press
'J' on my keyboard so I can start bringing the blacks
down to see where that is showing up. See I’m getting a lot of blacks here.
I’m gonna bring this down so I start seeing blacks
not bleeding into the details in the shadow areas, because I wanna still see that. So I’ll
bring that down.
Think that's about as much as I want to do there because it’s starting to impact the
door. I wanna see those details.
Next I'm gonna bring my whites up. You can see on the histogram we don't have any
whites.
So I will bring those over to the right. Keep going, keep going, keep going.
Now we start to see some white showing up in our image and that is really
giving us a lot more contrast then we started with. Right now that I have my
black
and white point set, I will turn off those warning labels.
Now I’m gonna start
working with my shadows. Up here in this corner we don't really see
much in the door and so what I'll do here is I’m going to
take the shadows and shift them to the right to bring the more into the mid
tone
area. Now we're seeing some of those values show up here. We can actually see the
details in the door
and up here on the wall and then I'm going to play with the highlights just a
bit.
Bring those down just a hair, maybe a bit more.
So I’m gonna see a little bit more of the detail in this wall.
That looks pretty good. Now im I need to do some fine-tuning here. One of the
things you can do as you can do is you can just go into the contrast slider and just slide that
back and forth or do some sharpening and some things like that.
I think this is a pretty good basic conversion from our color
to our black and white image. Right now that we have some of the basics down
let's get an image that is more appealing to us. When I was shooting this
wall I notice that there is this lock on the door that
had some really interesting light and so that's where we're going to go next.
So here is our lock. Now this lock we’re really gonna get into
the nitty-gritty of converting to black and white. Notice that we
can see
details across the board here. So we've got shadows here we can see detail
in the upper right-hand side. I want this to be a super contrasty
image. So the very first thing I'll do is convert this
again of the treatment to black and white. Alright this is
sorta contrasty it but is not where I want it to be.
The mid tones are exactly where I want them to be I like where
the mid tone values are. So I’m not gonna change the exposure slider at all it.
It’s
in a good place. But I really want this to be more contrasty, so I'm gonna turn on
my clipping warnings here. I'm gonna start by taking my blacks way
down. So we’re gonna go all the way down into the eighties maybe about right
there. So 88, 89 in that area. So you can see that I've
really taken the blacks down. So we've got a much more contrasty
image but you can see we don't have any whites in this image really.
So let's do that next. So I’m gonna take my whites and I will
keep those going higher and higher and higher. Until I'm about
well, about right there. I'm judging this based on these red
clipping highlights showing up. These little the warnings.
So I want this to be really contrasty and you can see immediately
that we have a high contrast image. But
we lost a lotta detail up here. Our shadows have gone away.
Our detail on our lock is gone away and so we need to bring that in. So now let's
play with the shadows
and the highlights. So the shadows what I want to do to bring some detail back in
So I’m gonna
say you know what, shift those to the right about like that so we're in the forties
the
upper forties. So you can see that we are just now are starting to get a little bit more
detail
up here that was completely black. So we've shifted the shadows
from black back into the shadow area. So we've shifted that zone
back. The next thing I do is play with the highlights here.
Now the highlights what I want to do is
I want to take them and i wanna go the opposite way. So I checked the highlights
from the highlight area and shift them down into the mid tone
area. So I’m gonna go left and shift those down. Down, down, down.
So we’re gonna take those down into the 50’s. About like that,
and that is affecting this area right here making it much,
much more contrasty. I really like this.
Now one of the issues though I'm having is I really wanted to see the detail
on that lock. Well guess what we can go up here
and we can use an adjustment brush in Lightroom.
I'm gonna tell it to take my shadows
all the way up to almost 100 and then I'm going to paint
on top of this lock here and that's shifting
those really dark shadows up into almost the
mid tone range. Not quite but we're getting some of that detail back.
So I’ll close that. You can see we have a
really dramatic image. So we went from something that wasn't
very contrasty to do something that's extremely contrasty.
Take a look at that. Let’s see if we can look, I saved a little
a snapshot here and you can see where we went from
the color image back to where we were.
There. That is a huge, huge difference.
Okay last but not least we've gotta figure out how color impacts our black
and white images.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go into this portrait that I made of
this gentlemen here in Puno. A really great guy.
Now one of the things that happens when you go in and
you create a black-and-white image from a color image, is the colors are converted
to different luminosities
and by default Lightroom determines what those
color mixes are. You can see this down here in the black and white mix.
So theres sort of this auto setting that happens automatically.
Now we can't go into great detail into that in this episode but I didn't an episode
on it. Its
digital photography 1 on 1 : episode 232 : how color
influences black and white photography. I really suggest that you watch that.
Let's take a look here. If we go over here there's this little dot.
I can click on that. When I do I get the special icon and then
I can click on area in an image and I can make it darker
or brighter. What I'm doing is I'm adjusting the
luminosity of the orange in my conversion
and by doing that I am making this guy's face darker
or brighter. So maybe sometimes I'll go in here and I'll click this
auto conversion. You can see that this is sort of a dull
image, but I can click on his face I can bring that up.
I can click on the background I can bring that down. Uou can do all kinds of
things, you can make his
coat a little bit darker. I can get a much much better conversion
by playing with this mis of colours in my black and white mix. Again
make sure you look at Episode 232:
how color influences black and white photography for more information on this
but don't forget that that is available cuz you can really make a big difference
to your black and white images. Right there you go all the different steps for
converting
images from color to black and white using
the zone, the abbreviated zone system and
some color conversion. Well I hope this will you help you with your post
processing a black-and-white
images. I just want to mention that this video doesn't include everything that we
could possibly talk about about black and white photography but
I have some more videos at the Adorama Learning Center that will help you with
this topic. Specifically fifty shades of black about processing
the different mid tone’s and shadows and blacks in an image.
Understanding stops if that's new to you and a bunch of other videos so make sure
you check out the Adorama
Learning Center for more information and don't forget to
subscribe so you don't miss a single
episode of Exploring Photography or any Adorama TV video. Thanks again for
joining me and I'll see you again next time.
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