Hi I'm Karl Taylor and in this video I'm gonna give you my top tips for creating
stunning black-and-white photos. Now if you've ever tried to convert an image to
black and white, chances are you've ended up with a flat dull photo with none of
the original contrast. Now this can be incredibly frustrating, especially for
photographers who are new to Photoshop. Now to help you create stunning black
and white images, I'm going to talk about the key things to understand when
shooting for black and white and also share my preferred methods of converting
images to black and white. This is also covered in much more detail in our
Advanced Photoshop Course for Photographers on KarlTaylorEducation.com
as well as our individual Photoshop classes. Now, black and white photography
when done correctly can be incredibly striking but to create truly stunning
black and white images it requires a bit more than simply adjusting the
saturation slider in Photoshop. One of the quickest ways to convert images to
black and white is to completely desaturate the color from the image,
however, although this is easy this method results in very flat boring black
and white images. Now my preferred method is to use the black and white
adjustments layer in Photoshop but let's also take a look at what black and white
photography actually is. Now, as the name suggests, black and white photography is
any image that consists of only black white and gray tones. Often it's used
interchangeably with the term monochrome. Black and white photography
refers to images that only contain gray tones
whereas monochrome images actually may use one color of various tones of that
particular color. Let's take a look at this graphic to better explain that. Now,
here in the shot of the model, we can look at the RGB values in the corner and
they're all equal 233, 233 & 233. That's in the red channel, the green
channel and the blue channel. When those values are all equal then the color is
neutral, therefore is not a color it is actually
a tone of gray, black or white. You can see on the background area that the tone
is neutral as well. The values are 114, 114 and 114. Zero would represent black
or pure black and a value of 254, 254 and 254 would be just one value below
pure white. If we look at the next image we can see that it looks slightly
different, whilst it looks black and white it's actually a monochromatic
image. If we explore the values you can now see that those values are not
neutral the red channel is 226, the green is 234 and the blue is 233.
So what that means is there's slightly less red in this image and there is
slightly more green in this image than in the other channels so therefore we
end up with an image that is slightly more cyan and slightly more green than
the neutral black and white version. If we look at the background values, you can
see RGB has 109, 114, 117, therefore showing more blue in the background and
less red in the background than in the equivalent black-and-white image
therefore giving a cyan, blue tint to the shot. So what makes good black and white
photography? Well, black and white photography can
certainly look impressive but it's not suited to every genre of photography. For
example, you wouldn't necessarily expect to see black and white product shots of
a woman's perfume or would you expect to see a black and white food image.
Landscape and wedding shots on the other hand may well suit themselves to black
and white photography. Now regardless of what your subject is, there are a few
things worth keeping in mind if you plan to convert your images to black and
white. First of all it's important to learn to understand the difference
between luminosity and color. Luminosity refers to the perceived brightness or
darkness of a hue but to fully understand it, it's
important to understand hue, saturation and color - let's take a look at another
graphic. Hue refers to a specific color on the color spectrum, saturation refers
to the intensity of that hue with 0% being gray and 100%
being the purest color. Any color is therefore a combination of both hue and
saturation as well as some degree of luminosity. Different colors at different
hues and saturation levels will therefore have different luminosity
values. You can more clearly see the different luminosity values for
different colors in this particular illustration, from this you can see how
the color red for example may not work well on a dark background because of its
low luminosity value. The same way a light blue subject on a white background
may not convert very well and you can see that yellow is very luminous with a
value of 94% in this illustration. Here are two more examples showing that in
real-world environments both of these examples were shot in color but you can
see how the fashion image with the model in the red dress does not work well in
black and white because she almost blends into the background, whereas the
model in the yellow dress does work in black and white because the yellow has a
much higher luminosity value than red and although it's on a dark background,
it stands out much more clearly. Seeing an understanding luminosity rather than
color can be difficult especially if you're new to photography, however you
can also look out for scenes with high contrast as these will often translate
well into black and white. To increase contrast you can also use filters. Before
digital, film was already adjusted to make the subject look good and by this I
mean that different films had different tonal characteristics or different
contrast levels. Photographers would actually select a
type of film based on the type of subject they were shooting, however, it
was still common practice to use a filter to further enhance the contrast.
For example, if photographing a landscape image and you wanted to accentuate the
contrast between the bright blue sky and the white clouds, it was common to put a
red filter on the end of the lens to increase contrast on that black and
white film by cutting out the blue light. Therefore, darkening the sky and
increasing the contrast between the sky and clouds. Polarizing filters could also
be used to increase overall contrast nowadays though shooting with DSLR's our
cameras are fine-tuned to reproduce color, which means we often have to do a
lot more post-processing to get a good black-and-white image. Now filters can
still be used on our color RGB cameras but another option is to apply a preset
filter in Photoshop. Another important thing to think about in black-and-white
photography is your composition. With no color to distract you in the image then
the elements like composition become much, much more important. It's important
to keep in mind the compositional rules such as the rule of thirds and look for
things like leading lines and interesting textures because color has
been removed from the image and you're left only with tonal value and
composition. How do you convert a photo to black and white? Now that you
understand what makes a good black and white image the next question is how do
you create that black and white image well in theory simply desaturating an
image will result in a black and white image but it will result in a very flat
boring black and white image. When we think of a good black and white image
those such as famous photographers like Ansel Adams or Peter Lindbergh you'll
immediately notice that their images have high levels of contrast and are
rich in tonal values. Simply desaturating the image won't give you this type of
result. To achieve the striking black and white imagery often
associated with these artists involves slightly more work than simply moving a
slider to the left or right. Now as I mentioned earlier my preferred method
for converting images to black and white is to use Photoshop's black and white
adjustment layer. Although there are other methods, I find this one offers the
most control especially when I'm combining it with multiple layers and
then masking through those layers to reveal the best parts. You can see
exactly how to convert images to black and white using this method
in a number of our Photoshop tutorials on KarlTaylorEducation.com but I'll
outline the steps briefly here. First of all, you have to apply the black and
white adjustment layer in the adjustments panel, click the black and
white adjustments icon, or alternatively go to layer, new adjustment layer, black
and white. This will open a dialog box and automatically apply a default
grayscale conversion. Secondly, you then select a preset from the black and white
adjustment layer, or you can adjust the color sliders. You can either select from
one of those preset options where you can add things like filters, such as red
filters, orange, etc. too, or adjust those sliders to adjust the gray tones of the
particular colors in the image. Option 3, you can apply a tint by using the black
and white adjustment layer it also allows you the option for adding a tint
to your image very similar to those monochromatic images that we were
talking about earlier. Now to do this, simply check the tint box and select the
color tint that you want to apply. Other ways to convert your images to black and
white include simply desaturating the image, or applying a channel mixer, or
gradient map adjustment. Again I'll show you exactly how to use these adjustments
in our black and white Photoshop class. I find using the black and white
adjustment layer somewhat easier than using the channel mixer or gradient map
as it offers a greater degree of control than simply desaturating the image but
whichever method you choose to use you'll achieve the
greatest control by creating multiple layers and using masks through those
layers to reveal particular areas of varying contrast from different parts of
the image. This is very similar actually to using multigrade paper and printing
techniques back in the days of the darkroom. Now the points I've mentioned
here should help you identify what makes a good black and white image and by
following the steps I've outlined and by watching our tutorials on KarlTaylorEducation.com
you'll soon learn how to create your own amazing black and white
photos. Get my completely FREE photography course with no signup
required. You can also access our free 90-page eBook, just click the link or
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