How to Make Black and White Photos || convert image to black and white photoshop
Hi, I'm deepak and in this blog I'll be teaching the basics of digital black and white photography and processing. First off, I'd like to start with some basic theory you'll need to know before you start taking your black and white photos. I've noticed that a lot of people think you can just take any picture, make it monochrome and suddenly you have a more artistic photo and a better photo. But that's not really true. Black and white photography looks better a lot of the time because it forces you to look at the form in your photo rather than color. Soit can enhance the photo if you have the right elements there. Some basic compositional theories that you'll need to know before going into it are the rule of thirds, the rule of space and the angle of view. Without those basic compositional elements no ammount of processing is going to make your picture look better. If you forgot some of those theories go to chapter two of our book, composition, and they're right there. You can brush up on them before you start taking more pictures. Another part of black and white photo theory is learning to think in monochrome. So when you're taking your picture, shift your attention away from colors and start looking at form and texture. Like crackling paint or old weathered wood. When you're looking at these tonal contrasts in different textures, you're going to be taking pictures that look good once they're converted to black and white. My first technical tips are really easy: shoot RAW and use the lowest ISO possible. You'll be shooting RAW because with the raw file its easier to bring down highlights in your pictures and bring up underexposed parts of your pictures without being too grainy or without too much noise. You want to use a low ISO for the same reason. You don't want a lot of noise and the lower the ISO the lower the amount of noise in your picture. Black and white photography tends to kinda exaggerate any noise in your photo. Let's go into my photo editing software and I'll show you examples of a good time to use black and white photography and bad times to use black and white photography. Now I'm using Lightroom 4 I'm certain there are many other photo editing softwares that will work just fine, as long as they have this option where you can go to black and white and then mix your colors. That's all you'll need. This example is a picture of food. A picture of tuna made by my favorite chef, Chris Rowe. It looks beautiful in color, it looks appetizing, but as soon as you shift it to black and white, you start focusing on the form in the photo, which is not so appetizing. Another bad time to use black and white photography is if the soft colors and tones set a mood in the photo, like this Christmas picture that I took of my daughter, Madelyn. When I convert it to black and white, it loses that soft, ethereal effect, for me anyway. Maybe some people prefer it but her skin looks a bit washed out, there's not much contrast and it's a bit uninteresting. Even adjusting the colors doesn't do much. The red channel kind of darkens her lips and her skin and makes it look ruddy. If I add too much contrast the orange will do the same thing, she looks way to tan to be natural there, and when I slide up the slider to create contrast everything just gets washed away. I prefer this picture in color. Now let's get to a good time to use black and white photography. This picture of pumpkins I took during a little road trip to Vermont. Now, you might think that the color looks good but in my opinion the orange really overwhelms the photo. WhatI liked about this picture is the rustic setting, you can see the word here on the sides very weathered and the pumpkins just have so much texture and when you convert it to black and white and focus on the form of the pumpkins, the picture takes on a whole new meaning. One important tip when you have a black and white photo is to make sure that you actually have white in the picture and black in the picture. So you can see here there's some dark deep shadows that are black and there are some highlights that are pretty much fully white. This picture of Tony in Edinburgh, Scotland is a great example of how black and white photography can really change a photo. So, when I look at it in black and white I see a silhouette I see him walking through this beautiful arched doorway and just kind of a vague background. When I convert to colour, my attention is immediately shifted to the green between the two buildings and I notice that there's a person in the background and a sign that seems to steal a bit of the attention. In this instance, changing the photo to black and white focuses on one form in the picture making the subject more identifiable. I took this picture of my daughter one night while we were walking in a snowstorm so my ISO was really high, 12,800, and this picture is really noisy it shows it. This is a time when converting to black and white would be a bad idea because as you can see as soon as I change it to black and white, the noise becomes even more obvious. That is a good reason to keep your ISO low and if you have a picture that's especially noisy, it's probably not a good time to convert it to black and white. Unless less that's a look that you're going for. Now this picture was taken in Copenhagen, Denmark and it's actually not a picture that I like converted to black and white, but it's a great example to show you how this mixer works. You can drastically change your photo by playing with these colors sliders here. You can see that when I change the red I can make it dark or make it lighter. This is important because it creates a lot of contrast in your picture and you have control over making your subject stand out more or less. So, if I wanted you to see less of the flags, I would make them lighter. If I wanted you to see more of them, I would make them darker. Let's play with the orange here and see what that does. The orange channel is bringing out the roof. Or making and dark. Against the the light sky, I would probably go with the roof being a little bit darker. It brings it out a bit more and it brings out the structure of the buildings. So you can see, just by playing with the colors in your black and white photo or the color channels rather, since they're not colors anymore, you can drastically change what your picture looks like. This picture that I took of a boat house in Lyme is a great example of how black and white photography brings out form and composition. When this picture's in color I feel like my eyes are fighting with it a bit, there's a bit too much going on. We've got this tuft of grass here, the boathouse, the background, the sky. There's a lot going on, my eye doesn't really wanna rest on anything. I already converted the photo to black and white and you can see that it anchors your eye a little bit. You've got these two subjects you're not distracted by the color of the boathouse, the red was a bit bright, and you can really focus on the form, the reflections and just the peacefulness of the scene. So I thought this was a great photo in black and white. So now that you've seen me convert some of my color photos to black and white and adjust the color mixer some, it might help you better understand the theorys that I talked about at the beginning of the video and maybe even help you with your processing. Don't forget the basics that I taught you: shoot RAW and use the lowest ISO possible. And don't forget black and white photography is really about form and texture and composition. I'm not good at rebounding from a mistake, it always ends in a song. do do do dit dit do do do dit dit (scat singing) (singing) this is where things get crazy I'm a loser! Get it together, Chelsea. Parameter extrapolater. I definitely made that up. Bluh bluh bleh bleh. This is hard. You wanna put on a wig and just sit here? Do what I say, I have a blog!
#How to Make Black and White Photos
#convert image to black and white photoshop
#convert image to black and white photoshop
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