2. What Is Black-and-White Photography?Is it really black and white?| 00:00 | Before we get started, I want to
get an ugly truth out of the way.
| | 00:04 | The term 'black and white' is a misnomer.
| | 00:07 | Here is an image that contains only
black and white--that is, every pixel is
| | 00:12 | either completely black or totally white.
| | 00:15 | But when we think of black-and-white
images we usually envision something
| | 00:18 | more like this, that is, something
with gray in it, lots of gray, lots of
| | 00:23 | different shades of gray.
| | 00:25 | Now there is still black and white in
this image, but we also have all that
| | 00:29 | wonderful gray that makes
all those intermediate tones.
| | 00:32 | So in this course every time I say
black and white, I should really be saying
| | 00:37 | grayscale, but our photographic tradition
equates the term 'black and white; with grayscale.
| | 00:44 | Now I'm not just being stuffy here.
Once we get to post-production it's actually
| | 00:48 | important to understand the difference
between these two terms because it is
| | 00:52 | possible to create a purely
black-and-white image from a color original.
| | 00:57 | So I will continue to say black and
white, but through the rest of this course
| | 01:02 | we're going to be outright wallowing in
gray and spending lots of time thinking
| | 01:06 | about and manipulating shades of gray.
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| How gray corresponds to color| 00:00 | As we've already mentioned, we live in
a color world, but to be effective with
| | 00:04 | black-and-white imaging you have to
understand how color translates into shades of gray.
| | 00:11 | You're probably already familiar
with the term RGB, an abbreviation for
| | 00:14 | red, green, blue.
| | 00:16 | Red, green, and blue are
the primary colors of light.
| | 00:19 | When you mix them together, you
can create every other color.
| | 00:21 | And you might be thinking, I remember
from finger-painting class in grade school
| | 00:26 | that the primary colors were different.
| | 00:28 | That's because those were
the primary colors of pigment.
| | 00:30 | The primary colors of light, which is
what we're concerned with as photographers,
| | 00:34 | are red, green, and blue.
| | 00:35 | And they differ from your finger
paints because they mix together additively.
| | 00:40 | As you mix the primary colors of pigment
together, they get progressively darker,
| | 00:44 | until you have a brown sludge.
| | 00:46 | As you mix the primary colors of light
together though, they get progressively
| | 00:49 | brighter, until you have white.
| | 00:52 | Take a look at this.
| | 00:55 | I've got here red, green, and blue lights.
| | 00:58 | These are three lights that have been filtered.
| | 01:00 | This one has a red filter on it, this
one a green, this one a blue, and they're
| | 01:03 | casting these separate red, green,
and blue patches on this wall.
| | 01:08 | Now, the theory that I just said
claims that we should be able to mix these
| | 01:11 | together and get white, so
I'm going to do that right now.
| | 01:14 | I'm just going to tilt the
lights until they combine.
| | 01:15 | I am going to shift the red here over on
top of the green and the blue here over
| | 01:20 | on top of both of them, and sure enough,
I'm getting white there in the middle.
| | 01:24 | Now there are colors around the edges,
and those are areas where the lights
| | 01:28 | aren't perfectly overlapping.
| | 01:29 | They're not perfectly
registered. But I've done it;
| | 01:31 | I've mixed these three primary
colors of light together and gotten white.
| | 01:35 | Now, you may be thinking, well it
doesn't look perfectly white to me, and it's
| | 01:39 | not--and there are few reasons for that.
| | 01:42 | One, these filters that we're using
they're not necessarily perfectly pure in
| | 01:47 | their red, green, and blueness, same
thing with the light bulbs. Also, we're
| | 01:51 | shining on to a gray wall here.
But still, I've mixed the primary colors together
| | 01:55 | and I've gotten a white tone.
| | 01:59 | By mixing the three lights in
various combinations, I can create any other
| | 02:04 | color, not just white.
| | 02:05 | Getting accurate color in a photograph
is not a simple thing because there are
| | 02:10 | so many subtle shades and
variations to every color.
| | 02:14 | If you've ever seen a row of TVs at an
appliance store, or tried to print a color
| | 02:19 | image from your computer, you know that
trying to precisely, accurately reproduce
| | 02:23 | color can be difficult and frustrating.
| | 02:25 | If something in an image is supposed to
be a particular shade of red, we expect
| | 02:29 | it to look that way, and getting an
exact match from device to device, or from
| | 02:33 | device to paper, can be tricky.
| | 02:36 | Black and white is much more forgiving
because there's no objective correlation
| | 02:40 | between any particular color
and a specific shade of gray.
| | 02:44 | For example, consider this
image. That blue sky there,
| | 02:48 | if we were to convert this image to
black and white, we could make that sky any
| | 02:52 | shade of gray that we want.
| | 02:54 | Here is the image with a grayscale
conversion that renders the sky very white,
| | 02:59 | and here's a conversion
that renders the sky very dark.
| | 03:02 | Both of these images look correct to our
eyes, because again, black and white is
| | 03:06 | an abstraction. The viewer will take
care of interpreting the sky as a sky, no
| | 03:11 | matter what shade of gray it is.
| | 03:14 | But one of these skies might leave the
viewer to interpret the sky in a way that
| | 03:17 | has more emotional impact.
| | 03:19 | This ability to choose how to render
specific tones in an image affords you a
| | 03:23 | huge degree of creative freedom and
expression, and it's one of reasons that
| | 03:27 | black and white can be a more
expressive medium than color.
| | 03:31 | In traditional film shooting, you use
lens filters and film processing techniques
| | 03:36 | to control how specific
tones translate into gray.
| | 03:39 | With digital photography, you control
tonality when you convert your document
| | 03:43 | from color into black and white.
| | 03:45 | You can then exercise further
control with additional image edits.
| | 03:49 | Understanding tone in black and white is easy.
| | 03:52 | This shade of gray is lighter than
this shade of gray--that is, these two
| | 03:58 | shades have different tones, but it's
important to understand that individual
| | 04:03 | colors also have a tone.
| | 04:05 | So this shade of red is lighter than this one.
| | 04:08 | It has a lighter tone.
| | 04:11 | Now, none of this might come across as
any kind of big earth-shaking insight, but
| | 04:15 | as we move forward, both in shooting and
post-production, you're going to see more
| | 04:19 | situations where you need to be
thinking about colors in terms of their tone.
| | 04:23 | So it's important to start thinking now
about the color world that you live in
| | 04:28 | as a world of varying
tones, not just varying hues.
| | 04:32 | If all that sounds abstract, don't worry.
| | 04:34 | We're going to explore this
idea in much greater detail later.
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| The medium of black and white| 00:00 | Before we go on, there is
something you need to think about.
| | 00:04 | Black and white is not color
photography without the color.
| | 00:08 | Black and white is a medium all to itself.
| | 00:12 | Painting and drawing are both
processes of rendering an image by hand onto a
| | 00:17 | piece of paper, but you would never say
they were the same medium because they
| | 00:20 | produce very different results, and
they can be used to very different effect.
| | 00:25 | It's the same way with black
and white and color photography.
| | 00:28 | I'm not just arguing semantics here.
| | 00:30 | If you start thinking about black and
white as a different medium then it will
| | 00:35 | be easier for you to shed some habits,
not permanently, but there are some ways
| | 00:39 | of looking at the world when you're
shooting color that just don't serve you
| | 00:42 | very well when you're shooting black and white.
| | 00:45 | At the simplest level, your goal as a
photographer is to create an image with a
| | 00:50 | clearly defined subject and background,
| | 00:52 | and so you frame in a particular way,
you expose in a particular way, perhaps to
| | 00:59 | brighten a specific area or to darken
another. You choose a specific focal
| | 01:03 | length and camera position.
| | 01:06 | Typically, you use all of these
parameters in concert to try to separate your
| | 01:10 | subject from the background so that it's
clearly identifiable as the center of interest.
| | 01:15 | If you're shooting color, separating
the subject from the background might be
| | 01:18 | easier because the subject and
background might be different colors.
| | 01:22 | At other times, a particular scene
might be harder because the subject and
| | 01:25 | background are the same color, or
because the background is distracting.
| | 01:30 | In black and white, everything in your
image is a shade of gray, and you get to
| | 01:35 | choose the shade of gray that
corresponds to any particular color.
| | 01:41 | Black-and-white photography therefore
is about recognizing and controlling the
| | 01:45 | interplay of total relationships in
the world, and this is why I say it's a
| | 01:49 | different medium than color.
| | 01:52 | In black and white, the way you
recognize subject matter, the way you shoot, the
| | 01:55 | way you post-process, all of these may
be done very differently than when you
| | 01:59 | shoot color, because your entire
photographic vocabulary is not exclusively about
| | 02:05 | tone, about lightness and darkness.
| | 02:07 | Here is an example. Walking
down the street I see this lamp.
| | 02:11 | Now the subject matter isn't
particularly interesting, and the light is not even
| | 02:14 | that great, but because I know how to
think in terms of tone, I recognize that
| | 02:19 | there is a total relationship that
could be interesting in this scene.
| | 02:22 | If the sky were represented as a very
dark tone then the lamp, which has a
| | 02:26 | very light tone, might stand out in an
interesting way. After processing the image, I get this.
| | 02:33 | Again, the entire thought process was
about tone, and I only recognized this as a
| | 02:38 | potential image because I was thinking
like a black-and-white photographer, not
| | 02:42 | a color photographer;
| | 02:44 | and this is why I see black and white
as a different medium from color, because
| | 02:47 | they have different vocabularies.
| | 02:49 | Yes, they share some things, just as
painting and drawing share line and form,
| | 02:54 | but with black and white, because you
don't have color to work with, you'll find
| | 02:58 | yourself paying more attention to tone,
contrast, possibly geometry, and line,
| | 03:03 | than you would when you shoot color.
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| The vocabulary of black and white| 00:00 | Let's take a closer look at the
vocabulary of black and white.
| | 00:05 | First, black and white.
| | 00:07 | Black, the tone, is a
measurable quantifiable phenomenon.
| | 00:13 | It's not a subjective quality,
and here is what I'm talking about.
| | 00:19 | I'm wearing a black shirt.
| | 00:20 | Behind me I've got these nice black
shadows on the wall, and so far through
| | 00:24 | this video, you've been watching it
thinking these tones are black, but
| | 00:28 | they're not, actually.
| | 00:29 | They're merely a very, very
dark gray. This is black.
| | 00:34 | Let me show you that again.
| | 00:36 | This is what you had been watching before,
| | 00:38 | a very, very dark gray, which you may have
thought was black until you saw the real black.
| | 00:45 | As a black-and-white photographer, all
you have to work with are shades of gray,
| | 00:50 | so you typically want as many of them
as you can get, because the more shades
| | 00:54 | of gray you have, the easier it will be
to separate different objects tonally
| | 00:58 | in your image, and with more shades
of gray, your image will have smoother
| | 01:02 | gradients, which will make skies and shiny
surfaces and shadows all render more attractively.
| | 01:09 | Finally, the more shades of gray you
have, the more tiny variations in tone that
| | 01:13 | you'll get throughout your image.
| | 01:15 | And these tiny variations are how you
achieve that silvery look that a good
| | 01:19 | black-and-white print can have.
| | 01:21 | The number of shades of gray you can have
can be referred to as your contrast range.
| | 01:26 | The more contrast you can
capture, the more you'll have to work
| | 01:29 | with in post-production.
| | 01:31 | Contrast is simply the range from
your darkest to your lightest tone.
| | 01:35 | So if the darkest thing in your image
is supposed to be black and it's merely
| | 01:40 | dark gray like this, then you're
cheating yourself of some of your contrast.
| | 01:46 | Similarly, if the lightest thing in
your image is supposed to be white and
| | 01:49 | it's merely a light gray, then you've lost some
shades of gray that you could be working with.
| | 01:54 | I'm harping this so much because a lot
of times in class students will make a
| | 01:59 | print and say well, you
know, here are my shadows,
| | 02:01 | they are black, and they won't be.
| | 02:02 | They will simply be dark, because they
haven't yet learned to recognize what true
| | 02:07 | black is, and what full contrast range is.
| | 02:10 | Black is not subjective.
| | 02:12 | You have to pay attention to it and measure
it and make sure that you've got it right.
| | 02:16 | Similarly, white can be off, except in a
print white is a function of a color of
| | 02:21 | your paper, because in a print white
is simply an area that has no ink.
| | 02:25 | So white is not as critical as black
because when we want whiter, we go to a
| | 02:28 | different paper, but blacks have to be right.
| | 02:31 | Here is another example.
Take a look at this image.
| | 02:34 | It's okay composition-wise. The tonal
choices are nice, but it's a little blah.
| | 02:39 | It lacks a certain punch and clarity.
| | 02:42 | Look at the dark shadow tones in
the image, tones that should be black.
| | 02:46 | They are actually just dark gray.
| | 02:48 | Similarly, look at the
highlights, areas that should be white.
| | 02:51 | They are actually just a light gray.
| | 02:53 | In other words, this
image has a contrast problem--
| | 02:57 | it's slight, but it's there.
| | 02:58 | There is just a little bit of a lack
of contrast because I didn't expose and
| | 03:02 | process to represent a full range of tones.
| | 03:05 | If we take the same image and expose and
process it for full contrast, we get this.
| | 03:12 | It's got more punch.
| | 03:13 | It appears to have better detail.
| | 03:15 | It's as if a gray haze
has been lifted off of it.
| | 03:19 | This is the power of contrast, and
it's the foundation of your work as a
| | 03:23 | black-and-white photographer.
| | 03:24 | Yes, contrast is important in color work,
but in black and white it's everything.
| | 03:29 | If you had to give a one-word definition
of black and white as a medium, I think
| | 03:32 | it would be contrast.
| | 03:34 | Fortunately, your eye is very adept at
seeing contrast, as we'll see in the next lesson.
| | 03:40 | Compositionally, you'll mostly work in
black and white the same way you work in
| | 03:44 | color, but a few ideas are more pronounced.
| | 03:46 | The fundamental compositional
devices in black-and-white photography are
| | 03:50 | light and shadow, and at times, you
will build compositions purely by playing
| | 03:54 | one against the other.
| | 03:55 | This composition is based almost
entirely on the interplay between the light
| | 03:59 | door on the left and the
shadowy door on the right.
| | 04:03 | Similarly, this image derives
entirely from the light/shadow interplay.
| | 04:09 | If you're the type of photographer
who likes playing with line then you'll
| | 04:11 | love black and white because stripped
of color, line, and geometry in an image
| | 04:16 | become more pronounced.
| | 04:17 | Here, the lines are created tonally,
the dark repeating polls and the
| | 04:21 | white repeating polls.
| | 04:23 | You can also combine these concepts
and play with line and geometry that are
| | 04:27 | created simply by light and shadow.
| | 04:30 | As with color, you still need to
think about balance, framing, and most
| | 04:35 | importantly, whether your
subject is obvious and defined.
| | 04:39 | But with black and white, you'll
perform these tasks purely by manipulating
| | 04:43 | tone, shadow, and light.
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| The physiology of black and white| 00:00 | Like your digital camera, the
back of your eye has an area of
| | 00:04 | light-sensitive material on it.
| | 00:05 | Unlike your camera though, the material
in your eye is covered with four types
| | 00:10 | of light-sensitive cells.
| | 00:12 | There are three types of cones, each
sensitive to either red, green, or blue, and
| | 00:17 | there are rods, which have
no ability to perceive color.
| | 00:21 | Instead, rods are sensitive only to brightness.
| | 00:23 | In other words, they see
the world in black and white.
| | 00:27 | Because they can't detect color, rods may not
sound as glamorous as cones, but consider this:
| | 00:32 | 98% of the light-sensitive cells in
your eyes are rods. That's right.
| | 00:37 | The substantial majority of your
vision is black-and-white vision.
| | 00:42 | Thanks to all those rods, that human
eye is incredibly sensitive to changes in
| | 00:45 | brightness, and this
sensitivity is there for a reason.
| | 00:49 | Your rods help with your spacial awareness.
| | 00:51 | They are a big part of your navigation
system that keep you from bumping into
| | 00:54 | things, and they help you see
in the dark, and I mean dark.
| | 00:58 | Once light levels drop below a certain
point, your cones shut down and your rods
| | 01:03 | take over completely.
| | 01:04 | When adjusted to complete darkness,
the rods in your eyes can detect a
| | 01:08 | single photon of light.
| | 01:10 | But as you may already know, your
night vision is black and white only.
| | 01:14 | Now you might be thinking, "That's not true.
| | 01:16 | I see color at night."
| | 01:17 | Well, you might see an overall
colorcast perhaps, say, orangish from sodium-
| | 01:22 | vapor streetlights, or bluish from moonlight.
| | 01:25 | But if you really pay attention, you'll
realize that you cannot discern any actual color.
| | 01:30 | If your memory is that you can, that's
probably because you already understand
| | 01:34 | that certain things are certain colors.
| | 01:37 | For example, you might remember
seeing green trees at night.
| | 01:41 | Of course, you know trees are green, so
you have a memory of green trees, even
| | 01:46 | though you couldn't see green at the time.
| | 01:48 | Even while you're standing in front
of the trees, your brain is probably
| | 01:52 | signaling green, despite the fact that
your eyes aren't showing you any color, and
| | 01:56 | if you really pay attention to what
you're seeing, you'll realize. "I'm not
| | 01:59 | actually seeing green in those trees."
| | 02:01 | This is all probably another reason that
black-and-white images can make sense to us.
| | 02:05 | We are already used to seeing the
world in black and white because we see it
| | 02:08 | that way every night
assuming we go out in darkness.
| | 02:11 | So walking around at night is a great way
to start seeing the world in black and white.
| | 02:16 | What you see at night is a very dark
version of what you can capture as a
| | 02:20 | black-and-white photographer.
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| How a camera's image sensor captures an image| 00:00 | In the back of your camera, directly
behind the lens, is a small computer chip
| | 00:05 | that has an area of light-
sensitive material on it.
| | 00:08 | This is the camera's image sensor,
and it's what actually captures light
| | 00:13 | and makes an image.
| | 00:14 | It's the digital equivalent of a
piece of film, or the back of your eyeball.
| | 00:19 | The surface of the image sensor is
divided into a grid, with one cell for each
| | 00:24 | pixel that the sensor can capture.
| | 00:26 | So if you have a 10-megapixel camera, the
sensor is divided into a grid of 10 million cells.
| | 00:33 | Each one of these cells contains a
type of metal in it that emits electrons
| | 00:37 | when struck by light.
| | 00:39 | The more light that strikes an area,
the more electrons that get emitted.
| | 00:43 | By reading the voltage at each one of these
cells, and these cells are called photosites,
| | 00:48 | by reading the voltage, we can find out
exactly how much light has struck each pixel.
| | 00:53 | In other words, we can capture an image.
| | 00:55 | Now here is the kicker.
| | 00:57 | There is no color in this image.
| | 00:59 | All that the sensor detects is how
much light has struck each pixel.
| | 01:03 | We know nothing about what color the light was.
| | 01:06 | In other words your camera is
inherently a black-and-white device.
| | 01:11 | Now, color is interpolated
using something about a hack.
| | 01:15 | Each photosite on the sensor is
covered with a different colored filter.
| | 01:21 | Some filters might be red, some
might be green, some might be blue;
| | 01:24 | different companies use
different colored filters.
| | 01:27 | In this case, there are twice as many
green filters as red or blue, because the
| | 01:32 | eye is more sensitive to
green than to any other color.
| | 01:36 | So after the image is exposed, we know
how much red filtered light has struck
| | 01:40 | some of the cells, how much blue
filtered light has struck others, and so on.
| | 01:45 | We still don't know the exact color
of any particular pixel, but we can
| | 01:48 | interpolate the color
from these filtered pixels.
| | 01:52 | Here is a very over-simplified
version of what I'm talking about.
| | 01:55 | Let's say we're trying to figure out the
color of that middle pixel there, which
| | 01:59 | has a green filter on it.
| | 02:01 | We know that it has received a full amount
of light, as have all the pixels around it.
| | 02:07 | And those have various combinations
of red and blue filters over them.
| | 02:11 | Because we know that equal amounts of
full-strength red, green, and blue make
| | 02:15 | white, the odds are that
the center pixel is white.
| | 02:20 | "But," you might be thinking, "what if
that's just a single white pixel in the
| | 02:24 | middle of a field of other colors?"
| | 02:26 | Well, the pixels on your image sensor
are so tiny that the odds are that there
| | 02:30 | would ever be a single-pixel row or
column of colors is just incredibly small.
| | 02:35 | Just to be safe though, there is
actually a filter in front of the image
| | 02:39 | sensor which blurs the image a little
bit to smear that colors together to
| | 02:43 | ensure that there are no single
stray pixels of one odd color.
| | 02:47 | Now, obviously this whole
color-interpolation process is much more complicated
| | 02:52 | than the very simple version that we've
seen here, but this should give you an
| | 02:56 | idea of how it works.
| | 02:57 | Now curiously enough, we think of the
digital camera as a somewhat recent
| | 03:01 | invention, but all this image sensor
technology was invented back in the '60s.
| | 03:05 | And we can thank Einstein for our
understanding of metals that emit electrons
| | 03:09 | when they are struck by light.
| | 03:10 | He won the Nobel Prize for his study of
the photoelectric effect, which is what
| | 03:15 | that process is called.
| | 03:17 | Your camera might have a black-and-
white mode on it, and you might think, "Oh,
| | 03:21 | that probably just reads that luminance
information and doesn't bother with the
| | 03:24 | color conversion stuff,"
but that's actually not how it works.
| | 03:27 | When you shoot in black-and-white mode,
your camera goes ahead and generates a
| | 03:31 | color image, and then it
converts that back to black and white.
| | 03:35 | To get the best results from your
camera and its sensor, you need to consider
| | 03:38 | some particular camera settings, and
that's what we are going to look at in
| | 03:41 | the next chapter.
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|
|
3. Shooting in Black and WhitePreparing the camera| 00:00 | There won't be a lot of technical
difference between your black-and-white and
| | 00:04 | color shooting, but there is a little bit of
camera configuration that you need to consider.
| | 00:09 | First, should you shoot RAW or JPEG?
| | 00:12 | Ultimately, the big difference between
RAW and JPEG is not one of image quality.
| | 00:17 | RAW does not yield better images
than what you can get from JPEG.
| | 00:20 | You won't see more sharpness.
| | 00:22 | In fact, straight out of the camera, RAW
images will probably be less sharp than JPEG images.
| | 00:26 | If you're shooting color, you won't
have more vibrant color in your images, nor
| | 00:30 | will you get more dynamic range--that is,
the range from the darkest to lightest
| | 00:34 | tones that the camera can capture.
| | 00:36 | What RAW will get you is the ability
to perform edits that are simply not
| | 00:40 | possible with JPEG files.
| | 00:42 | Now this doesn't really matter to us
for black and white, but with RAW files,
| | 00:45 | you can change the white balance of an
image after you shoot, something that's
| | 00:49 | not possible with JPEG.
| | 00:51 | What is useful for us is the
ability to very often recover overexposed
| | 00:56 | highlights when shooting with RAW.
| | 00:58 | RAW also allows us to perform more edits
to our images before certain ugly types
| | 01:03 | of artifacts appear.
| | 01:05 | Because you tend to do a lot of editing
to black-and-white files, pushing colors
| | 01:08 | around very specific gray tones,
| | 01:10 | this extra editability is very welcome.
| | 01:13 | So I highly recommend shooting
in RAW if your camera allows it.
| | 01:18 | Your camera might also have
a black-and-white mode on it.
| | 01:21 | If you're a Nikon shooter, you might
have a black-and-white picture control,
| | 01:25 | while Canon shooters might have
a black-and-white picture style.
| | 01:29 | Other cameras might have their own
equivalent of black-and-white mode.
| | 01:32 | Now a lot of people think, "Oh, this is great.
| | 01:34 | I don't have to wonder what my
color world looks like anymore.
| | 01:36 | I just put my camera in black-and-white
mode and I see it right there on the screen."
| | 01:40 | Alas, there is no such thing as a free lunch,
or free black-and-white visualization.
| | 01:46 | I am going to heartily recommend that
you do not use the black-and-white modes
| | 01:50 | on your camera, for a couple of reasons.
| | 01:51 | First, as we've already discussed,
there is no objective rule for what shade of
| | 01:56 | gray corresponds to a particular color.
| | 01:59 | The same color image can be converted to
black and white in many different ways.
| | 02:04 | Now what your camera shows you as a
black-and-white when you're shooting with a
| | 02:08 | black-and-white mode is just one
possible interpretation of that color scene, and
| | 02:13 | it may not be the one you had in mind.
| | 02:14 | I don't want that camera's stock,
probably kind of blah, black-and-white
| | 02:19 | conversion recipe to limit your thinking
of what can be done with a particular scene.
| | 02:23 | You might think, "Oh, that shoot is
going to be really good in black and white,"
| | 02:26 | and shoot it in your camera's
black-and-white mode and then look at the that
| | 02:29 | camera-generated version, be kind of
under-whelmed, and give up on that scene
| | 02:33 | when in fact, it could be a very good
black-and-white picture with a better
| | 02:37 | black-and-white conversion.
| | 02:38 | Second, if you're shooting RAW, all
this black-and-white mode stuff is
| | 02:42 | irrelevant anyway because that
black-and-white conversion step that your camera
| | 02:47 | is doing is a post-processing
function and only works on JPEG images.
| | 02:52 | Still, some cameras will show you a
black-and-white review in black-and-
| | 02:55 | white mode, even when you're shooting RAW,
but your RAW file will still come in as color.
| | 03:00 | Finally, even if you're shooting JPEG,
I don't recommend these modes for the
| | 03:04 | additional reason of editability.
| | 03:06 | As I already mentioned, there is a
finite amount of editing that you can do to
| | 03:10 | an image before certain types of ugly
artifacts appear, and black-and-white
| | 03:14 | conversion in camera will use
up some of that editability.
| | 03:17 | If you then want to do additional
edits to improve the camera's conversion,
| | 03:21 | you'll have far less
latitude in your image to work with.
| | 03:24 | Most importantly, learning to visualize
in black and white is not that hard, so
| | 03:29 | you simply don't need that
crutch of a black-and-white preview.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Light revisited| 00:00 | There are a lot of things that go
into the making of a good photo.
| | 00:04 | There is the gear you choose, the way
you compose, the exposure choices that you
| | 00:09 | make, and of course, your
selection of subject matter.
| | 00:11 | But ultimately, all of these things are
irrelevant if you don't have good light.
| | 00:16 | Good light can make an otherwise
boring scene into something interesting.
| | 00:20 | All photos begin with good light, and the
most expensive lens in the world in the
| | 00:24 | hands of the most gifted photographer
alive still won't yield a great image if
| | 00:29 | the light isn't right.
| | 00:30 | Now this is another one of those
things where you can say, "Yeah, yeah,
| | 00:33 | yeah, light's important. I get it.
| | 00:34 | If you don't have good light, you've got dark."
| | 00:37 | But the light thing is so much deeper
and more complicated than that, and whether
| | 00:41 | you're shooting color or black and white,
one of the most important things you
| | 00:44 | can do to improve your
photography is to study light itself.
| | 00:48 | I am not talking about the physics of
light, but simply opening your eyes to how
| | 00:52 | light looks at different times and
simply paying attention to its qualities.
| | 00:56 | Most people get that the light
looks better in the late afternoon.
| | 01:00 | Some people also see the
difference in the morning.
| | 01:01 | Others recognize that in the winter the
light generally looks different. That's great!
| | 01:06 | But you need to go farther.
| | 01:07 | Can you look at a scene and understand how
the light should be to get the best results?
| | 01:12 | Do you recognize when you're in a light
that is ideal for shooting, say, portraits?
| | 01:16 | Do you notice when there is no point
in taking a picture of that astonishing
| | 01:20 | scene that's before you because the
light is not working in your favor?
| | 01:24 | We don't just develop an eye for a
light because it's a technical necessity;
| | 01:27 | we develop an eye for light because
very often when your eyes are open to the
| | 01:32 | vagaries of light, you'll choose to
take a picture and not because you're
| | 01:36 | interested in a particular thing,
but because you're interested in the light
| | 01:39 | that's bouncing off of that thing.
| | 01:41 | When you have an aesthetic for light,
there is a lot more subject matter to be had
| | 01:44 | in the world, and when you're tuned
in to light, the subject matter that you
| | 01:48 | already know about can be
captured in much more compelling ways.
| | 01:52 | So why does the light look
better in the late afternoon?
| | 01:55 | Most people these days have heard
the term 'golden hour' and they know that
| | 01:59 | Hollywood types like to shoot movies
in it, and that term clues us into one of
| | 02:03 | the properties of light: it has a color.
| | 02:06 | A little bit before sunset, the light
turns very golden, or yellow, as it passes
| | 02:10 | through more of the earth's atmosphere.
| | 02:12 | This color can be very flattering to
skin tones, to grasses on a landscape, to
| | 02:17 | hair, to light-colored bricks on a building.
| | 02:20 | Those colors also carry emotional
impact because we recognize them as end-of-
| | 02:24 | day colors, and we have memories and emotional
associations with that transition from day to night.
| | 02:30 | Now, of course, as black-and-white
shooters, we're not so concerned with that
| | 02:33 | aspect of afternoon light, but something
else happens later in the day, and early
| | 02:38 | in the morning, as the sun
is just over the horizon.
| | 02:41 | Its light strikes things at more
of an oblique angle, causing them to
| | 02:45 | cast longer shadows.
| | 02:47 | Any texture on the thing itself will
also cast a shadow, meaning that textures
| | 02:52 | will appear much more vivid and deep.
| | 02:54 | So in addition to color, light has an angle.
| | 02:58 | A more extreme angle creates
more texture and longer shadows.
| | 03:02 | Related to that is contrast.
| | 03:04 | Longer shadows are typically darker, and
when the light is at an extreme angle,
| | 03:08 | there are more shadows, meaning
there are more dark things in your scene
| | 03:12 | alongside the light things.
| | 03:13 | In other words, you'll get an image
with more contrast, more range from the
| | 03:16 | darkest to lightest thing.
| | 03:18 | At noon, when the light is more overhead,
shadows are very short, texture goes
| | 03:22 | away, and there's very little contrast.
| | 03:24 | So I think of light as
having a contrast property also.
| | 03:29 | Finally, of course, there
is the direction of light,
| | 03:31 | which side the shadow is being cast off of.
| | 03:34 | If the shadow is being cast toward you,
that looks very different than if the
| | 03:38 | shadow is being cast to one side or
behind the object that you're shooting.
| | 03:42 | Now as much as I'm hyping high contrast,
it's important to recognize that there
| | 03:46 | are times when low
contrast is also very good light.
| | 03:50 | For some images, low-contrast light is
actually preferable, either because the
| | 03:54 | type of mood that you are aiming for or
because you want to use post-production
| | 03:58 | techniques to control the
light and shadow in your image.
| | 04:01 | And of course, if you are shooting
portraits, low-contrast light is almost
| | 04:04 | always preferable to high-contrast light.
| | 04:07 | Low-contrast light will reduce
shadows under eyes and chins.
| | 04:11 | It will lighten wrinkles and generally
create a more attractive final product.
| | 04:16 | Now, I don't walk around thinking, "Wow!
| | 04:19 | Look at this light that's shining at a 23-degree
angle, casting 60-yard shadows, from a vector of .96."
| | 04:26 | But to learn most things down to a gut
instinctive level, you've got to start
| | 04:30 | with a step-by-step intellectualized process.
| | 04:32 | So by putting a vocabulary to these
concepts, I'm hoping that you'll now be able
| | 04:36 | to go out into the world and start
thinking, "What does this light look like?
| | 04:39 | Is it very contrasty?
| | 04:41 | Am I seeing lots of texture?
| | 04:42 | Does it have a color?
| | 04:43 | Where are the shadows? Is it very even?
| | 04:46 | Is it somehow just luminous?"
| | 04:48 | The great thing about studying
light is that you don't have to go
| | 04:51 | anywhere special to do it.
| | 04:52 | In fact, doing it at home around light
that you're already familiar with is one
| | 04:56 | of the best ways to recognize how
different things can look at different times
| | 05:00 | of day, and different times of a year.
| | 05:03 | And just as important as studying light in
the real world is to study light in photos.
| | 05:07 | When you look at someone else's photos, take
note of where the light was in the picture.
| | 05:11 | What purpose does it serve?
| | 05:13 | How might the picture look
different if the light were different?
| | 05:16 | Now, the good news is that studying black
and white is a great way to learn about light.
| | 05:21 | As we've talked about, when we strip color
out of the equation, we're down to just brightness.
| | 05:25 | Light and shadow are all we have to
work with, so we are going to get a lot of
| | 05:29 | practice with paying attention to the
qualities of light. Now, the bad news.
| | 05:34 | Once your eyes are open to the vast
menu of different lighting in the world,
| | 05:38 | you'll find it hard to ever again
simply appreciate nice fall light, or the
| | 05:42 | fading light of a pretty afternoon.
| | 05:44 | Henceforth, light is going to become a
resource that you'll feel compelled to
| | 05:48 | capture and exploit.
| | 05:49 | But when you hit that point, that
point where seeing good light outside is
| | 05:54 | torture to you because you
want to go out and use it,
| | 05:56 | then you'll know that you've pushed
that understanding of light down to an
| | 06:00 | instinctive level that you can really work with.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Seeing in black and white| 00:00 | One of the things about black and
white that can intimidate beginning
| | 00:03 | photographers is that they think they have to
be able to see the world in black and white.
| | 00:07 | I guarantee you, when I'm shooting, I do
not have a black-and-white image in my mind.
| | 00:12 | I cannot perfectly imagine the color
world around me in black and white, but
| | 00:16 | that doesn't mean that I don't look at
the world in a different way when I'm
| | 00:19 | shooting in black and white.
| | 00:21 | Now very often, you'll
simply do what you always do:
| | 00:25 | you'll walk around, you'll look for interesting
subject matter, and then you'll compose and shoot.
| | 00:29 | In a rapidly changing situation, you may
not think at all about how light or dark
| | 00:33 | you want particular tones
to be in your final image.
| | 00:36 | You'll figure all that out later when
you convert your image to grayscale.
| | 00:40 | You may want to think some about
exposure, and we'll talk about that later.
| | 00:43 | But as we've already discussed, a
black-and-white photograph is a record only of
| | 00:47 | luminance, or brightness.
| | 00:49 | So if you move through the world paying
extra attention to changes in brightness
| | 00:53 | or curious plays of brightness or
darkness then your eyes will be open to
| | 00:57 | potential black-and-white images.
| | 00:59 | You don't have to be able to see
in your mind's eye what the finished
| | 01:02 | image might look like.
| | 01:03 | You can figure that out in post.
| | 01:05 | All you have to do is be able to
recognize that a scene might make a good
| | 01:09 | black-and-white image.
| | 01:10 | You then capture that and
figure out later if it works.
| | 01:13 | Now, if you are just starting out, make
it easy on yourself and do your practice
| | 01:17 | and what you know will be good light.
Head out in the late afternoon when the
| | 01:21 | shadows are long and the light is
contrasty and start practicing.
| | 01:24 | Trying to find good subject matter in
dull midday light is just going to be a
| | 01:28 | discouraging exercise in frustration.
| | 01:30 | So tilt things in your favor and be
certain that you're working in good light.
| | 01:34 | Later you can practice with less ideal lighting.
| | 01:36 | Remember, too, to always keep your eyes
open for any interesting relationships
| | 01:40 | of tone, regardless of what the light is like,
like we saw earlier with the lamp example.
| | 01:46 | As digital photographers, we are not of
course committed to choosing to shoot in
| | 01:50 | either color or black and white;
in fact, we're always shooting in color.
| | 01:54 | When you get adept at shooting in
black and white you'll be able to move
| | 01:57 | through the world doing your normal
color shooting, but also have your eyes open
| | 02:00 | to potential black-and-white images, and
there will be times when something that
| | 02:04 | you thought was going to be a good
color image will work better in black and
| | 02:07 | white and vice versa.
| | 02:09 | For now though, while you're learning
about black and white, it's best to go
| | 02:12 | out in the world with the idea that you're
only looking for good black-and-white images.
| | 02:16 | For a while you need to just wallow
in black and white, and shoot only that.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Taking a black-and-white expedition| 00:00 | I assume that you already have a large
collection of color images that you've shot,
| | 00:05 | and those color images can provide you
with a way to practice recognizing what
| | 00:08 | makes a good black-and-white image.
| | 00:11 | Even mere color photographers have
to worry about contrast and good light
| | 00:15 | and good composition,
| | 00:16 | so in the color work that you have
been doing, you've probably already taken
| | 00:19 | care of those issues.
| | 00:21 | So now, go through your color images, or
maybe just your best color images, and
| | 00:25 | start looking at them with an
eye towards black and white.
| | 00:28 | Try to identify images that you
think will work well in black and white.
| | 00:32 | This is basically a virtual version of
what you'll do when you're out shooting
| | 00:36 | in the color world, except that
you've already found the nice shots and you've
| | 00:39 | composed them and exposed them properly.
| | 00:41 | Now again, you're looking for
interesting plays of light and shadow, good
| | 00:45 | contrast, or areas that can be turned
into plays of light and dark depending on
| | 00:49 | how you ultimately perform
your black-and-white conversion.
| | 00:53 | Once you have selected some images, you
have two choices: you can make note of
| | 00:56 | them and come back to them after we're
done with the shooting lessons and we've
| | 01:00 | moved on to black-and-white conversion,
or you can jump ahead to black-and-white
| | 01:03 | conversion right now and see how
those images convert to black and white.
| | 01:07 | This will give you a chance to see if
your eye was correct, and it'll give you
| | 01:10 | some experience with black-and-
white conversion before we go shooting.
| | 01:14 | Black-and-white conversion starts in Chapter 4.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Finding and shooting a black-and-white image| 00:00 | It's a lovely afternoon here in
Southern California, and so I decided to get out
| | 00:05 | shooting, as one should do
all those lovely afternoons.
| | 00:08 | We've got this cool railroad trestle here,
and we've got about an hour left of daylight.
| | 00:12 | So, we are in great black-and-white
shooting situations here. The light is
| | 00:15 | really turning in our favor.
| | 00:16 | You can probably see that I do
have the warm late-afternoon glow.
| | 00:20 | We don't care so much about that
because we are shooting black and white, but
| | 00:24 | I am also getting a lot of texture,
a lot of shadows, a lot of play of
| | 00:26 | highlights and things.
| | 00:28 | So, all I am going to do here
is just see what I can find.
| | 00:31 | This is how shooting works.
| | 00:33 | I don't really have any grand idea;
| | 00:35 | I am just going to start poking around.
| | 00:38 | Right off the bat, I'm thinking that
depth of field is--I probably want as much
| | 00:42 | of it as I can get.
| | 00:42 | So, I put my camera in aperture priority mode.
| | 00:44 | I have set it on f/11.
| | 00:45 | I am just going to leave it there for right now.
| | 00:47 | It's already a little bit dark, so at f/11,
| | 00:50 | I have bumped up to ISO 200 to
be sure that I get good exposures.
| | 00:53 | If I come across something where I feel
like I want some shallow depth of field,
| | 00:57 | I will change it then, but I think
for the most part I am going to be deep.
| | 00:59 | So, I want a lot of depth of field.
| | 01:01 | However, before I even head into the
trestle, I'm looking this way and I have
| | 01:05 | talked a lot about shadow, and I keep
saying long shadows and so on and so forth,
| | 01:08 | but what's striking me when I look this
way is the highlights off of the rails
| | 01:13 | and off of the wire on the fences.
| | 01:16 | And I'm wondering if there's something
there. Because I'm shooting into the sun--
| | 01:19 | again direction of light here--because
I am shooting into the sun, I'm getting
| | 01:23 | nice silhouettes on those palm trees, so
the black silhouettes up against these
| | 01:28 | bright highlights on the rails and the
fence might be something interesting.
| | 01:32 | So, I'm focusing with the idea of
getting deep depth of field, and I am just
| | 01:36 | trying a few things.
| | 01:37 | I am trying a few different compositions.
| | 01:38 | I am going in tight, I am coming out far,
| | 01:40 | I am keeping the sun out of my shot, and
most importantly, I am keeping an eye out
| | 01:46 | for lens flare, because I am shooting
into the sun and flair is a dangerous thing
| | 01:51 | in those situations.
| | 01:52 | Now, let's get to work on this trellis here.
| | 01:54 | I'm just going to start
walking and see what I find.
| | 01:57 | Right off the bat, it's a little
bit interesting that we've got all
| | 01:59 | these graffiti and stuff.
| | 02:01 | But the graffiti is all color, and it's
mostly the same tone as the rusty metal.
| | 02:06 | So, I'm just going to skip that
because I am shooting black and white.
| | 02:09 | I don't think there's
really anything to be had there.
| | 02:13 | I've got nice long shadows here from the
structure itself, and I am about to
| | 02:18 | plunge to my death, which would make a
good picture, but I don't have anyone
| | 02:21 | else with me to get the shot.
| | 02:24 | What I am liking in here is--and this
is something that happens
| | 02:29 | with low-angle light--
| | 02:30 | I am getting all this
cool texture on this stuff.
| | 02:33 | It was actually a little more vibrant earlier;
| | 02:35 | it's gone a little flat.
| | 02:36 | Now the trick is, is there a photo here?
| | 02:38 | I can do detail work.
| | 02:40 | I can just see what kind of stuff I find
here, trying different orientations, and
| | 02:48 | for the most part I'm finding that all
of these pictures are incredibly boring.
| | 02:52 | But I am going to shoot them
anyway because it's good to know.
| | 02:56 | It's good to get some practice with
texture in my grayscale conversion.
| | 02:59 | I want to know what that's going to do
when I convert it to black and white.
| | 03:02 | There are a lot of pictures that you
just have to take to learn about them, or in
| | 03:06 | some cases to get them out of your system.
| | 03:08 | As you first start paying attention
to light, you're going to get really
| | 03:10 | interested in texture, and when that
happens, you need to get those shots and
| | 03:15 | learn about texture and learn
how it renders in black and white.
| | 03:18 | So, even though a lot of these are not
pictures that I am going to keep, they
| | 03:21 | are possibly good experiments.
| | 03:24 | Now the other thing that's going
on in here is just a lot of line.
| | 03:28 | With all of these beams and girders and
things going places, I am getting just
| | 03:31 | lots of interesting graphical detail, so
there might be something I can build up
| | 03:34 | from all these lines.
| | 03:35 | Now, I have also got all these plants back here.
| | 03:38 | And at first, I think, "Oh,
they are kind of lit up.
| | 03:41 | That's pretty," but for the most part
they are all the same tone of green.
| | 03:45 | It's just going to be a flat wall of gray,
and that's not going to be very interesting.
| | 03:49 | I don't really see anything here.
| | 03:54 | Notice I'm also not necessarily taking a
shot every time I look through the viewfinder.
| | 04:00 | I don't want to make my post-production
a nightmare of gobs and gobs of useless
| | 04:05 | and/or bad images.
| | 04:07 | So, some of the shadows on
the ground might be interesting.
| | 04:10 | The problem is I'm now getting my own shadow,
which I am not so interested in, so I am
| | 04:16 | going to try and hide in
this shadow and get a shot.
| | 04:19 | It's very easy to ignore shadows when we are
walking around, because they're not real things.
| | 04:23 | As you are shooting black and white,
you want to really pay attention to those
| | 04:26 | as objects that you can shoot.
| | 04:29 | But for the most part, I am coming on
here and I'm not really seeing very much.
| | 04:32 | I am not really seeing anything that
strikes my eye, and that's not so unusual.
| | 04:38 | Just because a situation is pretty,
doesn't mean there's a picture there.
| | 04:43 | There are a lot of people who are pretty,
but they're not photogenic. Similarly,
| | 04:46 | there are a lot of scenarios that you
walk into that are pretty but not scenic.
| | 04:51 | They may not make a good picture.
| | 04:52 | But I am not ready to give up yet;
| | 04:53 | I am going to keep looking around.
| | 04:55 | And we are almost to the end here, and
as I turn around, now I start to see
| | 05:00 | something, and I should've
noticed this from before--
| | 05:03 | again, a direction of light thing.
Walking this way is not so interesting.
| | 05:06 | The shadows are all going that way, and I am
mostly in shadow; I am not seeing a lot
| | 05:11 | of stuff. But if I turn around, now a
whole bunch of things are happening.
| | 05:14 | I am getting the highlights off the rails.
| | 05:16 | I am getting the highlights off the fences.
| | 05:18 | I'm getting the bridge thrown into silhouette.
| | 05:21 | This is getting much more interesting,
and these plants over here are now backlit.
| | 05:25 | It's no longer a uniform tone.
| | 05:27 | I am getting a lot of
interplay of light and shadow.
| | 05:29 | So, now simply by turning around, this whole
structure has turned into a different thing.
| | 05:35 | So, now it's time to
play a little bit with this.
| | 05:38 | Now, one of the tricky things here is I am
shooting, again shooting into sun can cause flare.
| | 05:43 | I can block some of that with my hand,
or I can try and work with the sun and
| | 05:47 | intentionally get flare, or I can
try and position it so that it's not
| | 05:51 | shining into the camera.
| | 05:53 | So, I am just working these.
| | 05:54 | Now, what I'm doing here
is shooting all these shots.
| | 06:00 | If you're out and shooting a gob of pictures,
that does not mean you're a bad photographer.
| | 06:04 | No photographer walks into any
particular situation says "Ah!
| | 06:09 | I see the picture, takes a shot, and goes home."
| | 06:11 | You have to work your subject.
| | 06:13 | You have to take lots and lots of pictures.
| | 06:15 | Because I want deep depth of field, I am
being careful about where I'm focusing.
| | 06:17 | Now, as I'm framing these
shots, the sky is empty.
| | 06:21 | It's a really boring sky.
| | 06:22 | It would be great if there were some
really puffy cumulus clouds up there, but
| | 06:26 | there aren't, and that's kind of bugging me.
| | 06:29 | So, I am going to try something else.
| | 06:30 | I am going to just start cropping the
sky out and not worrying about it and
| | 06:35 | going wider and getting some
kind of cool maybe distortion.
| | 06:42 | But I got to tell you, for the most part, I'm
still not feeling like I'm getting very much.
| | 06:47 | Now, you may be thinking that, "Well, you
are also not talking at all about all this
| | 06:53 | grayscale stuff you've been haranguing us with."
| | 06:56 | And that's true. At the moment,
I'm not thinking so much about tone.
| | 06:59 | I am thinking that these brightly lit
rails are going to be interesting against
| | 07:03 | black stuff, but this is
what I was mentioning before.
| | 07:06 | I'm recognizing this as a potential
black-and-white scene because of the dark
| | 07:11 | silhouettes and the light highlights
and the plays of light in the grass, but I
| | 07:14 | can't actually see it in gray yet. That's okay.
| | 07:16 | I will worry about that later.
| | 07:17 | And I hadn't really shot the grass yet.
| | 07:21 | We will see if there's something there.
| | 07:22 | I am not really seeing anything.
| | 07:25 | I've got to tell you, for the
most part, I'm kind of stuck.
| | 07:29 | Even looking in this
direction, I'm not seeing much.
| | 07:33 | We like to think that the creative
process is one of raw emotion and taking what
| | 07:38 | you feel and pushing it through your
camera and coming out with some great work
| | 07:41 | of art on the other end, and I've got
to tell you, it rarely works that way.
| | 07:44 | The process of creation is an
intellectual process most of the time.
| | 07:47 | And so at this point, I need to stop
and think for a minute. Why? Is there
| | 07:52 | something I'm missing?
| | 07:54 | What is it about the structure that
drew my attention in the first place?
| | 07:57 | There is a nice contrail in the
middle of some of these beams?
| | 08:03 | What was it that drew me to this in the first
place, and I think part of it is just the scale.
| | 08:06 | This is the big structure out here, it's
defining a very large space, and that's cool.
| | 08:13 | Just pointing my camera at it is
not necessarily going to capture that.
| | 08:17 | So, what can I do to convey a sense of scale?
| | 08:19 | I need to try and exaggerate things.
| | 08:22 | In theater, you talk about taking
ordinary life and blowing it up into drama;
| | 08:25 | photography is the same way.
| | 08:27 | I can't just stand here and point my
camera and expect to get what I'm feeling.
| | 08:30 | Sometimes I have to exaggerate things.
| | 08:32 | And I think in this case, one way of
exaggerating that is to leave this plane
| | 08:37 | that I've been shooting in.
| | 08:38 | I have been walking around at eye level
shooting everything, and it may be that
| | 08:41 | that's the wrong step.
| | 08:43 | So, I am going to just get down a
little bit lower and see what happens.
| | 08:47 | And when I do that, now right off the
bat, this rail here becomes more of a
| | 08:54 | subject almost, more of a
feature, so I am going to shoot that up.
| | 08:59 | I'm putting the sun back
behind that trellis back there.
| | 09:02 | Now, if I look at this scene and think
about it in black and white, what I have got
| | 09:04 | actually is pretty close to a black-
and-white scene, even in the viewfinder.
| | 09:08 | I have got the black
silhouettes, the light rails.
| | 09:11 | I am going to get down lower.
| | 09:13 | In fact, I am going to just give up on
looking at the camera and get my camera
| | 09:17 | right down here on the rail
and shoot up a little bit.
| | 09:21 | I am just tilting the camera up and down.
| | 09:24 | Now, I could, if I wanted, put my
camera in live view and try and look at
| | 09:27 | it, but all I would end up doing is tilting it
up and down and shooting a bunch of pictures,
| | 09:31 | so I am just going to do that without looking.
| | 09:32 | I am being lazy, but I really
don't think it's going to matter.
| | 09:36 | So, I am going to see if any of that works.
| | 09:39 | Now, we are getting somewhere.
| | 09:40 | I think this may be the shot.
| | 09:42 | Looking at the back of my camera, I
can't see it in gray, but I can imagine some
| | 09:46 | of these textures in here that are
nicely dappled with light, and they have got
| | 09:50 | all this flakey paint on it.
| | 09:52 | Those are really going to pop into a
high-contrast situation once I start
| | 09:55 | playing with them in grayscale.
| | 09:57 | Even though I'm feeling confident about
this shot though, I'm not going to stop
| | 10:00 | shooting until I am completely out
of ideas because one never knows.
| | 10:03 | And this is an interesting texture here.
| | 10:05 | This long row of railroad
ties that has stuff on it.
| | 10:09 | So, I am going to try some of these.
| | 10:14 | You know one of the really great things
about digital photography is we can do
| | 10:18 | this kind of haphazard shooting
and it doesn't cost us anything.
| | 10:24 | And so it's really nice to be
able to take advantage of that.
| | 10:27 | At this point now, getting down low, I
have really exaggerated the sense of space,
| | 10:33 | and I'm really just playing with line
at this point, and this is really one of
| | 10:36 | the building blocks of black and
white photography a lot of times,
| | 10:38 | just line and form a geometry, and
that's all I am doing is playing with all
| | 10:42 | those vanishing point lines.
| | 10:44 | I think that may be it. There's no way to tell
though, until I get back into the lab and start processing
| | 10:51 | these images and see what I have got.
| | 10:53 | Before I leave though, I am going to
take one look around, really thinking
| | 10:56 | about tone and light and shadow, and have I
missed anything, and I don't see anything else.
| | 11:04 | A lot of times your eye goes dead to a
scene if you shoot in it too long.
| | 11:08 | I am not feeling it here anymore, so
I'm going to get out of here before I get
| | 11:12 | run over by a train.
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| Shooting a tone-based subject| 00:00 | I have been really concentrating on
the good light situation here, on this
| | 00:04 | trestle with the sun going down and
the long shadows and the nice highlights,
| | 00:07 | but here off to the side, there is
something very interesting, which is an area
| | 00:11 | of really bad light, but there's
something that I think that I can do with it,
| | 00:17 | and there it's something tonal.
| | 00:18 | If I look here, I've got this green lawn
going out to the sea and cutting across
| | 00:24 | is this winding path of sand, which is
very light, and then I've got those backlit
| | 00:29 | bushes back there,
and then the ocean and the sky--
| | 00:32 | all of it in shade, so I've got no
contrast on it. But if I'm thinking like a
| | 00:36 | black-and-white shooter, what I'm seeing,
if I remember, any color here can be
| | 00:40 | any tone that I want.
| | 00:41 | So I've got all this
green, and I've got some blue.
| | 00:44 | What if I toned this green really dark,
| | 00:47 | so I've got this dark field with
this white line snaking across of it?
| | 00:50 | I've also got the stone circle that
might light up, and then I've got the blue
| | 00:54 | sky behind those bushes over there.
| | 00:56 | The blue sky might be able to be
toned dark to really bring out the
| | 00:59 | highlighted vegetation over there.
| | 01:01 | Again, I don't have great light
here, but I've got very interesting
| | 01:04 | tonal relationships:
| | 01:06 | the tonal relationship between the
potentially dark grass and the potentially
| | 01:09 | light path, the tonal relationship
between the sky and the backlit plants.
| | 01:14 | I'm not always looking for light when
I'm shooting black and white; sometimes
| | 01:16 | I'm just looking for interesting tone.
| | 01:19 | So I'm still here in aperture priority
mode, because I want to be sure this is
| | 01:22 | all good depth of field.
| | 01:23 | I cranked my ISO up to 400,
because this is pretty dark.
| | 01:27 | Now, actually, that's even
going a little slow. Well, now I'm okay.
| | 01:30 | I'm at 200th of a second.
| | 01:32 | So what I am doing is I'm trying a few
different framings, and this is a purely
| | 01:35 | graphical construction here.
| | 01:37 | I've just got these lines that I'm playing with.
| | 01:38 | I like the idea of the path going
right out of the corner of the frame.
| | 01:42 | We want to maybe try and play around
with the circles, centering it, maybe
| | 01:46 | pushing it off to the side following my rule
of thirds idea, and all that kind of stuff.
| | 01:51 | So I'm just working the shot a little
bit, and we're going to see what we can do
| | 01:57 | with these tones once we
get into post-production.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exposing for black and white| 00:00 | For the most part, when you're shooting
black and white, all of your exposure
| | 00:04 | decisions and your whole exposure
theory will be just like what it is when
| | 00:09 | you're shooting color.
| | 00:10 | As you saw in our previous shooting
movies, I was doing everything that I would
| | 00:14 | normally do if I were shooting color.
| | 00:16 | I was thinking about depth
of field and aperture control,
| | 00:20 | I was thinking about where I needed to
focus to get the most depth of field, all
| | 00:24 | of that kind of stuff that you do
even when you're shooting color.
| | 00:26 | With that said, if you are shooting an
image that you're pretty sure it's going
| | 00:30 | to be black and white, there might be one
more thing that you want to think about,
| | 00:34 | which is the slight exposure
adjustment that's going to help you in your
| | 00:37 | post-production, and we're going
to take a look at the right now.
| | 00:40 | We're looking at that in Photoshop
rather than out in the field with a camera,
| | 00:44 | because I really want us to be able
to look at the histogram of an image.
| | 00:48 | Yes, you can look at the histogram on
a camera, but we're just going to get a
| | 00:51 | better view here in Photoshop.
| | 00:53 | If you don't know what I mean when I
say histogram, or if you're not real
| | 00:56 | comfortable with histograms, or if
you think histogram is a kind of scary
| | 00:59 | looking, I really, really encourage you
to go watch two movies in chapter 9 of
| | 01:05 | Foundations of Photography: Exposure.
| | 01:08 | Chapter 9 is the Exposure
Compensation chapter and the movies are in "The
| | 01:11 | histogram," which is the fifth movie of
that chapter, and "Real-world histograms,"
| | 01:16 | which is the sixth movie.
| | 01:18 | If you're thinking, "Oh, it's okay,
I'll just pick it up as we go,"
| | 01:21 | the rest of the post-production in this
course is pretty much all histograms all the time.
| | 01:26 | We are going to live and die by the
histogram, and most of what I'm going to be
| | 01:29 | talking about in terms our adjustments
is going to be in terms of the histogram.
| | 01:34 | So again, if you're really not
comfortable with it, it would be much better if
| | 01:38 | you got up to speed on
histograms before we continue.
| | 01:41 | So with all that said, I'm going
to open up the Histogram palette in
| | 01:44 | Photoshop right now.
| | 01:45 | I have here an image that I shot,
thinking that this might be a good color
| | 01:49 | image, and mostly I like the curvy form
of the tree here. And I was thinking it's
| | 01:53 | nicely, brightly lit here.
| | 01:55 | It's possible that I could either
tonally, or through exposure changes,
| | 01:59 | separate it from the background and have
maybe this cool brightly lit curve in
| | 02:02 | front of the background.
| | 02:04 | So I shot it, and this is the
histogram for this image, and it's good.
| | 02:08 | It's got just what we want
| | 02:09 | when we are looking at a histogram.
I don't overexposed highlights.
| | 02:13 | I don't see underexposed shadows. As you
probably know, underexposed shadows are
| | 02:17 | not necessarily critical,
but overexposed highlights are definitely something
| | 02:20 | you want to avoid most of the time.
| | 02:22 | The bulk of my tones are down here in
the shadowy areas, and that's going to be
| | 02:27 | all of these tones down here, all the little
bits of shadow, all the black parts of the tree.
| | 02:31 | That's fine, but when I start editing,
I'm going to be wanting to probably push
| | 02:35 | these midtones around a lot, and I
don't have a lot of midtone data.
| | 02:40 | Now, I may be wrong.
| | 02:41 | I may not edit the image this way,
but I'm thinking the subject of my image
| | 02:45 | is pretty much just all midtones,
and right now I don't have a lot of midtone data.
| | 02:50 | When I shot the image, I looked at the
histogram and I noticed that the bulk of
| | 02:53 | my tones were shadow tones, and I
figured that while the tree is midtone, I'm
| | 02:56 | probably going to want to push it around a lot.
| | 02:58 | I would like to have more mid one data.
| | 03:00 | So I dialed in a one-stop
overexposure in my exposure compensation control,
| | 03:06 | figuring if it's overexposed, a lot of
these tones are going to push this way.
| | 03:10 | Now, the resulting image is here,
and I'm going to flip back and forth here.
| | 03:14 | This is regular exposure.
| | 03:16 | This is one stop over. Regular.
One stop over. And you can see, I've got just
| | 03:21 | slightly more midtone data.
| | 03:22 | Now the critical part is I
still don't have overexposure,
| | 03:26 | I still don't have clipped highlights.
| | 03:28 | So just that little bit of exposure
compensation is just redistributing
| | 03:31 | things to be a little more even so
that when I get time to actually edit my
| | 03:36 | image, I've got more to work with,
and having more to work with means there
| | 03:40 | is going to be a less chance of banding and
other problems. And here's my final conversion.
| | 03:45 | I want to introduce a couple more
terms that we're going to be bandying about
| | 03:48 | when we get into post-production,
and things that you might want to think about
| | 03:51 | when you're shooting.
| | 03:53 | High-key images are typically
images with lots of bright in them.
| | 03:58 | I tend to think of a high-key image
as an image where you are not worried
| | 04:02 | about overexposure.
| | 04:03 | You don't worry about loss of detail.
| | 04:04 | This is a high-key image. I've lost all
the detail back here on this building,
| | 04:08 | all the detail back here, the whites are just
completely blown out--and that was intentional.
| | 04:13 | And when I shot the image, I shot it
with that in mind. I then did more work
| | 04:17 | on it in post-production, but it was really, at
the time, recognizing this was a high-key image.
| | 04:22 | The reason I recognize that is I
was actually shooting this in midday.
| | 04:25 | You can tell the shadows are very short.
| | 04:26 | I mean this wasn't a lot of dramatic
light, and I kind of had this idea of this
| | 04:31 | building that look like the prow of a
ship, and if I could blow the background
| | 04:34 | out into a real high-key overblown white,
it might look like it was coming out of
| | 04:40 | fog or something like that.
| | 04:41 | Here's another high-key image, and
what struck me about this was simply the
| | 04:45 | tonal relationship: The left side of image was
all in shadow. The right side was very bright.
| | 04:51 | The camera could actually expose plenty
of detail in here, but I intentionally
| | 04:55 | overexposed to get a high-key image.
| | 04:58 | This one I could just as easily have done in
post-production just by blowing out the highlights.
| | 05:01 | Either way, whether you're going to try
to overexpose to create a high-key image
| | 05:06 | or create a high-key image in post,
knowing these terms and thinking in these
| | 05:10 | terms when you're shooting can
help you recognize more images.
| | 05:13 | Understanding that a high-key image--
an image with blown highlights--is
| | 05:17 | sometimes a good thing,
| | 05:19 | opens up more possibilities of
subject matter, because you're not to be so
| | 05:22 | concerned about, 'oh, I can
expose this without overexposing.'
| | 05:26 | If you're in a situation where your
highlights are really going to overexpose,
| | 05:29 | maybe you just want to go towards
that and work towards a high-key image.
| | 05:33 | As you might expect, there is the
opposite of high key, which is low key,
| | 05:36 | low key-images, where our images that
are often very dark, where we don't worry
| | 05:41 | about losing detail in shadows.
| | 05:44 | So I've plunged these into
complete darkness, and that's okay.
| | 05:47 | Silhouettey images are very often low-key images,
| | 05:50 | although this is not a complete
silhouette--I've managed to preserve some
| | 05:53 | highlight details, so that it is
not just an outline of a giraffe.
| | 05:57 | It's just a very low-key image.
| | 05:59 | Most of the time of course, we want
images with detail in the highlights and
| | 06:03 | details in the shadows.
| | 06:04 | We want to preserve detail throughout an
image and have really broad tonal range.
| | 06:08 | But low-key images and high-key images
are definitely thinks that should be in
| | 06:13 | your photographic vocabulary, and
you should be thinking about those when
| | 06:16 | you're out shooting.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Black-and-White Post-ProductionThe nature of grayscale images| 00:00 | Now we're ready to get to what is, in
my opinion, the good stuff, which is
| | 00:04 | converting a color image to black and white.
| | 00:07 | Shooting is fun, and you get to go
places, and you get to go outside and all
| | 00:09 | that, and that's great.
| | 00:10 | But as far as making a black-and-white
photo, this is where it happens, in the
| | 00:14 | process of converting color to black and white.
| | 00:17 | With what we're going to learn here,
you're going to be able to take a blah
| | 00:19 | color image and possibly turn it into a
really interesting black and white, or
| | 00:24 | you're going to be able to finally see
the possibility that you saw when you
| | 00:27 | were shooting realized into an
actual black-and-white picture.
| | 00:31 | We can do so much manipulation in
black and white, in terms of tonality, that
| | 00:35 | there is just a tremendous amount of
creativity that can happen in this process.
| | 00:38 | Before we get to converting to black
and white though, which we're going to
| | 00:41 | start in the next movie, I
want to talk about color.
| | 00:43 | I know that sounds a little weird,
but let's just look really closely at what's
| | 00:47 | going on in this image in terms of color,
because we're going to spending a lot
| | 00:51 | of time thinking about how to
turn color into a shade of gray.
| | 00:55 | So I've zoomed in on this image a long
way--I'm at 3200% here--so each one of these
| | 01:00 | squares is an individual pixel.
| | 01:02 | I am looking at that side of that
brick tower, which is why I'm seeing this
| | 01:05 | repeating pattern, a wall of bricks as a
repeating pattern, and we can see that
| | 01:09 | each individual pixel has its own color.
| | 01:12 | So this is a light shade of tan, and this
is a darker shade, and so on and so forth.
| | 01:16 | And the computer can represent
millions and millions of colors, and any pixel
| | 01:20 | can be a completely discrete, individual color.
| | 01:24 | That's an important point to remember,
because when we print color, we can't do that.
| | 01:28 | An individual dot on a
printed page can only be one
| | 01:31 | of maybe eight colors, depending on
how many colors you have in your printer.
| | 01:35 | Instead, your color printer works by
combining little patterns of different
| | 01:38 | colored dots to create the
illusion of every other color.
| | 01:41 | The fact that that works is
actually is just kind of amazing.
| | 01:43 | So anyway, I'm looking at
individual pixels here, and they are each an
| | 01:46 | individual color, and as we've learned,
individual colors are made by mixing
| | 01:50 | red and green and blue.
| | 01:51 | I'm going to go over here to the
Channels palette, and I see I've got RGB, and
| | 01:55 | then I have Red, Green, and Blue.
| | 01:57 | In Photoshop, I can look at
individual color channels.
| | 02:01 | So if I click on the Red channel, what I see
is a map of the red information in the image.
| | 02:06 | This pixel, because it's a lighter
shade, has more red in it than this pixel,
| | 02:11 | which is a darker shade.
| | 02:12 | In other words, lighter pixels have more
of a particular color that we're looking at.
| | 02:17 | So I've got a whole lot of red
through here, not a lot of red through here.
| | 02:20 | Similarly, I have some green in here,
really not a lot of green in here,
| | 02:26 | and then same for blue.
| | 02:28 | The image is getting darker as I
shift to these other channels, because I'm
| | 02:31 | looking at that reddish brick. So that
brick was a reddish, tan tone, so there
| | 02:35 | is going to be a lot of
red there, not a lot of blue.
| | 02:37 | Let's zoom back out to look at the whole image.
| | 02:39 | I'm looking at the blue channel right
now, and the sky was blue, so I'm seeing
| | 02:44 | a whole a lot of white here, because there's
a lot of blue information in that blue sky.
| | 02:48 | Let's look at the Red channel.
| | 02:50 | And it's gotten a little bit darker,
because there's not a lot of red
| | 02:53 | information in the sky.
| | 02:55 | So, right away, you can see, well,
just by clicking on a channel I've got a
| | 02:58 | grayscale conversion, and that's true.
| | 03:00 | This is one of the ways that
you could convert to grayscale.
| | 03:02 | There are lots of ways. This is not the best way.
| | 03:04 | The reason I'm just showing you all
this is to drive home that what our goal
| | 03:08 | here is is to take this combination of
red, green, and blue and mix it together
| | 03:14 | to produce a shade of gray
of the type that we like.
| | 03:17 | We can derive any shade of gray that we want
from these three bits of color information.
| | 03:22 | And there are lots of ways of doing
that, and how we choose to do that is really
| | 03:27 | the bulk of the creative process of
black-and-white photography, and that's what
| | 03:31 | we're going to start in the next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Converting to black and white using Photoshop CS4 or CS5| 00:00 | At long last we are ready to
convert a color image to black and white.
| | 00:04 | We've gone through the theory.
| | 00:05 | We've gone through the shooting.
| | 00:07 | I've got a color image open up here,
and I'm ready to do my conversion.
| | 00:10 | Now, there are many ways to convert
a color image to black and white.
| | 00:15 | There are lots of different
pieces of software you can use.
| | 00:17 | Most image editors have a way of
converting color to black and white, and within
| | 00:21 | any image editor there might be
multiple methods of doing the conversion.
| | 00:25 | I'm here in Photoshop CS5.
| | 00:27 | In Photoshop, I can list for you 16
different ways to convert a color image to
| | 00:31 | black and white, and if you look in
magazine articles and books and web pages,
| | 00:35 | you'll find lots of people listing
lots of different methods, and it used to be
| | 00:39 | that knowing the three or four
different conversion methods was not a bad idea,
| | 00:43 | because you got very
different results from each.
| | 00:45 | But starting with Photoshop CS3,
Adobe introduced a new black-and-white
| | 00:49 | conversion feature that is almost the end-
all be-all black-and-white conversion tool.
| | 00:55 | To my mind, you don't need to clutter
your brain with other techniques anymore.
| | 00:59 | Just learn this one.
| | 01:00 | It does everything you need and does it with
some really nice flair that can be very useful.
| | 01:05 | So that's what we're going to
be using mostly in this course.
| | 01:08 | I may at one point or another take a
look at one or two other methods, but
| | 01:11 | probably not, and I will give you
some brief ideas of how to do grayscale
| | 01:15 | conversions in some other applications.
| | 01:17 | But if you're in Photoshop CS3 or later,
then this is what you're going to be using.
| | 01:21 | Image > Adjustments > Black &
White takes me to Photoshop's black-and-
| | 01:26 | white conversion tool.
| | 01:28 | When that happens, the first thing I
see is a grayscale version of my image.
| | 01:32 | This is a default grayscale recipe.
| | 01:34 | Now the problem with default grayscale
recipes very often is that they're just
| | 01:38 | not right for your image. They're not what you
had in mind and so you want the ability to alter that
| | 01:42 | recipe to get a more
custom grayscale conversion.
| | 01:45 | And that's what's really nice
about this feature is it gives me
| | 01:48 | tremendous control.
| | 01:49 | This is why this feature scores over
so many other grayscale conversion
| | 01:53 | methods, and it's why we are, for the
most part, ignoring all those other
| | 01:56 | grayscale conversion methods.
| | 01:58 | So this Black and White dialog box
has these color sliders, and I've got
| | 02:01 | Reds, Yellows, Greens, Cyans, Blues,
and Magentas, and these correspond to
| | 02:06 | colors in the image.
| | 02:07 | I'm going an unchecked my Preview box
here, so that we can see the original color
| | 02:11 | image, and let's just take
note of a couple of things.
| | 02:13 | I've got blue up here in the sky.
| | 02:15 | I've got blue down here
on this video rental store.
| | 02:19 | I'm going to turn Preview back on so
that I can see my grayscale conversion.
| | 02:24 | I'm going to take the Blues
slider and drag it to the left.
| | 02:26 | When I do that, anything in the
image that is blue gets darker,
| | 02:31 | so my sky is gotten darker and
the video store has gotten darker.
| | 02:35 | If I slide to the right, anything in
the image that is blue gets lighter,
| | 02:38 | so now I'm lightening the sky and
with it goes to the video store.
| | 02:42 | It is not understanding that I'm
trying to lighten a particular thing,
| | 02:45 | it's just lightening
anything in the image that's blue.
| | 02:49 | So I'm going put that back to where it was.
Let's look at the color image again.
| | 02:52 | I've got some reds back here and some greens.
| | 02:55 | So if I drag the Reds slider, let's just
think for a minute about what's going to happen.
| | 02:58 | This tree back here and this truck
should get lighter as I drag the Reds to the
| | 03:04 | right, and sure enough, they are.
| | 03:06 | And the sign has gotten lighter, and
I've gotten a little bit lightening in a
| | 03:10 | couple of other places, because there's
reds up here in the brick--there's even
| | 03:13 | just a light red stain here.
| | 03:15 | There are some red down here.
| | 03:17 | So even these slight red tones are
getting altered as I move the Reds slider.
| | 03:24 | So what's really nice about this is I
can say, well, I know that I want the sky
| | 03:27 | darker so that it's more
contrasty against the foreground here.
| | 03:32 | For the moment, I'm not going to
worry about the fact that this is
| | 03:34 | darkening, but actually now that it is,
it kind of like it. It's set off against
| | 03:38 | this white building.
| | 03:39 | And to create further contrast,
maybe I should lighten the green trees.
| | 03:42 | So I'm going to drag the
Greens slider up to lighten them.
| | 03:46 | Well, maybe I don't like that so much.
| | 03:48 | I like that this bits lighter than
this bit, but maybe they should be darkened
| | 03:52 | so that they really stand out against the sky.
| | 03:54 | That's looking pretty good.
| | 03:56 | Now, let's crank the red so that
that tree stands out. There we go.
| | 04:00 | Now we're getting somewhere.
| | 04:02 | Obviously, these other tones are
getting messed up, maybe in ways that I like,
| | 04:05 | maybe in ways I don't.
| | 04:06 | We'll look later at how to control those.
| | 04:08 | At the moment, I just want to you to
understand what this box is doing.
| | 04:11 | I'm going to put this back to kind of their
default positions here and look at something else.
| | 04:17 | Let's say that I want to fiddle with this
truck, but I'm not really sure what color it is.
| | 04:22 | If I just mouse over here into my image,
my cursor turns into an eyedropper.
| | 04:26 | Now if I left-click, I get this
weird little cursor. It's a finger pointer
| | 04:31 | with some arrows on it.
| | 04:32 | If I drag it to the left, Photoshop
automatically identifies--look over there on
| | 04:38 | the right in the Black and White
dialog box, the Reds slider is moving--
| | 04:41 | it has automatically identified the
color that I clicked on and is adjusting
| | 04:45 | the appropriate slider.
| | 04:46 | I'm going to undo that now with Command+Z.
| | 04:49 | To do the edit that I did a minute
ago, which I did manually using these
| | 04:52 | sliders, I can also just come
up here and use the eyedropper.
| | 04:54 | I can say I want darken the sky.
| | 04:55 | I don't want to go that far.
| | 04:57 | I want to darken these trees, and I want to
lighten this tree by dragging to the right.
| | 05:04 | So drag to left to darken, drag to the right
to lighten, just like you would on the sliders.
| | 05:08 | So this is nice. I don't even have to
deal with the sliders if I don't want to.
| | 05:11 | This is what I'm talking about,
about having great control over your
| | 05:15 | grayscale conversion.
| | 05:16 | It's really like being in a darkroom,
if you ever did that, and it's like I am
| | 05:19 | selectively dodging and burning.
| | 05:21 | This Presets menu contains some
predefined kind of recipe alterations here that
| | 05:27 | are designed to simulate how you
used to shoot black-and-white film.
| | 05:31 | It used to be you would shoot black-and-
white film through colored filters to do
| | 05:34 | a type of toning that we're doing here.
| | 05:36 | So if you're used to thinking
that way, this can be very nice.
| | 05:38 | If I choose the Red filter, my sky gets darker,
which is traditionally how you made darker skies.
| | 05:44 | Here's an Infrared
simulator, which kind of works.
| | 05:46 | It's thrown my green trees into white.
| | 05:49 | This is going to cut out a lot of
light and generally lighten my whole image.
| | 05:52 | This is going to give me an extra
contrast kick, in addition to a Red filter.
| | 05:57 | These are often nice places to start.
| | 05:58 | I typically just start with the
default settings and begin toning on my own.
| | 06:02 | Those are the basics of the
Black and White dialog box.
| | 06:05 | We're going to be coming back to this
throughout the course and looking at it in
| | 06:08 | more detail as we go on.
| | 06:09 | For now though, fiddle around with it
and try to get comfortable with how the
| | 06:13 | sliders correspond to colors in your image.
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| More about the Black & White dialog box| 00:00 | I have more to say about
the Black and White dialog box.
| | 00:03 | In fact, I've got a lot more to say, and
we'll be talking about it throughout the
| | 00:06 | rest of this course.
| | 00:07 | But before we go back to it, I want
to look at another tool in Photoshop,
| | 00:11 | not one that I think you should use,
but one that is used in a lot of other
| | 00:15 | image-editing programs
| | 00:16 | and one that if you've been using
Photoshop for a long time, you might be used to
| | 00:19 | using, and I want to talk about it
because I think if you're an old Photoshop
| | 00:23 | hand who has used this tool before, it's
important to explain how it's different
| | 00:27 | from the Black and White dialog.
| | 00:28 | I've got the same exercise file
open that we used in the last lesson.
| | 00:32 | I am going to go to Image > Adjustments >
Channel Mixer, and it brings up this thing,
| | 00:36 | which looks kind of like the Black and
White dialog box, except I've only got
| | 00:39 | three color channels.
| | 00:41 | To get a grayscale conversion, I have
to check this Monochrome box, and that
| | 00:44 | gives me again a default grayscale recipe.
| | 00:47 | Now I've got red, green, and blue.
| | 00:49 | You should be comfortable
with what these are now--
| | 00:51 | the building blocks of any color image.
| | 00:53 | But these are percentages.
| | 00:55 | In the Black and White
dialog box, they are simply unit values.
| | 00:58 | My grayscale image is being created by
taking 40% of the red channel, mixing
| | 01:02 | it with 40% of the green channel, and
then mixing in 20% of the blue channel,
| | 01:06 | for a total of 100%.
| | 01:08 | As long as this is at 100%, my overall
brightness in the image will not change.
| | 01:13 | So let's say I want to
darken the sky like I did earlier.
| | 01:15 | I know the sky is blue.
| | 01:17 | So I might say, great,
| | 01:18 | I'll grab the Blue slider and drag it to left.
| | 01:21 | And sure enough, my sky has gotten
darker, but so has the rest of my image.
| | 01:25 | And that's because these are
not targeting specific colors,
| | 01:28 | these are targeting components.
| | 01:31 | And as we know, every pixel in the image is
made by combining these three components.
| | 01:37 | So when I'm dragging the blue slider
to the left, I am not saying find blue in
| | 01:41 | the image and darken it.
| | 01:43 | I am saying darken the blue component.
| | 01:45 | So any color that has blue in it--purple,
for example--will get darker because
| | 01:50 | it's got some blue in it.
| | 01:51 | So the sky is getting
darker, as is everything else.
| | 01:54 | The other reason that the entire image
is darkened is because I've drain luminance
| | 01:57 | from my image. I am no longer at 100%.
| | 01:59 | So to get my image back up to its
original brightness, I need to drag these up.
| | 02:04 | So let's say that I wanted to darken the sky.
| | 02:06 | I am going to knock that down to -20.
| | 02:08 | So if I start bumping these up--I am
just kind of eyeballing this, trying to get
| | 02:16 | it back up to my original exposure and
unfortunately, by doing that I've brighten
| | 02:20 | the sky back up again.
| | 02:20 | So it looks like there's a red
component in the sky, so I should get my
| | 02:23 | brightness back with green--and
that's still getting a little darker.
| | 02:28 | Are you beginning to see
why I don't push this tool?
| | 02:31 | The reason I'm explaining it though
again, is for those of you who've used it
| | 02:34 | before. This is what is different
about the Black and White dialog box
| | 02:38 | is it's not a component mix.
| | 02:40 | It's actually identifying specific
colors in your image and toning them.
| | 02:44 | If you do find yourself editing color in
another image editor that only offers a
| | 02:48 | channel mixer, then these are the kinds
of problems you are going to be facing.
| | 02:51 | Yes, you can try to target a specific
component to lighten or darken it, but if
| | 02:55 | you do, you're going to be
affecting the rest of your image.
| | 02:58 | This Constant slider down here let's
you apply an overall brightening or
| | 03:02 | darkening to your image,
but it's a pretty blunt instrument.
| | 03:05 | As you can see, as I brighten, my darks get
lighter also, so this is not a real useful tool.
| | 03:11 | Nevertheless, I'm hoping that by
looking at this, you now understand the
| | 03:14 | black and white is not
affecting component colors.
| | 03:16 | It's actually affecting
discrete colors in your image.
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| Converting to black and white using Black & White adjustment layers| 00:00 | So far, I've been applying the black-
and-white conversion tool by opening an
| | 00:05 | image and going up here to Image >
Adjustments > Black & White, and when I do
| | 00:09 | that--like I am doing right now, and this is
just the same thing we've seen before--
| | 00:13 | I'm going to make a couple of
adjustments to the sliders, hit OK, and when I do,
| | 00:17 | the black-and-white adjustment is
applied to my color image in a destructive
| | 00:21 | manner, meaning my original
pixels are irrevocably altered.
| | 00:24 | The color image is gone; this
is now a black-and-white image.
| | 00:27 | Yes, I can undo to get back to my color
image, or redo to get back to black and white.
| | 00:31 | But as soon as I make one more
error, I can't do that anymore.
| | 00:34 | And if I save the image then for sure
it is henceforth a black-and-white image.
| | 00:39 | The problem with that is if I want to
keep the color version I have to keep
| | 00:42 | separate files and so on and so forth,
and more importantly, if I decide well,
| | 00:46 | I'd like to darken that blue sky a little
more, I can't get back to those tools in any way.
| | 00:51 | So, a much better way to apply the black-
and-white conversion in Photoshop is to
| | 00:55 | do it through an adjustment layer.
| | 00:57 | Adjustment layers are Photoshop's
mechanism for applying certain edits in a
| | 01:02 | completely non-destructive manner,
meaning that you can go back and alter them
| | 01:05 | or remove them later.
| | 01:07 | If you're not familiar with adjustment
layers, we'll do a quick run-through right now.
| | 01:10 | Here in my Layers palette, I have a
background layer. That's my image.
| | 01:14 | Down at the bottom, I have the little
circle that's half black, half white.
| | 01:17 | That's a pop-up menu. If I click on
it, I get this list of things.
| | 01:20 | And they're all operations in Photoshop that
I can apply as an adjustment layer, so I
| | 01:25 | am going to pick Black & White.
| | 01:27 | And when I do, my image goes to grayscale
with the default black-and-white recipe,
| | 01:32 | and my Adjustments panel up here fills
with these black-and-white controls just
| | 01:36 | like we saw in the Black and White dialog box.
| | 01:38 | Now, if you're using Photoshop CS3,
you won't have this Adjustments panel;
| | 01:43 | instead, you will simply get the Black
and White dialog box like we saw earlier,
| | 01:47 | you configure it, hit OK, and then your
adjustment layer appears down here, just
| | 01:51 | like we've got here.
| | 01:52 | Now notice my color image is still here.
| | 01:53 | There is just now a layer
sitting on top that's doing the
| | 01:56 | black-and-white conversion.
| | 01:57 | This little eyeball controls visibility.
If I turn that off, you see my color image.
| | 02:01 | Turn it back on and there
is my black-and-white image.
| | 02:04 | You can think of this Black and
White layer as some kind of like magic
| | 02:07 | transparency that you're setting on
top of your color print, and when you do
| | 02:11 | that, it converts into black and white--
or maybe a can of black-and-white spray
| | 02:14 | paint of some kind; you spray it on your image
and wherever you spray, the image goes grayscale.
| | 02:19 | So what's cool about this is I can hide it.
| | 02:21 | I can, if I want, remove it completely and
go back to my color image and undo that.
| | 02:26 | Also, if I adjust my parameters up
here--and we'll do the same edit we've been
| | 02:31 | doing. I'll darken the sky up a little
bit. I'll lighten that red tree, and I
| | 02:35 | will darken the greens.
| | 02:37 | Let me just mention to get this
Eyedropper tool like we had in the
| | 02:41 | Black and White dialog,
| | 02:42 | you have to click on this thing.
| | 02:44 | So I have to select my adjustment layer,
then click on this thing, then I can go
| | 02:49 | up here and drag with the
eyedropper to alter my parameters.
| | 02:53 | Now what's great about doing this as an
adjustment layer is these parameters will
| | 02:57 | always be alterable.
| | 02:59 | I can save the image, shut it down,
close it, go to launch, come back, and I will
| | 03:04 | still be able to adjust these parameters later.
| | 03:06 | So if later I do a print and decide
well, the sky needs to be a little bit
| | 03:10 | darker, or I've got a little bit of
banding here in the sky, I actually need to
| | 03:13 | back off of that edit, I can go and
change these parameters at any time to
| | 03:18 | further alter my image.
| | 03:19 | I cannot do that if I do the
destructive edit through the normal dialog box.
| | 03:23 | So through the rest of the course I
will be applying the black-and-white
| | 03:27 | adjustment using an adjustment layer
both because it allows me to undo it
| | 03:31 | later and it allows me of this
parametric editing, the ability to go back and
| | 03:36 | adjust parameters later.
| | 03:37 | There's one other cool thing about the
adjustment layer that we are going to see
| | 03:40 | later, and that's the ability to
selectively change my image to black and white.
| | 03:46 | So fiddle around with this and get
use to the Layers interface and the
| | 03:49 | Adjustment panel interface and make
sure you're comfortable with them before
| | 03:53 | we go on.
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| Converting to black and white in Camera Raw| 00:00 | Earlier, I spent some time haranguing
you about shooting in RAW instead of JPEG
| | 00:05 | because RAW has a number of
advantages over JPEG, as we discussed: highlight
| | 00:09 | recovery, white balance adjustment--which
we don't really need as black-and-white
| | 00:12 | shooters--the ability to preserve 16
bits' worth of data instead of merely 8 bits,
| | 00:17 | like you get in JPEG.
| | 00:18 | It's also possible to do your black-and-
white conversion in RAW, and we're going
| | 00:21 | to look at that right now.
| | 00:22 | I've got this RAW file opened.
| | 00:23 | This is an exercise file that you can download.
| | 00:26 | And you can see I've got some blues,
some reds, some greens, a bunch of gray.
| | 00:30 | This is the basic controls
for adjusting tone and whatnot.
| | 00:33 | But if I go over to here, HSL/
Grayscale, this gives me Hue, Saturation
| | 00:39 | and Luminous controls and I've
got this check box here that says
| | 00:42 | Convert to Grayscale.
| | 00:43 | If I do that, again I get a default
black-and-white conversion recipe.
| | 00:48 | And basically, this works just the same way
that the Black and White dialog in Photoshop does.
| | 00:53 | I've got all these different color sliders.
| | 00:55 | In fact, I have more color sliders,
and as I adjust them, those colors in
| | 00:59 | my image will change.
| | 01:00 | So let's go again back to the color image.
| | 01:03 | I've got a blue sky and green grass here.
| | 01:06 | So I am going to drag the Blues to be
darker and sure enough, that darkens up the sky.
| | 01:11 | I am going to drag the Greens to be
lighter and sure enough, that lightens the
| | 01:15 | grass. Maybe I'll try darkening the grass.
| | 01:17 | So this is working just like the
Black & White control in Photoshop.
| | 01:21 | You may be thinking, "Yeah, but in
Photoshop, I've got that ability to just
| | 01:24 | mouse over my image and click on things and
drag left to right, and I really like that."
| | 01:27 | Well, you get that in RAW also,
if you go up here and choose the
| | 01:31 | Targeted Adjustment tool.
| | 01:33 | Now for this to work, you have to
already be in HSL/Grayscale tab, because
| | 01:37 | Targeted Adjustment does different
things depending on which one of these
| | 01:41 | tabs you have selected.
| | 01:42 | So I've got Targeted
Adjustment with HSL/Grayscale selected.
| | 01:46 | I can now click on a color.
| | 01:47 | I am going to click on one of the red
tiles up here on the roof, and now I can
| | 01:50 | drag left and right, and if you look
over there under the Grayscale Mix stuff--
| | 01:55 | all of the stuff over here--you can see
that my Reds and Oranges are changing.
| | 02:00 | So when should I do adjustments here in
Camera RAW, and when should I do them in Photoshop?
| | 02:05 | Well, to a degree it's six of one, half
dozen of another in terms of what your
| | 02:09 | final output is going to be.
| | 02:11 | Both of them provide very good control.
Both of them do an excellent job of
| | 02:15 | skewing the tones around.
| | 02:16 | I've got a little more granularity
here because I've got more sliders in
| | 02:19 | addition to Reds. I've got Reds and
Oranges, and as you saw, it was automatically
| | 02:23 | adjusting both of those simultaneously.
| | 02:25 | Similarly, I've got Blues and Aquas,
Purples and Magentas, Greens and Yellows.
| | 02:29 | If you think about these colors, you
will probably recognize that each pair of
| | 02:33 | sliders sits right next to
each other on the color wheel.
| | 02:35 | Reds turn into orange; yellows turn into
green; aquas into blue; purples into magentas.
| | 02:40 | They are all very closely related.
| | 02:42 | On the one hand, it's nice having that
extra granularity. On the other hand, it
| | 02:45 | can maybe sometimes get a little
confusing because it will adjust maybe only the
| | 02:49 | Purple range and not the
Magentas and you wanted both.
| | 02:52 | The Black & White tool in Photoshop,
because it has fewer sliders, there is a
| | 02:55 | better chance it's going to grab the
entire range of colors that you want.
| | 02:59 | Nevertheless, you can pretty
much make the same edits in both.
| | 03:02 | However, there is one very important
difference, which is, once I have made these
| | 03:07 | adjustments in here, when I open my image,
now I've got a black-and-white image.
| | 03:13 | I don't have the ability to go back
and alter those parameters, unless I do
| | 03:18 | something called opening that RAW file
as a Smart Object that gives me discrete
| | 03:23 | access back to the RAW parameters.
| | 03:24 | I am not going to go into
Smart Objects in this course.
| | 03:27 | I am going to recommend that for the
time being you just keep using the Black
| | 03:30 | & White adjustment layer.
| | 03:31 | Then you've got your adjustments right there.
| | 03:34 | You've got access to them at any time
without having to go back to Camera RAW as
| | 03:38 | a Smart Object or that kind of thing.
| | 03:40 | So for now, I would say stick with
the Black & White adjustment layer.
| | 03:44 | If you really like the idea of making
your adjustments in RAW, and one of the
| | 03:47 | advantages in making adjustments in
RAW is your RAW edits are then stored in
| | 03:50 | the RAW conversion data that's socked
away in that XMP sidecar file that goes
| | 03:55 | with your RAW file,
| | 03:56 | your black-and-white edits are stored
in there which is nice, but for the most
| | 04:00 | part I think you are going to have an
easier time just keeping all of your black-
| | 04:03 | and-white conversions here in Photoshop.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making an advanced tonal correction| 00:00 | So you have seen the basics of
getting color into black and white using the
| | 00:04 | Black and White dialog or ideally,
the Black and White adjustment layer.
| | 00:08 | And there's a lot of good
work you can do with that tool.
| | 00:11 | But as you may have noticed, so far we
haven't gone from color into that really
| | 00:16 | powerful black-and-white image, and very
often you can't do that simply with the
| | 00:20 | Black and White dialog box.
| | 00:21 | The Black and White dialog box is there to
get your image converted to black and white.
| | 00:26 | Now, it's up to you to use normal
toning controls to start to really work the
| | 00:30 | image and make it happen.
| | 00:32 | As I mentioned before, I use a
fairly small refined set of editing tools.
| | 00:36 | I think the bigger lesson for black
and white is learning more the aesthetics
| | 00:40 | of black and white in the vocabulary of
black and white and what it is you need
| | 00:43 | to look for, how you need to apply those tools
to make a black-and-white image that really works.
| | 00:48 | So, we are going to do that right now.
| | 00:49 | We are going to go from start to finish
through this image, which is located in
| | 00:52 | the exercises folder.
| | 00:54 | This is a raw file, so when
I open it up in Photoshop,
| | 00:57 | it opens up in the Camera RAW dialog box,
which is great because I need to do a
| | 01:00 | couple of Camera RAW things.
| | 01:02 | As I do anytime I open an image, the
first thing I do is look at the histogram.
| | 01:06 | Yeah, it's tempting to look at the
image and all that, but really, the
| | 01:09 | histogram is where it is at.
| | 01:10 | I can see from the histogram that I
have got a big spike over here, which means
| | 01:14 | I have got some overexposed highlights.
| | 01:16 | Odds are those are up here in the clouds.
| | 01:18 | I can find out for sure by clicking on
this button right here, which will show
| | 01:22 | me where the overexposed bits are.
| | 01:24 | Those red pixels are
pixels that are overexposed.
| | 01:26 | Why do I care about overexposure?
| | 01:29 | Because when a part of the image over
exposes, it goes out to complete white and
| | 01:33 | therefore loses all detail.
| | 01:35 | I want detail in those clouds.
| | 01:36 | Because this is a RAW file, there's a
good chance that I can get that detail
| | 01:39 | back, and I do that with the recovery sliders.
| | 01:42 | As I slide this to the right,
watch what's happening over here.
| | 01:46 | This big spike right there is going
away, and now it's gone, and I am going to
| | 01:52 | show you before and after. Watch this area up here.
| | 01:55 | This is the original file, all white, no
detail, generally offensive to the eye.
| | 02:00 | Turn back on my edits, and I've gotten
some detail back in there. So, that's great!
| | 02:05 | Next thing is this image is
a little bit low contrast.
| | 02:08 | I can tell that by looking at it
because I don't see a lot of contrast.
| | 02:11 | The blacks aren't real black.
| | 02:13 | I have got a nice long shadow here,
but it was still pretty overhead light,
| | 02:16 | kind of washing out.
| | 02:17 | I am not seeing a bunch of texture.
| | 02:18 | It was just a little bit hazy, and
my exposure was maybe a little off.
| | 02:22 | I could have underexposed a little to put
some more contrast back in, but that's okay.
| | 02:25 | I can slide the Blacks slider and pull my
contrast a little bit back to where it should be.
| | 02:29 | I'm not necessarily going to nail it
here because if this was a color image, I
| | 02:34 | would think, all right, I think maybe
I want my Blacks slider right in there,
| | 02:37 | and I am determining that by making sure that
I have got black detail all the way over here.
| | 02:41 | This big blue spike, don't worry about that.
| | 02:43 | That means a little bit of
the blue channel is clipped.
| | 02:45 | We are not really losing
any of the detail anywhere.
| | 02:47 | I am maybe a little bit worried that that's
gone a little too dark, so I would back off.
| | 02:52 | But I am going to be altering the
contrast further in Photoshop, and I would like
| | 02:56 | to have the control over the
shadows there when I do my black-and-white
| | 03:00 | conversion in my additional toning,
| | 03:01 | so I am going to back off on that a
little bit and put the Blacks right about there.
| | 03:05 | I could again do my black-and-white
conversion here in RAW, but I am not. I am
| | 03:09 | going to do it in Photoshop.
I'm almost ready to open the image.
| | 03:11 | I say 'almost' because if I take a
look down here, these controls--these are
| | 03:17 | the workflow controls--
| | 03:18 | they tell how the image is
going to be opened in Photoshop.
| | 03:21 | It's going to be opened in the Adobe
RGB Color Space, which I don't really care
| | 03:25 | about because I am going to grayscale.
| | 03:26 | It's going to be opened as an 8-bit
image with these dimensions, and these are
| | 03:30 | the original pixel dimensions of the image.
| | 03:32 | This was shot with the Canon 5D Mark II,
which natively spits out an image of this size.
| | 03:37 | The 5D Mark II also captures
14 bits of color per pixel.
| | 03:41 | Your camera probably captures
12 to 14 bits of data per pixel.
| | 03:46 | A JPEG file can only store 8 bits of
data per pixel, which means immediately, if
| | 03:50 | I saved a JPEG, I am throwing some data out.
| | 03:52 | And in this case, Camera RAW is telling me
that it's going to open it in 8 bits per pixel.
| | 03:57 | So, I am going to lose some information
from this image, information that I may
| | 04:00 | want as I'm shoving tones around.
| | 04:02 | So, I am going to click on this.
| | 04:03 | This is actually a link, and
I can change my Depth to 16.
| | 04:08 | That doesn't mean that I
suddenly have 16 bits of data per pixel.
| | 04:11 | I still only have 14, but they're in
a 16-bit container, so I get the full
| | 04:16 | amount of data that my camera captured.
| | 04:18 | So, now I am going to say Open
Image, and that's going to convert the RAW
| | 04:21 | file and open it up in Photoshop, and here I am.
I'm just going to hide the rest of my files there.
| | 04:27 | And here's my image.
| | 04:29 | So, first thing I need to do is
my black-and-white conversion.
| | 04:32 | So, I am going to go down here to my
Layers palette and pull up the Black and
| | 04:36 | White adjustment layer,
and so here's my adjustment layer.
| | 04:39 | Here are my controls up
here in the Adjustments panel.
| | 04:41 | So, now I am ready to start thinking about
black-and-white conversion and what I want to do.
| | 04:45 | First thing that happens is that
the image gets really washed out.
| | 04:48 | Most of the time after you do a black-
and-white conversion, your image is going
| | 04:52 | to need more contrast.
| | 04:53 | You are going to take a contrast hit.
| | 04:54 | It's not so much that you are losing contrast;
| | 04:56 | it's just that there wasn't enough
contrast there in the first place.
| | 05:00 | As I see it low contrast, I
kind of like it like that.
| | 05:02 | It's a somewhat dreamy image.
| | 05:04 | That was not my original
impulse when I was there.
| | 05:06 | What I really liked when I was there
was this big shadow coming towards me and
| | 05:09 | some of the highlight stuff
that was going on back here.
| | 05:11 | So, I want to try and get back to that.
| | 05:12 | My histogram is showing me, sure
enough, a fairly low-contrast image.
| | 05:16 | Yes, I have a lot of data across the
histogram, but I don't really have any black.
| | 05:20 | In fact, I don't really have any
significant dark tones till over here.
| | 05:23 | So, I've lost almost an entire stop's
worth of shadow detail that I can have.
| | 05:28 | I'm not going to be able to get that
contrast back with the black-and-white
| | 05:30 | adjustment, but I can at least
start toning things the way that I want.
| | 05:33 | The first I think I want to do is put
more contrast into the sky by separating
| | 05:37 | the clouds from the blue sky, and I
can do that by darkening the blues.
| | 05:41 | I could go and grab
either the Blues or the Cyan;
| | 05:44 | I am not sure which it is.
| | 05:45 | Sometimes the sky is
falling to the Cyans range;
| | 05:48 | sometimes they fall in to the Blues range.
| | 05:49 | Personally, I don't care, because I've
got those wonderful tools here that I can
| | 05:53 | click on, and then I can come
over here and just click and drag.
| | 05:57 | And as I do, my sky gets darker, and I
have got to go pretty far, because the sky
| | 06:03 | wasn't a deep blue to begin with.
| | 06:05 | And as I do that, I'm
looking very closely at this area.
| | 06:08 | Is this gradient here?
| | 06:10 | A sky is always a gradient, from
dark at the top to light at the horizon.
| | 06:14 | Is it staying smooth? And it is.
| | 06:16 | I am not seeing a breakup.
| | 06:18 | I'm not seeing weird pixilated
patterns in here, or bands of color.
| | 06:22 | If I was seeing those, I would need to
stop and back off the edits, but I
| | 06:26 | have got a lot of latitude in
here because it's a 16-bit image.
| | 06:29 | If it had been an 8-bit file, that
might not have worked. So, that's good.
| | 06:32 | I have got the sky where I want it.
| | 06:34 | I am going to turn off my Black and
White layer for a moment just to figure out
| | 06:37 | what other tones I have to work with here.
| | 06:39 | I have got the reds of the road.
| | 06:40 | The problem is the reds in this road
are also going to affect the trees.
| | 06:44 | I have got the green grass over here.
| | 06:47 | I like it dark like that.
| | 06:48 | I could lighten it up.
| | 06:50 | But I think if I lighten it up then I am
not getting much distinction between it
| | 06:54 | and what's around it.
| | 06:55 | That's what it looks like lighter.
| | 06:56 | I like it back where it was.
| | 06:58 | Again, I could play with the reds on
this road, but that's changing all sorts
| | 07:03 | of stuff throughout the image,
so I am not going to do that.
| | 07:05 | So, I think that's about all I can do
here in the black-and-white adjustment.
| | 07:08 | And again, my image is far
from where I would like it to be.
| | 07:11 | This is not an image that I can work
completely just with the Black and White layer.
| | 07:15 | So, now it's time to get my hands
dirty tonally and start going in and really
| | 07:20 | making a lot of adjustments to the
contrast and tone throughout this image.
| | 07:23 | And I am going to do all of those
adjustments the same way, and that is with
| | 07:26 | lots of Levels adjustment layers,
some constrained with masks.
| | 07:30 | The first thing I want to do is improve
the overall contrast of this image.
| | 07:33 | So, I am going to do that by
making a Levels adjustment layer.
| | 07:37 | Just popped open the Adjustment
layer menu here, and I am choosing Levels.
| | 07:40 | If you are not familiar with Levels,
| | 07:42 | there are lots and lots of
places you can find out more about it.
| | 07:45 | I have got a histogram here.
| | 07:47 | I can see that my black is also--I
am just going to pick my black point
| | 07:50 | and start dragging it to the right, and as
soon as I do that, my contrast starts improving.
| | 07:56 | Now, I'm keeping my eye on
these dark bits of this tree.
| | 07:59 | I am trying to decide how much
detail I want to preserve there, and I am
| | 08:02 | thinking I don't mind if I
lose some detail up here.
| | 08:05 | That's the shadow side of the tree.
| | 08:07 | Because we know the shadow is here,
our eyes are inherently understanding
| | 08:10 | that the sun is back over
here somewhere, shining this way.
| | 08:14 | So, we kind of expect that
to be in shadow. That's okay.
| | 08:17 | But I don't think I want to go too much
farther than that, even though I would
| | 08:20 | like more contrast in some
other parts of the image.
| | 08:22 | Also a little worried about this.
| | 08:24 | That's going a little extreme.
| | 08:26 | See what to do about that later,
but that's the beginning of my
| | 08:29 | contrast adjustment.
| | 08:30 | I think I'm going leave that there.
Because this is an adjustment layer, I can
| | 08:33 | always come back and fiddle with it later,
so I am going to ballpark it right there.
| | 08:37 | The road and this shadow are
really kind of the subject of the image.
| | 08:42 | They are really what you see first and
foremost, and I would like to have more
| | 08:45 | texture on the road, I would like
it to have more pop, and that means a
| | 08:49 | contrast adjustment.
| | 08:50 | So, another Levels adjustment layer.
| | 08:53 | Now, I'm going to adjust the midpoint.
| | 08:56 | I want to keep black where it is.
| | 08:58 | I don't want the darkest parts of
the road to get any darker--I think.
| | 09:01 | I may be wrong about this assessment.
| | 09:02 | This is the beauty of adjustment
layers is I can fiddle with it later.
| | 09:05 | I don't want that shadow to go complete black.
| | 09:07 | I just want it darker.
| | 09:08 | So, if I drag my midpoint to the
right, look what's happening.
| | 09:12 | The midtone values in
the road are getting darker.
| | 09:15 | So, the shadow has gotten darker, a lot
of these grooves in the road--this is a
| | 09:19 | dirt road--they're getting darker.
| | 09:21 | And so I am just generally
picking up more contrast.
| | 09:24 | I can easily get more contrast by
dragging in the blacks, but then it,
| | 09:27 | immediately goes too dark.
| | 09:28 | So, what I am doing is I
am darkening the midtones.
| | 09:30 | I can get more contrast by lightening
the white point, which is going to make
| | 09:35 | the whiter areas pop out more and
create more of a distinction between the
| | 09:39 | bright areas and those
darker midtones that I just did.
| | 09:41 | So, that's pretty good.
| | 09:43 | I am liking how the road and how
this big centerpiece shadow are working.
| | 09:46 | Unfortunately, I have
screwed up the rest of the image.
| | 09:48 | That's okay. Because this is an
adjustment layer, I can create a mask.
| | 09:53 | This box right here is the mask for this layer.
| | 09:56 | Wherever I put black into this mask,
that part of the image will be protected
| | 10:01 | from the effects of this adjustment layer.
| | 10:03 | So, I'm going to fill
this whole mask with black.
| | 10:05 | I can do that by hitting Command+A
or Ctrl+A to select the entire image.
| | 10:10 | I've got black as my background color.
| | 10:13 | If you don't have that, you can just
hit this button right here and that sets
| | 10:16 | your foreground color to white,
your background color to black.
| | 10:18 | Now, all I have to do is hit the Delete
key on my keyboard, and then I am going
| | 10:21 | to hit Command+D to deselect.
| | 10:24 | Now my mask is filled with black.
| | 10:25 | What that means is that this adjustment
layer, which is being effectively sent
| | 10:29 | through this mask, well, the mask is
stopping it. No part of the image is getting
| | 10:34 | affected by this adjustment layer.
| | 10:36 | Now, what's going to happen is I am
going to grab my paintbrush here.
| | 10:40 | I have got white paint, and I have got a
pretty good-sized brush, but I want it bigger.
| | 10:43 | I can make the brush bigger by using
the Right Bracket key--left and right
| | 10:47 | brackets change the brush size.
| | 10:48 | So, now I am just painting.
| | 10:51 | And what's happening is, first of all,
you can see in the image that where
| | 10:54 | I'm painting, the image
is getting more contrasty.
| | 10:56 | And when I let go of the mouse button,
if you look over here on the mask, you
| | 11:00 | see that there's a bunch of white here.
| | 11:02 | Wherever I paint white, I am punching
a hole in the mask, and that contrast-
| | 11:06 | increasing Levels adjustment layer is
making it through to my image, and so I'm
| | 11:12 | basically just painting and increasing contrast.
| | 11:15 | So, let's take a before-and-after look here.
| | 11:17 | This is before that Levels adjustment--
| | 11:19 | my image isn't too bad. But with it, I get a
lot more punch on the road, and I like that.
| | 11:24 | Now, that my mask is in place, I can
start maybe thinking about, did I set my
| | 11:28 | Levels adjustment properly?
And it's a little extreme for my tastes
| | 11:32 | right now. I am going to
back off of it just a tiny bit.
| | 11:35 | Of course, I don't know how
your monitor is configured.
| | 11:38 | You might be seeing darker darks,
lighter lights, but just trust that this is a
| | 11:42 | normal part of the process.
| | 11:43 | I take a ballpark stab at an
adjustment layer, then mask it, then go
| | 11:47 | back and refine it.
| | 11:48 | So, that's looking pretty good!
I like what's happening there in the foreground.
| | 11:50 | I am not liking this back here.
| | 11:53 | There is just this kind of fuzzy mess back here.
| | 11:55 | And what I remember seeing when I was
standing there were really the highlights
| | 11:58 | glinting off of these tree branches.
| | 12:00 | I am going to zoom in here, and now you can
see a little more what I am talking about.
| | 12:03 | This is a tree farm I think,
because the trees are planted in rows.
| | 12:07 | So, there is this deep dark bit back
there. Boy, it would be really nice to play
| | 12:12 | these brightly highlighted
branches off of that dark bit.
| | 12:14 | So, I would like to do a Levels
adjustment to just these parts of the trees.
| | 12:18 | Another thing that's happening with
the trees--you can see it in this one
| | 12:20 | here in the foreground--
| | 12:21 | they are kind of like Aspen trees--
| | 12:22 | I don't know what they actually were
though--where one side gets lit up really
| | 12:25 | brightly and the other side stays
in dark shadow, which is really nice.
| | 12:28 | So there should be a lot of
highlights I can play with there.
| | 12:30 | So, I am going to add another
adjustment layer. And again, I'm only looking at
| | 12:36 | this area that I'm ultimately going to mask.
| | 12:38 | I don't care what's happening to
the rest of the image as I make this
| | 12:40 | initial adjustment.
| | 12:41 | I am going to darken the midtones, and
right away you can see this has fallen
| | 12:47 | into deep darkness, but I want to pull
those highlights of those branches back out,
| | 12:51 | so I'm going to take my white point and
pull it up and slide this in a little more.
| | 12:57 | I am doing just a very
localized contrast adjustment.
| | 13:00 | I don't mean localized
area-wise, but localized tonally.
| | 13:03 | I am trying to really pull those bright
highlights out of the dark shadow, and I
| | 13:07 | am liking that more.
| | 13:09 | Now, I've got just these interesting
little highlights fading into shadow.
| | 13:13 | The problem is that same edit has
been applied to the entire image.
| | 13:16 | So, obviously I need to go in and mask this off.
| | 13:18 | So, I click here to select my
mask for this adjustment layer.
| | 13:21 | Command+A again, or Ctrl+A if you are
using Windows, to select the entire mask,
| | 13:26 | but making sure that
black is my background color.
| | 13:29 | Hit the Delete key and my
mask is filled with black.
| | 13:33 | Now, I am taking the Brush tool, making
sure that I have still got white here,
| | 13:36 | and I am just going to paint into this area.
| | 13:39 | And wherever I paint, the shadows are
going to get darker and the midtone
| | 13:43 | highlights are going to get brighter.
| | 13:47 | So, that's just a slight little
tweak to this area of the trees.
| | 13:49 | I will make my brush smaller, paint
around this bit, because I really like the
| | 13:54 | highlight on this tree here in the front.
| | 13:55 | Now, that I have got that set, again, I am
ready to think about refining my adjustment.
| | 14:02 | And in the refining, I need to be
careful that I don't push it so far that it
| | 14:06 | becomes obvious where the edges of the mask are.
| | 14:08 | Brighten that up a little more.
| | 14:10 | There is just a lot of kind of
gray branchy noise back there.
| | 14:13 | I am trying to lose that. I am trying to get it
down to more of just black and white, and I'm liking that better.
| | 14:18 | Again, this is a normal part of
working with adjustment layers:
| | 14:21 | you take an initial stab,
you mask, and then you refine.
| | 14:24 | Now, what that's done--I am going to
zoom back out--is it has given me another
| | 14:28 | kind of single compositional
element here, or tonal element.
| | 14:32 | Let me show you before and after.
| | 14:33 | That's before, where this is just kind
of a gray thing, and this is after, where
| | 14:38 | it is now a darker gray thing.
| | 14:40 | What you can't quite see in this
magnification is that I've also got all these
| | 14:44 | pretty, speckly highlights in
here coming off the branches.
| | 14:46 | That's really going to pop when I print.
| | 14:47 | And so now what I am getting is this
light area here kind of balancing against
| | 14:52 | this darker area over here.
| | 14:53 | So, it's not just about bringing out
those highlights; it's about creating a
| | 14:55 | counterpoint between this area
of tone and this area of tone.
| | 15:00 | As I look at the image, what I'm looking
for now are are there other highlights
| | 15:04 | that I can exaggerate or shadows that
I can exaggerate, just to create more
| | 15:07 | interesting tonality, or more depth in
the scene, or more depth on a surface?
| | 15:12 | And I only see one other
thing that I want to do here.
| | 15:15 | I like the highlights on these
trees and the shadows on the backside.
| | 15:18 | I would maybe like to
play that up a little more.
| | 15:20 | So, I am going to make one more
Levels adjustment layer, and I am going to
| | 15:24 | brighten it, and I am going to brighten just
the midtones, slide it to the left to brighten.
| | 15:29 | And I'm watching this tree right
here, and I like how this side is now
| | 15:33 | noticeably lighter than the other side.
| | 15:35 | This is a very slight adjustment, but I
think it's going to make a big impact.
| | 15:38 | Again, Select All to select my mask.
| | 15:40 | My mask is chosen down here.
| | 15:42 | Delete to fill it with black.
| | 15:44 | Deselect with Command+D or Ctrl+D.
Pick my paintbrush, got white paint, and
| | 15:49 | now what I can do is with a small brush, I go
in here, and I just paint this highlight in here.
| | 15:54 | I am not adding the highlight;
| | 15:56 | I am just exaggerating
the highlight a little bit.
| | 15:58 | And it's going to make the trees
look a little more round. It makes them
| | 16:01 | stand out a little more.
| | 16:02 | Of course, I really want it on this tree
| | 16:04 | because it's the one right up in front. It's the
once we are really going to see when it's printed.
| | 16:08 | I am going to refine my mask a
little more just to bring that out.
| | 16:13 | So, the bigger lesson here is the
types of things I am looking for.
| | 16:17 | I am looking for tonal relationships, I
am looking for black against white that
| | 16:20 | I can play up, or grays that I can play up, and
I am looking for contrast that can be improved.
| | 16:25 | Let's get the histogram out of the way.
| | 16:27 | There is our close-up view of this
middle part, and you can see something else
| | 16:31 | that's happened is, as I've brightened
up these midtones here and brightened up
| | 16:35 | these midtones here, I am starting to
get that nice silvery look that you want
| | 16:38 | in a black-and-white print.
| | 16:39 | I am getting this beautiful gradient
from a nice white into a darker black here.
| | 16:44 | A lot of times a black-and-white
print is not even about the subject matter.
| | 16:48 | It's just about beautiful areas of
gray, and I really like this transition
| | 16:51 | in here and in here.
| | 16:53 | I like the crunchiness here.
| | 16:54 | I like this playing of light against dark here.
| | 16:57 | Those are the types of things I am
trying to look for and exaggerate.
| | 16:59 | So, let's take a quick look
here at a before and after.
| | 17:03 | What did all these adjustments do on top
of my initial black-and-white conversion?
| | 17:08 | So, here is my original color image.
| | 17:11 | Here's what happened when I did my
black-and-white conversion--it's a little ho-hum.
| | 17:15 | Here is what happens after all of my
edits go on, color image to black and white.
| | 17:21 | We are going to take a look at working
through some additional images, then we
| | 17:25 | are going to reinforce some of these
things, and look at some additional ways
| | 17:28 | that you can use layer masks to
improve the tonality of your images.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Doing more tonal corrections| 00:00 | We're going to dive into another image
here, this color RAW file, we're going to
| | 00:04 | take it all the way through
to a finished black and white.
| | 00:06 | This is in your Exercises folder,
and because it's a RAW file, when you
| | 00:09 | double-click on it, it's open up in Camera RAW.
| | 00:12 | And a lot of times when you're first
facing an image, you've come back from a
| | 00:16 | shoot and maybe it's been
a while since you've shot.
| | 00:18 | I was on the road for a while, so I
haven't looked at this in a few weeks.
| | 00:21 | And there's so much you can do in Photoshop.
| | 00:23 | There are so many different ways to
take an image, where do you even start?
| | 00:26 | And one of the best things to do is to
really try to put yourself back into the
| | 00:29 | moment of shooting and try to remember,
why in the world did I take this image?
| | 00:34 | If it's not immediately obvious to me,
what was striking to me about this image?
| | 00:38 | And I think in this case,
there are three main things.
| | 00:40 | First of all, I've got this big
pile of wood here, which I think is an
| | 00:43 | interesting texture, and which I
know from experience that from a
| | 00:46 | black-and-white standpoint, this could
be a really fun just big mess of contrast--
| | 00:50 | and contrast can be a very attractive thing.
| | 00:52 | I also like that there's this kind
of big triangle of wood here, and then
| | 00:56 | there's this triangle of other stuff
over here, and this is fairly light and
| | 00:59 | this is fairly dark, so
that's a nice tonal contrast.
| | 01:02 | But then there's also a story going on here:
| | 01:04 | I have got a big pile of wood and
I've got guy back here sawing wood with a
| | 01:07 | handsaw, and he had been sawing like
crazy, because this was not the only
| | 01:10 | pile of wood around.
| | 01:11 | So I want to think about that and how to
play that up, and that actually leads to
| | 01:15 | another thing, which is I've got
woodcutter all lit up with these beautiful
| | 01:18 | highlights against this nice dark shadow,
| | 01:20 | and so it's hopefully going to be
very easy to make him pop out of the
| | 01:23 | background to reinforce the story element of it.
| | 01:26 | So I think those are the
things I want to work towards.
| | 01:28 | But first of all, I'm here in RAW, and
I need to do as many good RAW edits as
| | 01:32 | I can, because there are some things I
can do in RAW that I can't do anywhere else.
| | 01:35 | I'm going to turn on Highlight clipping
warning up here, and I see that I've got
| | 01:39 | some overexposed
highlights here on these buckets.
| | 01:41 | There's not a lot, so I'm just going
to drag the Recovery slider to the right
| | 01:45 | until those you've gone, so that I'm
sure I've got full highlight detail.
| | 01:48 | When I do that, I look at my histogram
and I see that I don't really have a
| | 01:52 | full range of contrast.
| | 01:53 | So that's going to affect us later.
| | 01:55 | There's not much else I can do.
I don't care about white balance.
| | 01:58 | I would like more contrast in the image,
but I want the contrast distributed
| | 02:02 | locally in different ways.
| | 02:03 | If I just start dragging the Contrast
slider here, I'm going to lose control
| | 02:07 | over what's falling into shadow and what's not.
| | 02:09 | So I'm going to undo that
and just stick with this.
| | 02:11 | Making sure I've got 16-bit selected
down here, which I do--if you don't, click
| | 02:16 | on that and make sure
the depth is set to 16-bit.
| | 02:19 | And I hit Open to open it in
Photoshop, and I'm ready to get started.
| | 02:23 | First thing I do of course is
my black-and-white conversion.
| | 02:25 | So here in the Levels palette
I'm going to pick a Black & White
| | 02:28 | Levels adjustment layer.
| | 02:29 | Now what can I do there?
| | 02:31 | I'm going to turn this off for a minute
because I want to look at my colors again.
| | 02:35 | I've got a bunch of yellowish-tan
tones here in the wood, but I've also got
| | 02:39 | yellowish-tan tones here on the ground.
| | 02:41 | So it's going to be difficult to separate
those two by simply dragging the Yellows slider.
| | 02:45 | If I drag the Yellows slider, this is going
to get darker, and this, I don't want that.
| | 02:48 | I've got some blues. That's about it.
| | 02:51 | There's not actually a whole lot that
I can do in the black-and-white slider.
| | 02:55 | Let's see what happens if I darken the yellows.
| | 02:58 | Well, I kind of like this, because I'm
not crazy about how light these boards
| | 03:02 | are, because they get lost
in this lightness back here,
| | 03:05 | so darkening the yellows helps that up some.
| | 03:07 | But it introduces a new problem, which is, I've
just got this big ugly mess of gray here
| | 03:12 | that doesn't have a lot of definition.
| | 03:13 | It needs to pop more,
| | 03:14 | so that's something I may need to fix.
| | 03:16 | The Blues, I can try brightening and
darkening those, but that's not really
| | 03:22 | doing anything for me.
| | 03:23 | I think I like the default
position, because I'm going to want to play
| | 03:25 | up the highlights off of the shadows there,
so I think we're done with black and white.
| | 03:29 | So now, we're ready to
move on to tonal adjustments.
| | 03:32 | Very often, what you'll need to do is
simply pick one area of your image that
| | 03:36 | you want to work on and just
forget about everything else.
| | 03:38 | So I'm going to start with this pile of wood.
| | 03:39 | Let's get it right, because it's one of the big
compositional elements in the scene.
| | 03:43 | Like I said before, it's a little drab.
| | 03:44 | It needs more punch.
| | 03:45 | There's possibly some texture, like in here,
| | 03:47 | that could be played up,
and this is just really bugging me.
| | 03:50 | It's all one shade of gray.
| | 03:53 | So I'm going to add a Levels adjustment layer.
| | 03:57 | Now, I've got these three sliders here.
How do I even begin? Which one do I
| | 04:00 | start clicking on first?
| | 04:01 | Before I even do that, I need to
really look at my data and understand it.
| | 04:05 | Histogram is a graph of the distribution
of tones in my image from block on left
| | 04:09 | to white on the right.
I've got a lot of black.
| | 04:11 | I've got a lot of really dark tones.
| | 04:12 | I have a fair amount of midtones, and then
suddenly my data falls off really quick.
| | 04:17 | I don't have much data at all past here.
| | 04:19 | In other words, this tiny little bit
is the brightest thing in my image.
| | 04:23 | That's going to be this white wall, this
bit on the ground, and maybe this board.
| | 04:27 | That means the bulk of my image is
represented on histogram from here to here,
| | 04:33 | from black to only about here.
| | 04:36 | So it's pretty safe to say that the
lightest significant shade of gray in this
| | 04:39 | pile of wood is going to be somewhere
about in here. I want that lightest shade
| | 04:42 | to be as bright as possible,
| | 04:44 | so I'm going to drag my white
point all the way over to here.
| | 04:48 | Now, I've totally clipped this part.
| | 04:50 | This stuff is all overexposed. I don't care.
| | 04:51 | I'll mask that out later.
| | 04:53 | Again, I'm just trying
to fix the wood right now.
| | 04:55 | I want more contrast in the wood.
| | 04:57 | If I had only dragged the white point to
here, yes, the wood is a little bit brighter--
| | 05:03 | here is where it was; here is where it can go--
| | 05:05 | but there's a lot more brightness to be
had in it if I go all the way over to
| | 05:10 | the kind of first significant amount of data.
| | 05:13 | So it's important to understand what
data in your histogram is significant and
| | 05:17 | what is kind of isolated to
just one part of your image.
| | 05:20 | So that's improved the white point.
| | 05:22 | I'm possibly overexposing some things.
| | 05:24 | I'll worry about those later.
But I've got these dull kind of grayish bits
| | 05:29 | into a lighter kind of solid mess
of gray, but we're going to add more
| | 05:33 | contrast there in a minute.
| | 05:34 | Another reason to do this is anytime I
print something it's going to come out
| | 05:39 | darker. That's the nature of printing.
| | 05:40 | Prints will go darker than your screen.
That has to do with something called
| | 05:42 | dot gain. As the blobs of ink on the
paper, they spread and they expand in ways
| | 05:47 | that are unpredictable and
your image simply gets darker.
| | 05:49 | So if I had put my white pointer here
and printed it, I'm pretty sure that
| | 05:53 | this stuff would have come out too dark,
and that's just something I know from experience.
| | 05:57 | I'm just going to play to the
significant part of the data.
| | 05:59 | Now, I'm ready to punch up
the contrast in this area.
| | 06:03 | I've got the whites in
this area set pretty well.
| | 06:05 | To increase the contrast, I'm going to
take my midtones--this represents the
| | 06:08 | middle gray values--and I'm going
to darken them, just a tiny bit.
| | 06:12 | Now let's look at the before and after,
| | 06:14 | just paying attention to the pile of wood--
don't worry about all these other stuff.
| | 06:17 | Before, there's like gray
hazes over it, and after.
| | 06:21 | It's just got a little more punch,
and that's all I want in this area.
| | 06:25 | That said, I need to be careful
about what is done to rest of my image.
| | 06:28 | It is time to start masking.
| | 06:30 | So I've got my adjustment layer selected.
| | 06:32 | I've got black paint as the background color,
| | 06:35 | this swatch is the foreground color.
| | 06:37 | This is the background.
| | 06:38 | I can reset them to white and black
by just clicking on that if I need to.
| | 06:41 | I need to fill my mask with black,
so I'm going to go to the Select menu.
| | 06:45 | I'm doing this with the menus this
time, rather than the keyboard, and
| | 06:49 | choosing Select All.
| | 06:50 | I could also have hit Command+A
or Ctrl+A. That selects everything.
| | 06:53 | And now I'm going to say Edit > Fill,
and I'm going to tell it to fill.
| | 06:58 | I could either say Background Color,
because that's at the black, or I could
| | 07:01 | just say Black, hit OK, and
now this is filled with black.
| | 07:05 | I am ready to deselect. Go up to the
Select menu and choose Deselect, and
| | 07:10 | that kills my selection.
| | 07:11 | Now what's happened, my mask is
completely full, so that Levels adjustment is
| | 07:15 | having no impact on my image.
| | 07:17 | I can take my Brush tool.
| | 07:18 | I want a really big brush,
and now wherever I paint,
| | 07:23 | I'm punching a hole in the mask,
and the contrast is going into that area.
| | 07:28 | So I'm just going to paint my contrast in.
| | 07:32 | Once I've got my mask set up
then I can start refining my edit.
| | 07:35 | Now you may think, "Well, gosh, don't
you need to be very carefully painting
| | 07:39 | around each one of those boards?"
| | 07:40 | And now, you know, with just a few
exceptions, if you're masking someone's face
| | 07:45 | and they've got wispy hair, yeah,
you've got to be real careful.
| | 07:47 | But most of the time if you're using a
really soft-edged brush, which I am--I
| | 07:51 | have got 300-pixel brush
with a really soft edge--
| | 07:54 | you can really get away with
murder on your masks, actually.
| | 07:56 | You can be very rough around the edges.
I'm keeping an eye on the icon over here
| | 08:02 | to try and figure out any bits that I've missed.
| | 08:04 | I am going to a smaller brush to
paint around these areas, and that's
| | 08:10 | looking pretty good.
| | 08:11 | So, before, somewhat blah stack of wood,
after, stack of wood with little more punch.
| | 08:17 | Now you may think, "I don't know,
I don't see much difference there."
| | 08:21 | Very often, it's these tiny little
contrast adjustments that make the difference.
| | 08:24 | They just take that haze off the image;
| | 08:26 | they make it leap off
the page a little bit more.
| | 08:28 | Now, I'm little concerned about these.
| | 08:31 | It looks like we've lost detail there, so I
would like to protect these from the edit.
| | 08:35 | I painted white over this area of
the mask, so they're getting the full
| | 08:37 | effect of the edit.
| | 08:38 | I would like to back that off.
| | 08:40 | These don't need to be brightened so much.
| | 08:42 | I can do that by going up to here to my
Swatches palette, and I'm going to pick
| | 08:45 | a middle gray, 50% gray right here.
I'll get a nice small brush, and I'm just
| | 08:50 | going to paint into my mask right here.
| | 08:53 | The way this works is wherever I paint
white, the full effect of my adjustment
| | 08:57 | goes in; where I paint black, no
adjustment goes in; where I paint gray, an
| | 09:01 | attenuated amount of the adjustment goes in.
| | 09:03 | I'm going to go to a darker gray. There we go.
| | 09:07 | Let's pull some more of it out.
| | 09:08 | I'm going to do the same
thing on this board here--
| | 09:11 | I don't like it being so bright--or these areas.
| | 09:17 | And if we look at the mask, you can see
I've got these little bits of gray going
| | 09:20 | in, and they're serving to
just tone things down a bit.
| | 09:23 | Now I've got my mask in place.
| | 09:26 | I can do what I always do, and think
about refining the actual Levels adjustment.
| | 09:31 | Can I get even more punch out of this?
| | 09:34 | You want to be careful about
how far these black shadows go.
| | 09:37 | I like them, but I don't
want them spread too far.
| | 09:40 | So I'm liking that.
| | 09:41 | I think that's pretty good.
| | 09:42 | Now. I can think about other parts of the image.
| | 09:44 | Let's go back to this guy.
| | 09:46 | I really liked the idea of him
lit up against a black background.
| | 09:49 | Well, I can still see a lot
of detail in the background.
| | 09:51 | I need to be careful that I don't lose the saw.
| | 09:53 | I need to see that he's sawing.
| | 09:56 | So I'm going to go in here and add
another Levels adjustment, and let's see
| | 10:00 | what we can do to him.
| | 10:01 | I'm going to grab my midpoint and
darken, and that's looking pretty good.
| | 10:07 | I don't need to lose all the detail in the
background, but I want him to pop out some more.
| | 10:10 | Now again, if I look at my data, I can
see the significant data doesn't really
| | 10:15 | start till in here, but I
can also just eyeball this one.
| | 10:17 | I'm just going to drag this to
the left while watching these areas.
| | 10:21 | I don't want his hat to overexpose.
| | 10:23 | I'll leave that about there
and go in and darken more.
| | 10:26 | That's looking pretty good.
| | 10:30 | I've lost the background here.
| | 10:32 | I like the way this--whatever
this is, some piece of folded cloth or
| | 10:36 | plastic or something--
| | 10:37 | I like the way it's lighting up.
| | 10:38 | This stuff is all overexposed again.
His face is going to need some work, but
| | 10:42 | again, I'm not worried about this stuff.
| | 10:44 | I have lost bits on the wood, but that's
because I don't have my mask in place yet.
| | 10:48 | So, go in here to my layer mask.
| | 10:50 | This time I'm going to do with the keyboard,
Command+A or Ctrl+A to select everything.
| | 10:55 | My foreground is set to gray.
| | 10:56 | That doesn't matter.
My background is still black.
| | 10:58 | That's what I want.
| | 10:59 | Delete key will fill the mask,
and so now I see that my adjustment layer
| | 11:03 | is completely black.
| | 11:05 | That adjustment that I just
dialed in is not going through.
| | 11:07 | So I'm going to take my brush now--
which I can get with the B key, or I can
| | 11:12 | just click over here--and I want this white.
| | 11:14 | It's only gray right now, so I'm
going to click on my default swatches.
| | 11:17 | I could also hit D, as in default, to
put those back to black and white.
| | 11:22 | Nice big brush, which I can get
with the Left or Right Bracket keys.
| | 11:25 | I can also get those up here in the
Brush palette by simply changing size.
| | 11:29 | And now I'm just going to paint in here to
paint in this contrast increase that I defined.
| | 11:34 | I'm just going to keep it to
that one point. I like that.
| | 11:39 | I want more out of him.
| | 11:41 | I can't use my midpoint, because if I
do that, I screw up my blacks, so I'll
| | 11:48 | push that in there.
| | 11:50 | That's looking pretty good. His hat
is getting a little too hot, though.
| | 11:54 | So again, I'm going to go to a
middle gray and make sure that my
| | 11:58 | adjustment layer is selected.
| | 11:59 | I'll just paint a little bit of gray
onto the top of his hat there, and again,
| | 12:04 | I'm painting the mask,
| | 12:05 | I'm not painting the image, and that's
going to calm that down a little bit.
| | 12:10 | Before, after. He is just punching
out a little bit more, which I like.
| | 12:17 | Still not quite right,
| | 12:18 | and I think it's that I want
these highlights even brighter.
| | 12:21 | I want more contrast on him.
| | 12:23 | So now it's time to make
yet another adjustment layer,
| | 12:26 | and there's no reason not to just keep
adding them as you need them, and really
| | 12:29 | localizing your edits like this.
| | 12:30 | There's not really a penalty to pay for this.
| | 12:33 | These days our computers are fast
enough and have enough RAM in them that you
| | 12:36 | can really stack layers up like crazy
and not suffer performance hit for it.
| | 12:41 | Here's my adjustment, Command+A to
select all, Delete to fill my mask, Command+D
| | 12:47 | to deselect, and now I'm ready to
start painting in this new highlight detail
| | 12:52 | that I just defined.
| | 12:53 | I'm going to cover his entire tunic there.
| | 13:01 | Now, this is one where I've really got
to go in and define adjustment later,
| | 13:05 | because I'm not seeing that much yet.
| | 13:07 | So let's push this even farther.
| | 13:09 | Now, you can see those highlights lighting up.
| | 13:10 | That's what I wanted.
| | 13:12 | Now he's really looking like he is in sun.
| | 13:14 | So let's do a before and after.
| | 13:16 | Here is my image simply as a black-and-white.
| | 13:20 | It doesn't look bad.
| | 13:21 | There's some nice tonal stuff going on,
but it's overall just generally gray.
| | 13:26 | I first added an adjustment layer to
deal with the wood. Then I added and
| | 13:29 | adjustment layer to deal with this
background bit. Then I added an adjustment
| | 13:34 | layer to punch up just the
highlights and shadows on him.
| | 13:37 | Let's do one more before and after.
| | 13:39 | Here is before, just simple grayscale.
| | 13:41 | Here is after with my adjustments.
| | 13:44 | So this is looking pretty good, except
that, this big white thing right here.
| | 13:49 | It's just an eye magnet.
| | 13:51 | It completely captures my attention.
| | 13:53 | It keeps me from noticing him, which is
really what I want, and it breaks up the
| | 13:57 | whole interplay between all of
this stuff and all of that stuff.
| | 13:59 | So I've got to do something about that,
| | 14:00 | and we are going to learn how to calm
down bright areas in the next lesson.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Calming down highlights| 00:00 | In the Exercises folder, you'll find a
Photoshop document that is basically the
| | 00:04 | state of this image where we
left off in the last lesson.
| | 00:08 | If you don't have one of your own,
just to review, we had a color image here
| | 00:13 | that we converted to black and
white and did a bunch of toning to.
| | 00:18 | Here is our original color image.
| | 00:20 | We did a black-and-white conversion,
added an adjustment layer to punch up the
| | 00:24 | wood, added another to increase the
contrast over here to try and make him
| | 00:28 | stand out against the black shadow, and then
another to play up these highlights on him.
| | 00:34 | What's messing up the image right now
is this stuff is just so bright, and I
| | 00:37 | would really like to column
that down, and I can do that--
| | 00:41 | you guessed it--with a Levels adjustment layer.
| | 00:43 | As I said, I use a very small tool set.
| | 00:46 | But again, I really think the thing
with black-and-white conversion is about
| | 00:50 | knowing how to play tone and light
and shadow in a particular way to get
| | 00:54 | the effect you want.
| | 00:56 | So the normal controls that we use in the
Levels adjustment layer are the input controls.
| | 01:01 | These are black, midpoint, and gray, and
they allow me to define what in my image
| | 01:06 | is black, what is white, and what is
middle gray. And as I make these adjustments
| | 01:10 | the overall tone relationships are
preserved, so I can make white brighter,
| | 01:15 | black stays black, and the midpoint and
all intervening tones are just accordingly.
| | 01:21 | What I want to do though, is to calm
down the white, to make white darker.
| | 01:26 | Well, if dragging the white point this
way makes white whiter, I can't drag it
| | 01:31 | in the direction that
maybe would make it darker.
| | 01:33 | So I could see about dragging the black
point, but that makes the shadows darker.
| | 01:37 | I could see about dragging the
midpoint, but that lightens and darkens the
| | 01:41 | middle tones, not this white.
| | 01:44 | So what can I do about that?
| | 01:45 | Darkening white is a little bit tricky.
| | 01:47 | First of all, fortunately,
this is not completely white.
| | 01:49 | There is some detail in there, which is good.
| | 01:52 | White is basically empty
space. There is no value.
| | 01:55 | In a print, white is the area of the
paper where no ink has gone, and so the
| | 02:00 | computer thinks of it the same way--
| | 02:01 | it thinks of it an empty value.
So, very often, darkening white is not possible
| | 02:05 | because there is simply nothing to darken.
| | 02:08 | The white space is empty.
| | 02:09 | What I can do instead is redefine what is white.
| | 02:12 | It's almost like a philosophical
leap of some kind, and I can do that with
| | 02:16 | the output sliders.
| | 02:18 | These sliders down here define what
is black and what is white, and the main
| | 02:23 | reason for these has to do with
printing, particular offset printing.
| | 02:26 | A lot of times you prepare an image
with nice dark blacks in it and when you
| | 02:30 | maybe take it to an offset press to run
them in the newspaper or print it in the
| | 02:34 | book or something, the print guy will say,
"Well, I am sorry you have got blacks that
| | 02:37 | are 100% black. Our press cannot
hold darker than 85%," at which point
| | 02:43 | you would say, "Oh okay, then I will make
black in my image about right here."
| | 02:48 | And now you look at the image, and it looks
a little more washed out because we have
| | 02:51 | killed the black, but once it's printed,
those tones will darken up back to true black.
| | 02:57 | We can do the same thing on the
other end of the output slider.
| | 02:59 | We can redefine white. Right now, white is white.
| | 03:03 | This gray ramp here shows us that my
white point pointer is pointed at pure white.
| | 03:08 | If I drag it to the left, I can
make white a shade of gray.
| | 03:14 | As I do that, keep your eyes on this.
| | 03:16 | I am going to put my output
slider back to where it was.
| | 03:19 | Here it's white, and look at this white bucket.
| | 03:20 | It's completely overblown. And as I
drag it back in, those areas darken.
| | 03:26 | Now, the rest of the image is darkening
too, but by now I am sure you are aware
| | 03:29 | that we will be painting a mask for that.
| | 03:31 | So I am not quite sure where to put it
because I need to see it in the context
| | 03:34 | to the rest of the image.
| | 03:35 | So before I can get this set
properly, I got to have my mask in place.
| | 03:39 | So, click to select my mask, Select > All,
or Command+A. I am sure that black is
| | 03:46 | my background color. Edit > Fill, and I am
going to tell it to use the Background Color.
| | 03:51 | You could also leave it on Black.
| | 03:53 | That would be fine.
| | 03:54 | That fills my mask with black. I am going to
deselect so that I don't have those margin lines all over the place.
| | 03:59 | I have white in my foreground color.
Take a brush, and now wherever I paint,
| | 04:04 | white will get darker.
| | 04:06 | Now this is possibly a little bit
tricky in so far as how to paint this mask.
| | 04:13 | What am I going to do is rough it in here and
then try to figure out how to fix it later.
| | 04:19 | I'm, as best as I can, painting around
some things. One reason that you can very
| | 04:23 | often cheat these masks is that there
are just natural boundaries and areas of
| | 04:28 | the image that if they get darker, for
example, on this bucket, I can be real
| | 04:31 | rough rather, because if that black
back there gets any darker, I don't care.
| | 04:36 | So I am just letting it spill over
in some places into other areas.
| | 04:40 | Now, this whole area looks really gray
now, so I need to break that up somehow.
| | 04:45 | I am going to choose gray for my brush
and go down real small, so that now I am
| | 04:51 | not painting in the full effect.
| | 04:52 | I am going to paint on one side of
that bottle so that it looks little
| | 04:55 | more three dimensional.
| | 04:56 | I will do the same thing here on this bucket.
| | 04:58 | I'll just paint in some highlight here so that
things just look a little more three dimensional.
| | 05:05 | Same thing up here.
| | 05:06 | I am trying to think like a painter here.
| | 05:08 | I am trying to think about form and what
areas should be highlighted and what shouldn't.
| | 05:14 | Put back in. So that's looking a
little better. I think I might brighten
| | 05:17 | that one up even little more, which
means going to a darker brush to block the
| | 05:22 | mask even more. If you are not
following that about which color brush to use to
| | 05:26 | block or reveal it, that's fine--just experiment.
| | 05:29 | You can always repaint over areas.
| | 05:31 | So, let's look at it before
and after. This is before.
| | 05:33 | That area is really hot and little distracting.
| | 05:36 | Now, it's more of a background element.
| | 05:37 | So I think that works pretty well.
| | 05:39 | I am wondering about these bits.
| | 05:40 | They are awfully bright.
| | 05:42 | My mask is still selected.
| | 05:43 | That's not darkening enough.
| | 05:44 | I need to go to a lighter brush.
| | 05:47 | That's working. I can darken this stuff up,
| | 05:50 | maybe take some of those
highlights down, some of that down.
| | 05:56 | This thing is bugging me.
| | 05:57 | It looks too bright, so I will darken
that up, and I think I want to darken
| | 06:00 | that up all the way,
| | 06:02 | so I am going to full white in my mask,
so I get the full effect of the darkening.
| | 06:07 | Same thing there.
| | 06:08 | Maybe take those out,
trying to get focus on him.
| | 06:13 | That's looking pretty good.
| | 06:14 | The last thing that's worrying me is,
would the wood stand out more if this stuff
| | 06:18 | back here was darker?
| | 06:19 | So I want to go to Levels, and here,
I am not sure how to do this edit.
| | 06:24 | I don't know if I need to again
adjust my output levels to darken that up--
| | 06:29 | and that does work.
| | 06:30 | I am watching just this area
right here, and it is darker.
| | 06:34 | That's before, that's after.
| | 06:36 | But I do like having contrast down there
I think, so I am not sure that a better
| | 06:39 | way to darken it isn't like this, which
also gives me the interesting thing of
| | 06:44 | having this dark tone against that light tone.
| | 06:46 | I think I am going to try that first,
and by try, I mean I don't really don't
| | 06:50 | know what that's going to look
like until my mask is in place.
| | 06:52 | I am sure that's getting little
tedious hearing me talking about
| | 06:56 | always wondering about my masks,
but that's just how this works.
| | 07:00 | So you should be pretty comfortable
with this technique by now, and now I
| | 07:05 | can paint this dark.
| | 07:08 | Again, I don't have to worry about
really carefully painting perfectly around
| | 07:11 | these boards because if the boards are
little dark, no one who looks at this
| | 07:15 | image doesn't know that that
board just wasn't a little dark.
| | 07:19 | So, I am liking that better.
| | 07:23 | Before, after. I wonder if I can even darker.
| | 07:26 | Back in here. I don't want the ground
to end up the same tone as him, though.
| | 07:32 | I can take it to there, and I like how
dark it is, but now he and the ground are
| | 07:35 | just one solid blob of gray.
| | 07:37 | So I am going to back off on that and say
that that needs to go to right about there.
| | 07:42 | Now, a lot of these times, I am
guessing that, because I won't know for sure
| | 07:45 | about this image until I print.
| | 07:47 | And we will talk about printing,
but if your ultimate goal is paper, there is
| | 07:50 | degree to which you can't really know
if your tones are right until you see it
| | 07:53 | on paper, and suddenly, I am not
liking that. That's too bright.
| | 07:57 | So I've already got an
adjustment layer that darkens light tones.
| | 08:01 | I can simply go and mask that
adjustment layer to include this.
| | 08:05 | Problem is I can't remember which layer it was.
| | 08:08 | If I want, I can go in and label these.
| | 08:11 | Double-click on them, and I
know that this darkens ground.
| | 08:14 | I am pretty sure it was this one,
but just to be sure, all I have to do is
| | 08:18 | change the visibility. Oh, sure enough,
| | 08:20 | okay this is the one that darkens whites.
| | 08:23 | So with that mask selected, I am going
to take white into my paintbrush and
| | 08:28 | just paint over those bits to calm them down.
| | 08:31 | Why do I care if those things are too
bright? Because white points attract focus,
| | 08:36 | and I am really trying to
keep the focus controlled.
| | 08:39 | It is the essence of composition to
control the viewer's eye, and sometimes you
| | 08:43 | alter your composition through your image edits.
| | 08:45 | The viewer really needs to know
what the subject of this picture is.
| | 08:48 | In this particular case, this is a busy image.
| | 08:50 | It's going to take him a while to
completely figure it out, but that
| | 08:53 | doesn't bother me too much.
| | 08:55 | I am going to see what happens if I
just darken this fence up a little bit to
| | 08:58 | again get further separation
between the background and the wood.
| | 09:03 | Now if you're hearing that it sounds
like I'm just stumbling my way through this
| | 09:07 | image wondering what to do, it only
sounds like that because I'm just stumbling
| | 09:12 | my way through this image wondering
what to do, and I promise you, that's normal.
| | 09:16 | It's perfectly okay to find the image
amongst all this data and to feel your way
| | 09:23 | through the edits and figure out what
works and what doesn't and experiment with
| | 09:26 | things and try things--that's how this works.
| | 09:28 | How it worked in the darkroom.
| | 09:30 | It's how it works here.
It's how it works when you are shooting.
| | 09:32 | Just as we work a shot when we are
shooting, we work it when we are editing to
| | 09:36 | find the thing that works best.
| | 09:39 | And I am liking that better.
| | 09:40 | That makes that stand out a little bit more.
| | 09:42 | I do think it's also important not to get
too hung up on every tiny little detail.
| | 09:45 | I am going to step up back for a minute now
and go, what do I think of this? Is this working?
| | 09:49 | Yes, it is, and I am sure you can hear
the impending 'but' that I'm about to say,
| | 09:53 | so I will just say it. But, I think
there's one more thing we can do, and that's
| | 09:57 | possibly to add a vignette to the image
to pull attention more to the center, and
| | 10:02 | that's what we'll look at in the next lesson.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Vignetting| 00:00 | A vignette is often
something that you try to avoid.
| | 00:04 | A vignette is a darkening in the
corners, and a lot of times lenses will
| | 00:07 | inherently produce a
vignetting, particularly at wide angles.
| | 00:10 | At other times vignetting is something
that you want to encourage, or add, and so
| | 00:14 | you choose a lens with a vignette, or
you do what we're going to do and add a
| | 00:17 | vignette in Photoshop.
| | 00:19 | A darkening in the corners can help
bring more attention to the center of an
| | 00:22 | image, to the subject of your image,
and it's very easy to apply in Photoshop.
| | 00:26 | In the Exercises folder for this
movie, there is a Photoshop document
| | 00:30 | called vignette me.
| | 00:31 | Go ahead and open it up, and
you'll see this massively layered
| | 00:34 | Photoshop document.
| | 00:35 | Rather than doing all the edits, I'm
just going to quickly show you what I did.
| | 00:38 | I started with this color image and
then converted it to black and white.
| | 00:41 | I didn't do much, as you can see here.
| | 00:44 | This is pretty much the default recipe.
| | 00:46 | There's not a lot of color in
this image that needs to be altered.
| | 00:49 | The sky, it was raining,
| | 00:50 | you can see the raindrops here, so
there's really no color in the sky anyway.
| | 00:53 | So that's my black-and-white conversion.
| | 00:55 | Next thing I did was add this Levels
adjustment layer with a mask to improve the
| | 01:00 | contrast on this delivery guy here.
| | 01:03 | So that brightens up his shoulders, which
I did because I wanted him to stand out.
| | 01:06 | There are all these people in black behind him.
| | 01:08 | So to get him to stand out more, I
decided to put some highlighting on his
| | 01:11 | shoulders, as well as to
brighten up his clothes and his hands.
| | 01:16 | Next thing I did was using
the Output sliders and Levels,
| | 01:20 | I darkened the blacks back
here, directly behind him--
| | 01:23 | again, before and after--just
trying to make him stand out more.
| | 01:26 | Again, our goal with everything we do
through the whole process of photography
| | 01:31 | is to really make sure the viewer
understands what the subject of our image is.
| | 01:34 | So I'm just trying to separate him
from the background as much as I can.
| | 01:37 | Then I decided he really needed just
more highlighting on his shoulders, so
| | 01:42 | that's what that is. And the reason I can get
away with that is that lighting-wise it makes sense.
| | 01:46 | There's all this bright light
coming from right behind him.
| | 01:48 | We buy it that he could have this
nice room lighting around him.
| | 01:52 | Next, I darkened the street and
improved the contrast. Before and after.
| | 01:58 | Now when I do it this way, you can see that
I did kind of a lousy job with the masking.
| | 02:03 | Watch this area around his arm, and you
can see that I probably could've painted
| | 02:09 | that mask a little bit tighter,
and maybe if I printed, if it looks like a halo
| | 02:13 | around his arm, I'll go back and fix that.
| | 02:14 | But it also looks okay, because it
looks like that happens to be a highlight
| | 02:18 | behind his arm that's washed out the street.
| | 02:20 | Again, I'll figure that out when I
print, so that doesn't really bother me,
| | 02:23 | but that separates him a little more, and it
just adds interesting texture to the image.
| | 02:27 | Next thing I did was brighten up his eyes,
and there's one with a little more pop in there.
| | 02:31 | Then--now this is a very,
very subtle darkening in there.
| | 02:35 | I don't know that that
makes any difference at all.
| | 02:37 | I thought maybe his shoulders would stand
out a little more if this bit wasn't so bright.
| | 02:41 | Depending on how your monitor is adjusted,
you may or may not even be able to see that.
| | 02:46 | Next, I darkened the sky a little bit
because it was just a little too much.
| | 02:50 | Now that I look at that, I'm not sure
that I want that darkening in there.
| | 02:53 | Again, I'm going to do a print
of that and see what I think.
| | 02:56 | What I was thinking was I darkened this,
but I didn't darken this, thinking that
| | 02:59 | it made a nice kind of
halo right behind his head.
| | 03:01 | I'm not sure about that edit. I'll see
how it goes, and that, again, is just a
| | 03:05 | Levels output trick that you learned earlier.
| | 03:08 | And finally, another additional
brightening of his face. I could have gone
| | 03:12 | back and just adjusted the first
adjustment layer, but honestly, I'd
| | 03:15 | forgotten that I had already put one
on there, so I just added another, and
| | 03:18 | sometimes that's how it goes.
| | 03:20 | So now what I would like to do to
further bring focus to him is to throw a
| | 03:23 | vignette on the image.
| | 03:25 | The easiest way to do that in Photoshop
is with a filter called Lens Correction,
| | 03:29 | not highlighted right now because
I don't have a layer selected. But Lens
| | 03:33 | Correction is a destructive edit,
and I don't want to do this destructively
| | 03:36 | because I don't know if I'm
going to like the vignette or not.
| | 03:39 | You apply Lens Correction to an image
layer, like the Background layer here, so
| | 03:43 | I'm going to duplicate the image layer.
| | 03:46 | So I just dragged that down to here to
the New layer button. It makes a copy.
| | 03:49 | Now I'm going to add my vignette to here.
| | 03:51 | If I don't like it, I can just trash the layer.
| | 03:53 | Filter > Lens Correction,
and then it has to think for a bit.
| | 03:57 | Here's my Lens Correction dialog box.
| | 03:59 | By default, Lens Correction is going
to try to identify the type of lens you
| | 04:03 | were using and make some
corrections to it. This is in CS5.
| | 04:06 | If you're using an earlier version
of Photoshop, you won't have this
| | 04:09 | Auto Correction thing.
| | 04:10 | I'm going to turn that off.
| | 04:12 | And you can see what it's doing.
| | 04:13 | It's trying to correct some pincushion
distortion, and I don't actually mind the distortion.
| | 04:18 | I don't even notice it.
| | 04:19 | So I'm going to turn off these Auto
features and go over here to Custom.
| | 04:23 | And here I have Vignette,
and I can darken or lighten.
| | 04:28 | If I lighten, it will lighten the
corners--what's called burning in.
| | 04:31 | I'm going to just darken those up.
| | 04:35 | And you can see now up here
the corners are darker.
| | 04:38 | Basically, the vignette is an oval shape.
| | 04:40 | Midpoint allows me to define
the center point of that oval.
| | 04:44 | I don't actually know how much vignette
to dial in here because as you can see
| | 04:47 | in our preview, I'm not seeing the
effect of any of my adjustment layers.
| | 04:50 | I'm going to assume that I've
probably applied an adjustment layer that's
| | 04:53 | going to darken this vignette up more
than I wanted, so I'm going to back off
| | 04:56 | on it a little bit.
| | 04:56 | This is another reason that I'm doing
this on a duplicate layer because I really
| | 05:01 | can't know for sure what my vignette is
like until I hit OK and see it in place.
| | 05:06 | It actually looks pretty good.
| | 05:08 | That's before. That's after.
| | 05:11 | Vignettes can be overdone.
| | 05:13 | You can make them too dark.
| | 05:14 | You can make them too obvious.
| | 05:15 | A good vignette is not
something someone will notice.
| | 05:17 | When it works, it's astoundingly
effective, and I think this is the case where
| | 05:21 | it works pretty well.
| | 05:22 | That's before. That's after.
| | 05:24 | These just look like shadows,
| | 05:26 | this I don't even notice that much,
and now really the whole center of the
| | 05:30 | image is just kind of lit up, and I didn't
have to do anything but darken the corner.
| | 05:34 | Sometimes you achieve a lightening of
part of your object by putting some
| | 05:37 | darkening around it.
| | 05:38 | So I like that vignette.
I'm going to keep that.
| | 05:40 | Again, I need to print this image to
find out for sure if this is what I like.
| | 05:45 | Vignetting is something that I mentioned
earlier that we need to do to this image.
| | 05:48 | Sometimes you don't want a vignette all
the corners, and that may sound a little
| | 05:51 | strange, but I think this is a case of that.
| | 05:54 | A vignette would be a great way of
toning down this corner, which is distracting
| | 05:58 | me a little bit from him, but I don't
want to darken this corner, because this
| | 06:01 | shape is so important to me,
this whole big pile of wood.
| | 06:04 | So, I'm going to do just what we
did before. I'm going to duplicate my
| | 06:07 | Background layer, and I'm going to
go in here, Filter > Lens Correction.
| | 06:11 | If I just pick this Lens Correction
up here, it will apply the exact same
| | 06:14 | vignette settings that I last used.
| | 06:16 | I don't know if those are
correct, so I'm going to go up here.
| | 06:19 | I'm going to darken that up to about there.
| | 06:22 | Why am I thinking there?
| | 06:24 | I like that this has gone darker.
| | 06:26 | Even if I have a Levels adjustment
that pushes that down a little bit lower,
| | 06:29 | I think that'll be okay. Hit OK.
| | 06:30 | That looks pretty good.
| | 06:34 | There's before, after.
| | 06:37 | Watch this area right in
here. Watch what happens.
| | 06:40 | That's before. That's after.
| | 06:42 | Your focus just goes a little
bit more to him, which is great.
| | 06:45 | Let's check out this corner. Before, after.
| | 06:49 | I don't mind the ground getting darker there.
| | 06:51 | Now let's watch this side
of the image. Before, after.
| | 06:55 | Hmm! I'm not sure that bothers me or not.
| | 06:59 | It's nice having this bright stuff in here;
| | 07:02 | on the other hand, this kind of leads me in.
| | 07:04 | Let's see what happens if we take out
just this side of the vignette, which I can
| | 07:08 | do with the same technique that
I used for Levels adjustments.
| | 07:11 | I can build a mask that will protect
this part of the image, and I'm going to
| | 07:14 | do that by selecting the layer and going up to
the Layer menu and saying Layer Mask > Reveal All.
| | 07:21 | In other words, I'm going to get a
mask that's white because I want to
| | 07:26 | reveal the entire image.
| | 07:28 | Now I take a paintbrush and black
paint and a nice big brush, and if I paint
| | 07:35 | black in, I will be plugging up that part of
the mask to reveal the image that's underneath.
| | 07:44 | This is a case where I'm using a
vignette not to really create a vignetted
| | 07:48 | look, but to get kind of just
some auto shadows painted in there.
| | 07:53 | I think I liked this better.
| | 07:54 | That's before, that's after--
| | 07:57 | before the vignette, not
before that last edit that I made.
| | 07:59 | So I've still got my pile of wood all
nicely lit up, and these bits are darkened,
| | 08:05 | and what this is kind of serving to do
is give some depth to the image in a way.
| | 08:08 | The pile of wood is plainly in the
foreground, all lit up. The background now
| | 08:13 | looks more like it's back in the
background in shadow, and that's giving my
| | 08:18 | image some nice depth.
| | 08:19 | So I think I'm going to keep that vignette.
| | 08:21 | Don't forget about the vignetting.
| | 08:22 | It's something that you maybe don't
think about when you're doing your image
| | 08:25 | edits. Just think sometimes about well,
maybe what I need is more focus on
| | 08:29 | the center of my image.
| | 08:31 | Vignette doesn't do you any good if
your subject is off over on the side, and
| | 08:33 | we got lucky here that my subject kind
of, even though the guy is here, I've got
| | 08:37 | this over here. It all balances together.
My subject kind of takes up the whole
| | 08:40 | entirety of the middle of the image, so
the vignetting trick still kind of works.
| | 08:44 | So anyway, don't forget about vignettes,
and Lens Correction is a great way to do it.
| | 08:48 | If you're using an image editor that
doesn't have a vignette filter, you can try
| | 08:51 | and paint one by hand.
| | 08:53 | Pretty tricky to be that smooth with
your brush, but that's another way to get
| | 08:57 | a vignette effect.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| The trestle images| 00:00 | I thought you would want to see the finished
images that we shot on the railroad trestle,
| | 00:03 | so I am going to very
quickly walk you through those.
| | 00:06 | Of all of those images that was shot,
the one keeper image was one of the ones
| | 00:11 | right from the rail, and I was lucky--
that was the one that I thought probably
| | 00:14 | didn't work and it did. It was the
only one that really had the drama of the
| | 00:17 | scene that I wanted.
| | 00:19 | So I started with a black-and-white conversion.
| | 00:21 | There wasn't much to do with the
sky because the sun is right there.
| | 00:24 | It's pretty washed out. Then I brightened up
the tracks on either side, giving me some nice texture in
| | 00:29 | there, and of course the
centerpiece here is this big rail.
| | 00:33 | Next, I brightened up the whole thing
just because it was all a little dim, and I
| | 00:38 | knew that when I printed it,
it would go a little rough.
| | 00:40 | I'm a little concerned
about this banding in here.
| | 00:43 | This is posterizing, or tone breaks, and I
don't know if it's going to show up in print.
| | 00:48 | If I go into actual size, I
can see that it's not so bad.
| | 00:53 | So it could just be that
| | 00:54 | it's at this particular
magnification level. It's very visible.
| | 00:57 | So I'll print that and see what it's like.
| | 00:59 | If it's too bad, I will back off on
this adjustment, or I'll mask that area.
| | 01:03 | And then a more controlled brightening
of the stuff around here, just because
| | 01:08 | when I looked at the histogram, it
seemed to me like that stuff was going to go
| | 01:11 | a little bit muddy when I printed.
| | 01:13 | So I like this image like this.
| | 01:14 | I've got another idea
about it that we might look at.
| | 01:18 | Here is the tonal image.
| | 01:20 | This is the one, as you'll recall, that
when I looked at it, it was in complete
| | 01:23 | shadow, so no good light on it at all,
but I thought maybe there was still an
| | 01:27 | image to be saved because we've got
some interesting tonal relationships
| | 01:31 | here. So I did a black-and-white
conversion and right off the bat, what I had
| | 01:35 | been visualizing at the scene is happening:
dark grass intersected with this nice light line.
| | 01:41 | So that bit is working well, and I got that
simply by dragging my Greens slider over.
| | 01:47 | Next, I calmed down the sky a
little bit and then brightened up these
| | 01:51 | foreground elements.
| | 01:52 | At this point, I'm simply
painting light in wherever I want it.
| | 01:55 | So I've brightened the bits up just
to give some variation and some texture
| | 01:59 | to the whole thing.
| | 02:01 | Brightened that up a little more.
| | 02:02 | I think it's a nice
counterpoint to these dark areas.
| | 02:05 | I fiddled darkening those up a little
bit to create more of a sense of depth.
| | 02:09 | So the light area is receding over
the dark areas, and then the whole thing
| | 02:13 | needed a little bit of contrast punch.
| | 02:15 | So those are the only two keepers out
of all of those images that I shot on
| | 02:18 | the railroad trestle.
| | 02:19 | And I've got to tell you, that's pretty normal.
| | 02:22 | Two images out of 60 is a pretty good
shooting ratio for an hour's worth of
| | 02:27 | work, but as you can see, one of the
great things about black and white is I can
| | 02:30 | take this otherwise pretty blah, no-
contrast, no-good-light image and turn it
| | 02:37 | into something much more interesting.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Handling tricky skies| 00:00 | The ability to tone skies lighter or
darker is one of the easiest ways to get
| | 00:05 | more drama, or more contrast, into a black-
and-white image, but there is something
| | 00:08 | you need to be very, very careful about.
| | 00:10 | This is a RAW file that you saw earlier.
| | 00:12 | It's in your Assets folder, and I am going
to go in here and darken the sky up here.
| | 00:18 | And immediately, the feel of
the image starts changing.
| | 00:21 | Again, nice contrast with this tree.
| | 00:23 | It's a great way of bringing out
foreground elements, but I am going to zoom in here.
| | 00:27 | Look what's happening around this tree
here, and look how much worse it gets as I
| | 00:33 | continue to tone the sky darker.
I'm getting this weird halo around some of these
| | 00:38 | branches, and it's only on this one
tree, and sure enough, this tree is a
| | 00:42 | different color than that tree.
| | 00:44 | Let's zoom in real close
and see what we get here.
| | 00:48 | There are these fringy tones around
this tree, and so they're not getting hit by
| | 00:53 | the adjustment that I'm making
with the Black and White layer.
| | 00:56 | I've targeted blues, and those tones
in there aren't blue and so they're not
| | 01:00 | getting darkened like everything else, and
it's making this ugly fringe, and it kind
| | 01:03 | of makes it look like an electric tree
of some kind. And that's definitely going
| | 01:07 | to show up in print, and that is not an
uncommon thing to experience when you're
| | 01:11 | trying to darken skies this way around foliage.
| | 01:13 | Now, first of all, you could argue that
this adjustment is possibly a little too
| | 01:17 | far because of the vignetting that's
happening, but there are going be times
| | 01:21 | where you will want to darken a sky this
far, particularly if I was going to crop
| | 01:24 | the center out, or take
pains to limit that vignetting.
| | 01:27 | So to deal with this, what I am going
to do instead is back off this adjustment
| | 01:31 | until that halo is not visible.
| | 01:32 | Now, it looks pretty good there.
| | 01:35 | There is still a little bit of white
stuff, could be highlights or just the
| | 01:38 | occasional odd leaf in there.
| | 01:40 | That's about as far as I
can push that adjustment.
| | 01:42 | If I want the sky darker still, then
I now need to go in and add a Levels
| | 01:48 | adjustment layer and do my darkening that way.
| | 01:50 | And I am going to want to do it with
the midpoint slider, not the black point
| | 01:54 | slider, and that's going to target the
middle values that are going to darken
| | 01:57 | the sky, and as you can see--let me
just do it extreme adjustment--and you can
| | 02:01 | see I don't ever pick up that fringe because
I'm darkening the fringe along with the tree.
| | 02:06 | So this is the way around that.
| | 02:07 | Now I do need to be careful. As I start
pushing this, I'm starting to see some
| | 02:11 | banding in here,
and that's even on a 16-bit image.
| | 02:15 | Whether it shows up in print or not, I
don't know. The only way to find out is
| | 02:18 | to do a test print it, where it
will might, or it might be hidden.
| | 02:22 | So the most important thing to know is
that you've got to keep an eye on the
| | 02:25 | edges of your skies, particularly around
foliage, when you're darkening them with
| | 02:29 | a black-and-white adjustment.
| | 02:30 | If you are, take the black-and-white
adjustment just as far as you can before you
| | 02:34 | see the fringe and either give up on
the idea of darkening it any further or
| | 02:38 | use a Levels adjustment with the
midpoint slider to get the rest of the
| | 02:41 | darkening that you want.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Doing a selective black-and-white conversion| 00:00 | There will be times when you won't want to
convert all of an image to black and white.
| | 00:04 | Selective black-and-white conversion allows you
to leave something in the image that's in color.
| | 00:09 | So, you'll see this. A lot of times
people will convert an image into black and
| | 00:12 | white and leave one object edited in color.
| | 00:14 | It can be a very cool effect.
| | 00:16 | I would argue that you need to be careful
with it, that it doesn't upstage your image.
| | 00:20 | A lot of times such an effect can be
distracting because what people notice is
| | 00:24 | oh, hey, one thing is in color.
| | 00:25 | Here is an example. I'm going to
leave her color and knock the background out
| | 00:30 | to black and white.
| | 00:31 | So here is my original.
| | 00:33 | I've added a Black and White adjustment layer.
| | 00:35 | I can now do any toning in black and white
that I like, but this works this fine as is.
| | 00:40 | Black and White is an adjustment layer,
just like the Levels adjustment layers
| | 00:43 | that we've been using, which means it
always comes in with a layer mask, which
| | 00:47 | means I can simply build a mask to say
what should be in black and white and
| | 00:51 | what should be in color.
| | 00:53 | Right now, the mask is empty, so
the entire image is getting the
| | 00:56 | black-and-white effect.
| | 00:57 | Remember this Black and White adjustment
layer, again is kind of spray paint that
| | 01:01 | we're spraying onto our image,
that's turning it into black and white.
| | 01:04 | And this layer mask is like a
stencil that's in front of our image.
| | 01:08 | So wherever I fill up the stencil, or the
the mask, with black, none of that magic
| | 01:14 | black-and-white spray paint goes
through, and so these areas do not get
| | 01:18 | converted to grayscale.
| | 01:20 | So fortunately, this image is extremely
shallow depth of field and so the edges
| | 01:24 | are already a little bit soft.
| | 01:25 | I don't have to be super
particular about nailing my mask exactly right.
| | 01:31 | If I want to be, I can, and I can use
some of Photoshop's other masking tools.
| | 01:35 | A detailed discussion of Photoshop's
masking tools is way beyond a humble black-
| | 01:41 | and-white course such as this.
| | 01:43 | But you can find other courses on
Photoshop's masking capabilities, and any of
| | 01:48 | them can be used with a Black and White
layer that we're looking at here, or the
| | 01:52 | Levels adjustment layers that we've
been using--all of those masking tools give
| | 01:56 | you ways of constraining your
tonal adjustments in your edits.
| | 01:58 | I might just do a little more of
touching that out, and so there we go.
| | 02:03 | I've got her in color, the background
in black and white. It makes for a nice
| | 02:07 | cooler background, brings more focused her.
| | 02:09 | These kinds of edits are extremely easy
| | 02:12 | thanks to Black and White adjustment
layers, and they are a single reason to be
| | 02:17 | using Black and White adjustment
layers rather than the destructive Black and
| | 02:21 | White dialog box.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Toning| 00:00 | In a wet darkroom, after you've made a
black-and-white print, you can soak it in
| | 00:05 | different toning agents to give
it an overall tone, or colorcast.
| | 00:09 | By tone, I don't mean shade of
gray, but an actual color tone.
| | 00:12 | So a sepia tone, for example, to
make an image look more antique.
| | 00:17 | We can do a digital version of that
very easily using the Black and White
| | 00:21 | adjustment layer by simply going
into the Black and White adjustment layer
| | 00:25 | controls and checking this Tint box. And boom!
| | 00:28 | As soon as I do, my image is tinted.
| | 00:30 | I can select the color that I would
like to tint by clicking on that color
| | 00:34 | swatch and just picking a color.
| | 00:36 | And in almost every case, remember, this
is just a tint of color, so it doesn't
| | 00:41 | need to be a dark, deeply saturated color.
| | 00:44 | That's looking a little yellow to me.
| | 00:46 | I'm going to slide more towards orange.
| | 00:48 | And obviously, the type of tint you
want depends on the type of mood you're
| | 00:52 | going for and the subject
matter and so on and so forth.
| | 00:55 | Typically, sepia, orangish colors are
what you might use, although cool tints
| | 01:01 | are very appropriate for
certain types of subject matter.
| | 01:04 | Not so much this one though,
| | 01:05 | so I'm going to head back to here.
| | 01:07 | If you're going to print, you're going to need
to do some test prints to see if you've got it.
| | 01:11 | But this is a very, very easy way
to apply a simple color toning to any
| | 01:17 | black-and-white image.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Split-toning| 00:00 | In the last lesson we looked at toning, the
process of applying a color tint to an image.
| | 00:06 | We are going to look at a variation on
that now called split toning, which is
| | 00:09 | something that you can do in Camera Raw.
| | 00:11 | Split Toning allows you to tone the
highlights of an image one color and the
| | 00:15 | shadows of an image another color and
have them kind of blend together.
| | 00:19 | So this is the trestle
image that we looked at earlier.
| | 00:22 | Before, I'd done all my edits in
Photoshop. Here, I have kind of recreated
| | 00:26 | the same edits in Camera Raw because
I have to be in Camera Raw to do this
| | 00:29 | Split Toning effect.
| | 00:31 | So as you can see, I have
already done a Convert to Grayscale.
| | 00:34 | You can also see that because my
image looks like it's in black and white.
| | 00:37 | Anyway I've done a Convert to Grayscale,
which you have to do to get Split Toning.
| | 00:40 | The next tab over is the Split Toning
tab, and it's got two different controls,
| | 00:45 | one for letting me pick the color that
I want the highlight toning to be, and the
| | 00:49 | other to be the color that I
want the shadow toning to be.
| | 00:52 | So I am going to quickly go
back and look at the color image.
| | 00:55 | I kind of like the slight-blue
sky and we've got warm down here.
| | 00:59 | I think I might stick with the cool-to-
warm thing here, although I don't know.
| | 01:03 | Maybe I am going to reverse that. But let's see
what happens if we come over here and get more of the magenta
| | 01:08 | color in the sky. That's kind of
interesting, and notice it's picking up in the
| | 01:11 | rails, which is not what was
happening in my original color image.
| | 01:15 | I was not actually getting any color in
these highlight details down here or in
| | 01:19 | these highlights over here.
| | 01:20 | So I am not really just recreating the
exact same color that was in the image, I
| | 01:24 | am spreading that color through more of
the image, which is kind of interesting.
| | 01:28 | So what that's done is that's
given me a tone in only the highlights.
| | 01:31 | It might be that you just want to stop
right there because you like the coolness
| | 01:35 | of the shadows that we get here, but let's see
what happens up if we warm up the shadows also.
| | 01:38 | I am going to keep this in the orange
range and warm that up, and there is a lot
| | 01:41 | of overlap here between the highlights
and shadows, tonally, because even these
| | 01:47 | highlights are pretty dark.
| | 01:49 | Now the Balance slider lets me move
more towards the shadows, which makes the
| | 01:53 | image more orange, or more towards the
highlights, which makes it more blue.
| | 01:57 | So I can find the just the change that
I like and if I want along the way, go
| | 02:02 | back and change the tinting itself.
| | 02:04 | So Split Toning is a very
specialized, unique kind of an effect.
| | 02:07 | It's roughly akin to duo tones in the
print world if you've got any experience of
| | 02:11 | that kind, and it can be a way of getting
a nice stylized look that allows you to
| | 02:16 | really control the mood
of the image through color.
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| High-key and low-key images| 00:00 | We talked earlier about high-key and low-key images:
| | 00:04 | low-key images being ones
whose shadows are really crushed down to
| | 00:07 | total black and lacking in detail, high
key being the opposite--highlights that
| | 00:10 | are blown out to complete detail.
| | 00:12 | These are very easy things to
create in Photoshop, and there are a lot
| | 00:15 | different ways of doing them.
| | 00:17 | Probably the easiest, based on the
tools we've look at so far, is simply a Levels
| | 00:20 | adjustment. Take your black point and
just start punching your blacks down.
| | 00:24 | If you want a little more control
over that, you can do it with the midpoint
| | 00:27 | slider. Or, we haven't worked with
curves yet in this course, but you can use
| | 00:31 | curves to define a curve to really
precisely control exactly what you wanted to
| | 00:35 | darken and what you wanted to brighten.
| | 00:37 | There's really not anything
more tricky about it than that.
| | 00:39 | Let's look at one other way, which can
be interesting partly because it can be
| | 00:43 | little random and partly because it can
keep you from having to do any masking.
| | 00:47 | I am going to up a flattened
version of our trestle image here.
| | 00:51 | Let's say I do like this detail in
here, but also this rail is awfully
| | 00:54 | compelling. What if this was a really low-
key image where all of this fell out to black?
| | 00:58 | Now, I could build adjustment
layers to plunge all of that into black.
| | 01:02 | I could build a Levels layer here and
do that, except I'm losing stuff on the rail,
| | 01:08 | and it's not losing all of that.
| | 01:10 | It takes some masking work to get that to work.
| | 01:12 | Instead, I am going to do something different.
| | 01:13 | I am going to duplicate my Background
layer, just like we were doing before when
| | 01:18 | we were creating a vignette.
| | 01:19 | I'm going to change its
Blending mode up here to Soft Light.
| | 01:25 | That's starting to look
more like a low-key image.
| | 01:27 | The highlights are coming through.
The shadows have really gone down to just black.
| | 01:32 | So there you can see the difference.
| | 01:33 | If I want to further refine this, I can
throw a Levels adjustment layer on top
| | 01:37 | of the whole stock and fiddle with my
midpoint to decide exactly where I want
| | 01:42 | this to be, and I am finding I really like this.
| | 01:45 | This is pretty interesting, this rail
just kind of coming out of nowhere and
| | 01:48 | vanishing into this lightness.
| | 01:50 | We get a nice good, strong silhouette
of this, and we are still preserving
| | 01:53 | some detail in here.
| | 01:54 | So I am not sure that I don't actually
prefer this really low-key version to the
| | 01:59 | original image that had more detail.
| | 02:02 | And that's that important thing to
remember in any type of shooting you are
| | 02:04 | doing, but particularly with black and
white: just because there is detail in an
| | 02:08 | area doesn't mean you need to keep it.
| | 02:11 | Your vocabulary is light and shadow,
not detail and really fine, super-sharp
| | 02:17 | filigree in every part of the image.
| | 02:19 | There is just as much power in having a
black area of your image, or silhouette,
| | 02:23 | as there is in having a perfectly
rendered detail here on the railroad track.
| | 02:26 | So this is a very, very easy way of
quickly knocking out a low-key image.
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| Diffusion| 00:00 | If you've spent much time watching old
movies then you're probably used to seeing
| | 00:05 | actresses shot with this diffuse hazy
glow around their faces, so they would
| | 00:10 | sit perfectly still on a particular
pool of light and have this wonderful
| | 00:13 | softness about them.
| | 00:15 | And that's because very often they
insisted that the cinematographer shoot
| | 00:19 | them through some gauze, or a pair of
pantyhose, or smear Vaseline on the lens, or
| | 00:23 | something to ensure that they had this soft
glow that made their skin look much better.
| | 00:28 | That type of diffusion is an effective
technique to apply to any type of photo,
| | 00:32 | but it's very often particularly
effective on black-and-white images.
| | 00:36 | Black and white, as we discussed, is
already an abstraction. Adding diffusion
| | 00:40 | can make the image even more abstract
which can often create atmosphere and draw
| | 00:46 | the viewer more in, emotionally.
| | 00:47 | So we're going to do that to this image.
| | 00:49 | I've got this horse ears here that were
shot in this nice bright light, and it's
| | 00:53 | already kind of a really
soft, hazy luminous image.
| | 00:56 | I would like to increase that
sense by adding some diffusion.
| | 01:00 | I'm going to start by
lowering the contrast in the image.
| | 01:03 | I'm doing that because the process that
we're going to use to add the diffusion
| | 01:07 | is going to increase the blacks, so
I'd like to buy myself a little more
| | 01:10 | latitude for that by lowering the contrast.
| | 01:13 | So I'm just dragging the
Contrast slider to the left.
| | 01:16 | And a diffuse image
inherently doesn't have much contrast.
| | 01:19 | That's why an actress's skin looks better.
| | 01:21 | You don't see as much texture on the
skin because texture is simply contrast.
| | 01:27 | Wherever there is an edge or something
like that, you are seeing a line of contrast.
| | 01:31 | So by reducing contrast, we're inherently
making the image softer and more diffuse.
| | 01:36 | With contrast lowered, I'm going to
open the image in Photoshop and begin my
| | 01:40 | black-and-white process.
| | 01:41 | Now there's not much that I need to do
in the way of black-and-white conversion,
| | 01:44 | because this image is mostly white.
| | 01:47 | But I'm going to throw a Black and
White adjustment layer on there, and that's
| | 01:50 | looking pretty good.
| | 01:51 | Now, there are a lot of
different ways that I can do this.
| | 01:53 | I'm going to do this in the
way that will yield me the most
| | 01:57 | non-destructiveness that I can get;
| | 02:00 | in other words, I want to be able to go
back and alter any of these steps at any time.
| | 02:03 | So I'm going to go in the Layers
palette here and create a new group.
| | 02:07 | I'll leave that there, and I'm going to
put this layer in it, and I'm going to
| | 02:11 | double-click on the Background layer
to turn it into a floating layer and
| | 02:15 | add that to the group.
| | 02:17 | So now my image has not changed at all.
| | 02:19 | I have my original layer with a black-
and-white layer on top of it, but they're
| | 02:22 | all held in this little folder here.
| | 02:25 | So now what I'm going to do is
take this folder and duplicate it.
| | 02:28 | Let me get the Layers palette out,
here so you can see the whole thing.
| | 02:31 | Now I have two copies of the same
thing sitting right on top of each other.
| | 02:35 | I have a color image with a black-and-
white layer in this folder, and sitting on
| | 02:41 | top of that a duplicate of the
exact same thing in its own folder.
| | 02:43 | I'm going to now go to my upper image layer and
go to the Filter menu > Blur > Gaussian Blur.
| | 02:52 | And I really want to blur this a lot--
maybe not quite that much, but we'll see.
| | 02:56 | I'll back it off to about there.
| | 02:58 | So I'm creating a blurry, or diffuse,
version, if you will, of the image.
| | 03:02 | So I'll save that, and now what I've got
is a blurry black-and-white photo.
| | 03:06 | That is really not what I was going for.
| | 03:08 | I want this whole group to
change its Blending mode.
| | 03:12 | The Blending mode pop-up simply
controls how one pixel merges, or replaces,
| | 03:18 | the pixels that are sitting below it
in the layer stack, and I want to set
| | 03:21 | this to Soft Light.
| | 03:23 | And as soon as I do that, my blurry
image is now composited with my original
| | 03:28 | image, and you may think, "Well, it
doesn't look that much different."
| | 03:30 | So let me hide this group, and
you see there's the original,
| | 03:33 | there's the copy, and it is more diffuse.
| | 03:35 | It is getting some halos and things
around it, just not getting it enough.
| | 03:38 | I think I need to blur my image some
more, so I'm going to go back up to here
| | 03:42 | and maybe I'll just hit it
with the same amount of blur.
| | 03:45 | And well, that's kind of working, but not much.
| | 03:48 | I think what needs to happen next is
my upper layer needs to be brighter.
| | 03:50 | So I'm going to go ahead and add a
Levels adjustment layer here, and I did that
| | 03:55 | to the upper set, and I'm
going to brighten this up.
| | 03:58 | Now we're starting to get
a nice glow around things.
| | 04:02 | There's before, there's after.
| | 04:04 | I've softened up a lot of his hair.
| | 04:06 | There is kind of a white halo around
this, and because I've done these as
| | 04:10 | adjustment layers, all of
these steps are editable later.
| | 04:14 | So I can create this nice hazy, diffuse look.
| | 04:17 | It's very subtle, but again, for skin
tones and things like that, it's going to
| | 04:20 | just smooth things out very nicely
without eliminating too much detail.
| | 04:23 | I still see hair in here, so it's not
obvious that this image has been diffused.
| | 04:28 | It doesn't look like there's a big blur
sitting on top of it, but it is just a
| | 04:32 | tiny bit dreamier and more luminous than
the original image that I started with.
| | 04:37 | This is a very easy way to achieve that effect.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using Nik Software's Silver Efex Pro 2 plug-in| 00:00 | I want to take a look at one more
black-and-white conversion tool, and it's a
| | 00:03 | black-and-white conversion tool
that is not built into Photoshop.
| | 00:06 | It's a plug-in filter made by Nik Software.
| | 00:09 | That's N-I-K Software.
| | 00:11 | And if you go to niksoftware.com, you
can download a free, I believe it's 15-day
| | 00:16 | demo version of Silver Efex Pro 2,
which is an exceptional way of making black-
| | 00:22 | and-white conversions.
| | 00:24 | This is the Silver Efex Pro 2 dialog
box, and you can see, right off the bat, that
| | 00:28 | I get this nice preview of my image.
| | 00:30 | And the preview looks about like the
normal default black-and-white conversion
| | 00:34 | that I get in Photoshop with the Black
and White tool. It put me in about the same place.
| | 00:39 | What I also get are all these presets
over here These are predefined black-
| | 00:43 | and-white conversions that I can
just click on to get an edit of my image.
| | 00:47 | And as you notice, they're even using the same
terminology we have been: High Key, Low Key.
| | 00:52 | You'll also see some traditional
darkroom terminology, like Push Process.
| | 00:56 | These presets are simply built up by
operating these parameters over here and
| | 01:00 | then saving them, so that gives you
all of these and they've grouped them into
| | 01:04 | categories: Classic, Vintage, Modern, Favorites.
| | 01:06 | But I want you to take a look at the
actual manual tools, which is where I
| | 01:09 | spend most of my time.
| | 01:11 | We looked at this image earlier, and we
actually worked through an edit of it in
| | 01:14 | Photoshop, so we're going to
redo that here in Silver Efex.
| | 01:17 | What I've got are first these
global adjustments, and they're clearly
| | 01:20 | labeled, GLOBAL ADJUSTMENTS.
| | 01:22 | I can change the brightness and contrast
of the image, so I'm going to give this
| | 01:25 | an overall contrast boost, just to pull
the blacks back up to where they need to
| | 01:29 | be in, so immediately, things are looking better.
| | 01:32 | But as you recall, I did a whole lot of
localized editing in Photoshop, where I
| | 01:35 | was adding Levels adjustment layers and
then painting masks and to control them.
| | 01:40 | There is no masking in Silver Efex,
because Silver Efex will simply do all
| | 01:44 | the masking for you.
| | 01:46 | You don't have to do anything
other than use these control points.
| | 01:48 | Control point is U Point technology.
| | 01:51 | It's something that Nik Software came up
with, and it exists in a lot of their plug-ins.
| | 01:55 | They make some excellent color-editing
software called Viveza that uses this
| | 01:59 | technology also, and if you're a Nikon
user, you may have used Nikon CaptureNX2,
| | 02:03 | which includes this control point technology.
| | 02:06 | I'm going to click right here in the sky.
| | 02:08 | Now, notice there's now this yellow-
orangish circle, which is a control point.
| | 02:12 | I clicked it on the blue sky,
and Silver Efex knows that.
| | 02:15 | It's looked underneath that control
point and analyzed the color that I clicked
| | 02:19 | on, and determined, 'oh, he clicked on blue.'
| | 02:22 | I'm going to drag out an area of effect
for this control point, and what I would
| | 02:26 | like to do is darken that
color that I clicked on.
| | 02:28 | Brightness, Contrast, Structure,
these are little sliders, so I'm going to
| | 02:32 | darken the Brightness slider and looky
there: the sky is getting darker and
| | 02:38 | nothing else in the image is.
| | 02:39 | Now, the clouds are getting
darker, also, a little bit.
| | 02:42 | That's because they've got some blue in them.
| | 02:44 | It has analyzed the underlying color
and is darkening only things within that
| | 02:49 | area of effect that are that color.
| | 02:50 | In other words, it's automatically
built a mask around all these tiny little
| | 02:53 | branches, things that I
could never paint around--
| | 02:55 | it's done that for me.
| | 02:57 | I can move it around onto different
colors and different effects start happening.
| | 03:02 | So it's analyzing that color that's
underneath and automatically generating a mask.
| | 03:06 | If I don't like the darkening on
those clouds over there, that's okay.
| | 03:10 | I can drop a control point on them, and it
will build a mask that will protect them.
| | 03:14 | I'm not sure what I think.
| | 03:16 | I kind of was liking that darkening,
but maybe it's a little too ominous.
| | 03:19 | For now, I think I will leave a control
point there to protect those areas, and
| | 03:23 | I'm going to duplicate this control
point by Option+Clicking and dragging down to
| | 03:28 | this other part of the sky.
| | 03:30 | And that's not having too much of an effect.
| | 03:32 | I thought that might get me a little bit more
darkening, so I'll just get rid of that one.
| | 03:37 | So I've got my sky taken care of.
| | 03:39 | Now, I want to go back to work on the
foreground here, and get the contrast up
| | 03:43 | like we did in the other image.
| | 03:44 | So I'm going to click on the road,
and I'm going to click in an area that's not
| | 03:48 | in shadow, because I want that red tone.
| | 03:51 | I want to be sure it's selecting that,
drag my area of effect out, and I'm going
| | 03:55 | to increase the contrast, and looky
there. My road is getting nice and
| | 03:58 | chunky, seeing a lot of texture.
| | 04:01 | I'm darkening that shadow.
| | 04:03 | I don't like the way those highlights
are blowing out a little bit there, so
| | 04:06 | I'm going to darken things a little bit
to pull some detail back in there, and
| | 04:09 | that looks pretty good.
| | 04:10 | So notice what I've done here.
| | 04:11 | I've done an edit masked to only the
road, and I've done another edit masked
| | 04:16 | to only the sky, around all these tree branches,
and at no time, have I used any masking tools.
| | 04:21 | I haven't had to paint anything or
select anything or any of that kind of stuff.
| | 04:26 | This is the power of the Nik
Software control points, and it's pretty
| | 04:30 | wonderful for complex edits.
| | 04:32 | Still lost a little bit of highlight in here.
| | 04:34 | I'm going to go in here to Tonality
Protection and slide up Highlights and see
| | 04:40 | if that buys me anything in here.
| | 04:43 | And I think maybe it's just I did a bad
job with my RAW conversion, so at some
| | 04:46 | point I may go back and do a little
recovery there and try and fix it.
| | 04:49 | Now what else did I do to this image?
| | 04:50 | I worked on these bits back here, so I'm
going to click a control point in here,
| | 04:55 | define a circle, and I want more contrast.
| | 05:00 | Ooh, look how that's lighting up. I really like that.
| | 05:02 | I'm going to do something else.
| | 05:04 | I'm going to increase Structure.
| | 05:06 | Structure is akin to Sharpening.
| | 05:08 | It's a bunch of tiny little contrast
adjustments that get applied to an area.
| | 05:12 | Let me zoom in, so you can
see this is a little better.
| | 05:15 | So I'll show you where it was
originally. It was back here.
| | 05:18 | These are just a little soft.
| | 05:19 | As I increase Structure, they
really get a nice pop to them.
| | 05:22 | They get really clearly defined.
| | 05:25 | And now look at all this
wonderful silvery stuff I've got.
| | 05:27 | I've got these beautiful silver
branches against all this dark black stuff,
| | 05:31 | which I really, really like.
| | 05:33 | So, in addition to simple toning, if I
really want to finish creating the look
| | 05:38 | of the black-and-white image, I might
want to think about Grain, Grain and
| | 05:41 | Texture, and there are some fairly
kludgey ways of doing this in other programs.
| | 05:46 | Silver Efex does a wonderful job of
modeling gray, and in fact, I can even just
| | 05:52 | pick a type of film that I
like and it will simulate it.
| | 05:55 | So I could say that I want to
simulate Kodak 400 TMA, and not only does it
| | 05:59 | simulate the grain, it
simulates the contrast response.
| | 06:02 | Very contrasty film and that's what I see there.
| | 06:04 | But what I'm going to do instead is just
do my own custom little thing here, and
| | 06:09 | I'm going to zoom in again
and just dial up some grain.
| | 06:13 | And what I'm actually doing is
dialing down the Grain number, because I'm
| | 06:17 | telling how my particles
of grain I want per pixel.
| | 06:19 | What Silver Efex does is actually
shatters your image into individual pixels
| | 06:23 | and rebuilds those pixels up from grain.
| | 06:27 | And now you look up here and you
can start seeing a lot of film grain.
| | 06:30 | I've got some final other toning
and adjustment controls, including a
| | 06:34 | full Levels adjustment.
| | 06:36 | I've also got vignetting controls
which are very nice, and a really fun thing,
| | 06:40 | which is the ability to burn edges.
| | 06:42 | So I can say over on the left I want
to put in some Edge Burn, and what this
| | 06:48 | lets me do is simulate negative
borders, just like I would get off of an
| | 06:52 | enlarger, or it let's me simulate
burning edges onto an enlarger.
| | 06:56 | And it's nice because these are not
just stock, pre-canned edges that they're
| | 07:01 | applying to my image.
| | 07:02 | They're algorithmic,
meaning it's generating new edges.
| | 07:04 | And that means that if I save this as a
preset and apply it to multiple images,
| | 07:08 | I won't see the same edge on every
image, which can become conspicuous if I'm
| | 07:13 | showing a bunch of images at one time.
| | 07:15 | And of course, as I mentioned,
I've got Vignetting and Toning.
| | 07:17 | So if you're really serious about
black-and-white shooting, you have to at least
| | 07:21 | download the demo of Silver
Efex and take a look at it.
| | 07:24 | It's a very, very powerful black-and-
white tool, one that's very easy to use.
| | 07:28 | It's a great thing to have in your arsenal.
| | 07:29 | It's not a replacement for Photoshop.
| | 07:31 | You got to have Photoshop to host it,
although it can also run in Lightroom and Aperture.
| | 07:34 | But it is an additional set of tools,
whether you use it as your de facto go-to
| | 07:39 | black-and-white converter or just for
times when you've got a difficult masking job.
| | 07:43 | Either way it's a really handy
tool to have at your disposal.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Printing in Black and WhiteSelecting a printer| 00:00 | I have a confession to make.
| | 00:03 | I don't get all of this online photo
stuff, Flickr and sending photos over
| | 00:08 | Facebook, and all of that kind of
stuff, but yeah, yeah, yeah I get that
| | 00:10 | it's a great way to share your
images with a lot of people, but I don't
| | 00:14 | understand people who never print their
images, because as far as I'm concerned,
| | 00:18 | until trees have been killed and toxic
chemicals have been squirted on them to
| | 00:22 | produce a photographic print, until
that's happened, your image isn't done.
| | 00:26 | Now, that's not just me being old-
fashioned and thinking in some quaint
| | 00:30 | 20th-century idea of photography.
| | 00:33 | I believe that a well-crafted
photographic print always looks better than an
| | 00:38 | image on screen, for one simple reason,
and that is the light that we're used to
| | 00:43 | seeing, the light that we see in the
everyday world, the light that our eyes are
| | 00:47 | developed for, is reflected light.
| | 00:48 | It's light that bounces off of things
into our eyes, just like light bounces off
| | 00:53 | of a photographic print into our eyes.
| | 00:55 | When you look at an image onscreen,
you are looking at transmissive light,
| | 00:58 | light that's being shined from a light
source directly into your eyes, and that
| | 01:01 | light has very, very different quality.
| | 01:04 | We go out in the real world, we
identify some light that we like, we take a
| | 01:07 | picture of it, and to really recreate
that reflected light that we see in the
| | 01:12 | real world, we need to
make a photographic print.
| | 01:15 | If you've never seen one of your
images printed, I would argue that you're
| | 01:18 | selling yourself short.
| | 01:19 | If you've only ever seen your images on
a computer screen then you've only ever
| | 01:23 | seen kind of a garish overwrought version
of them that probably doesn't really look
| | 01:27 | that much like what you
had seen in the real world.
| | 01:31 | There are a lot of different
printers out there for making color prints.
| | 01:34 | When it comes to making black-and-
white prints, things get a little more
| | 01:37 | complicated because it turns out that
black-and-white printing is actually a
| | 01:40 | fairly complicated
process, for a couple of reasons.
| | 01:43 | The main one being it's very difficult
to get a black-and-white print that's
| | 01:47 | truly neutral, and by that I mean where
the grays are really gray--they're not
| | 01:52 | gray with a little bit of green
cast or a little bit of a magenta cast.
| | 01:56 | They don't have a colorcast of any kind.
| | 01:58 | They simply look gray.
| | 02:01 | While there are a lot of color inkjet
printers out there, there are only a few
| | 02:04 | that are capable of producing a truly neutral
black-and-white print, and this is one of them.
| | 02:09 | This is the Epson R3000.
| | 02:10 | It uses something called Epson's K3
Ink Set, and they make a few different
| | 02:15 | printers with this ink set, and by the time
you are watching this video, there may be more.
| | 02:21 | What separates this printer from a non-
black-and-white-capable printer has to do
| | 02:27 | with the inks that Epson
has chosen to put in here.
| | 02:29 | So I am going to open this up here, so
you can see the vast array of inks that
| | 02:33 | this printer provides.
| | 02:35 | You can see I have got a bunch of color inks.
| | 02:37 | What makes this printer a good black
and white though are these things here.
| | 02:40 | I've got two different blacks, one for
printing on matte paper and the other for
| | 02:43 | printing on photo paper, and
I have two different grays.
| | 02:47 | So these inks are combined to help
me get a nice range of neutral tones.
| | 02:54 | There's another thing this printer does
though, that a less capable printer won't
| | 02:57 | do when it comes to bring black and
white, and that is that it produces prints
| | 03:01 | that stay neutral no matter
what type of light you're in.
| | 03:04 | Whether I am looking at this under
sunlight, tungsten light, fluorescent light,
| | 03:08 | it will still always look neutral.
| | 03:10 | A less-capable printer will show a
color shift as I move the print around from
| | 03:15 | light source to light source.
| | 03:16 | So again, there are only a few printers
on the market that have these abilities,
| | 03:21 | the ability to print a truly neutral
print and the ability to print one that
| | 03:24 | doesn't have a color shift, what's
called a metamerit shift, as you move from
| | 03:28 | light source to light source. Why do I need a
black and white printer with all these extra color inks?
| | 03:32 | Well, that's partly because I would
like to be able to print color as well,
| | 03:35 | but also it turns out that in a black-and-white
print there's still a lot of color ink that's used.
| | 03:39 | One of your concerns with any
type of printing is longevity.
| | 03:43 | You want a print that's
going to last a long time, that has archival qualities.
| | 03:46 | This printer when you print on the
right type of paper, you can get prints that
| | 03:50 | will last a hundred years, maybe longer.
| | 03:53 | And that has to do with the formulation of the inks.
| | 03:55 | These inks are created from photo
pigments rather than dyes, like a less
| | 03:59 | archival printer would be.
| | 04:01 | Also, for black-and-white prints, they
will mix different colors in to get more
| | 04:06 | archive-ability, to help reduce
that color shift that can happen.
| | 04:09 | So, black-and-white printing is a
very complicated process, involving all of
| | 04:12 | these different inks.
| | 04:13 | So when you are out shopping for a
printer that's capable of doing good black
| | 04:17 | and white, that's the
first thing you want to look for is
| | 04:20 | a printer that can printer truly
neutral, without a color shift as you change
| | 04:23 | light source. From there you move on to
just the other things that you want to
| | 04:26 | consider when you're
looking for any type of printer.
| | 04:29 | What size paper might you want--
how big might you want to go?
| | 04:32 | This can go up to 13x19, and it can go
borderless all the way to the edge of the paper.
| | 04:36 | If you want bigger, you are going to
need to go tot a larger-format printer.
| | 04:39 | If you want smaller, that's okay.
| | 04:40 | I can feed smaller paper in here.
| | 04:42 | If you think well, I am never going to print
13x19, the fact is you are kind of out of luck.
| | 04:46 | All of the good black-and-white
printers come in this larger size.
| | 04:51 | There are also some networking
concerns you might want to consider.
| | 04:53 | This printers can be wireless, which is nice.
| | 04:55 | They can be connected to your network
through an ethernet connection, or you can
| | 04:59 | go directly in through USB.
| | 05:01 | Mac and Windows drivers are available, so it
doesn't matter what platform you are using on.
| | 05:05 | But again, when it comes to black-and-
white printing, you need to be very careful
| | 05:08 | that you're not just grabbing any
old color inkjet printer off the shelf.
| | 05:12 | You need one that's specifically
capable of doing good black and white.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Preparing the image for print| 00:00 | At some point, after you've toned and
retoned and untoned and made your image
| | 00:05 | high key and low key and everything
in between, you are going to finally be
| | 00:08 | ready to print it, but there will be
two steps left that you'll have to take.
| | 00:12 | You have to resize your image for
printing, and you have to sharpen it.
| | 00:17 | Before you do that though,
you need to save your image.
| | 00:19 | Now, I'm assuming you've been saving
along the way, but just to be sure, I want
| | 00:22 | to mention that you need to be
saving your image in Photoshop format to
| | 00:26 | preserve all of the layers.
| | 00:28 | And up here in the Save dialog box,
that's the very first entry, Photoshop
| | 00:32 | format, not Photoshop EPS, or
Photoshop PDF, or any of these other things.
| | 00:36 | Save in Photoshop you will preserve all
of your layers, and the layering stuff
| | 00:40 | becomes particularly handy for printing.
| | 00:42 | For example, in this image, there was
this bright bit on this building here and
| | 00:46 | I toned that down because I
found it a little distracting.
| | 00:49 | When I print, I may decide either it's
still too light, or maybe I would like it
| | 00:52 | brighter or something.
| | 00:53 | I've got that edit as a discrete thing
that I can go back and adjust after printing.
| | 00:58 | So layers are very, very handy during printing.
| | 01:01 | First up with the printing process
though, I'm going to do a Save As and save
| | 01:05 | out a special printing copy of this image,
because I am going to make this image smaller.
| | 01:10 | We are going to print this out as an
8x10 and as we resize for that print size,
| | 01:14 | we're going to end up throwing out a lot
of image data, and I don't want to lose
| | 01:18 | that data for good because one day I
may want to make a bigger print of it.
| | 01:21 | So I have saved out to the
desktop as a special printing version.
| | 01:24 | If you print on different kinds of paper,
you may find that you like to create
| | 01:28 | separate versions for each type of
paper, because matte paper may need very
| | 01:33 | different tonal adjustments than glossy paper.
| | 01:35 | Our first task is to resize.
| | 01:37 | I am going to go up here to Image > Image Size.
| | 01:41 | Now, this is the negative
full-pixel count of my camera.
| | 01:45 | So as the image was shot,
it's 3861 pixels x 2574.
| | 01:52 | Currently, it has a resolution of 240,
which means my final print size is 16x10.
| | 01:57 | Now a document has no inherent resolution.
| | 02:00 | You are free to change that however
you want, because resolution is simply a
| | 02:04 | measure of how many pixels occur over a
particular distance, and we can change that.
| | 02:08 | As we change it, the pixels will
either be crammed closer together or
| | 02:11 | spread farther apart.
| | 02:13 | So right now, I have a width of 16x10
when these numbers of pixels are spread
| | 02:18 | out, so that there are 240 of them per inch.
| | 02:20 | This Image Size dialog box is a very cool thing.
| | 02:23 | It's a little calculator, and it
makes it very easy to understand the
| | 02:26 | relationship of pixel
dimensions to document size.
| | 02:30 | These dimensions at this
resolution give me the size.
| | 02:33 | I am going to uncheck Resample Image
and when I do that, my Pixel Dimensions
| | 02:38 | are no longer editable.
| | 02:40 | I cannot change the number of pixels
in the image, meaning I can't throw any
| | 02:44 | data or make up any new data.
| | 02:46 | I said I wanted an 8x10, so I am going
to plug 10 into the Width field and when
| | 02:51 | I do, I end up with a Height of 6.667.
| | 02:54 | Okay, for this particular aspect
ratio, I cannot get exactly an 8x10.
| | 02:58 | The only way to do that would be to crop,
and I don't want to crop this image.
| | 03:01 | So this means I am going to be looking
at a custom frame if I want to frame it.
| | 03:06 | At 10x6, my resolution ends
up being 386.1 pixels per inch.
| | 03:12 | I'm going to print this
image on an Epson printer.
| | 03:15 | Epson printers want the image
coming in at 360 pixels per inch.
| | 03:20 | So I am going to type 360 in here, and oh!
| | 03:23 | When I do that, my Width goes too big.
| | 03:25 | I'm now at 10.7x7.15.
| | 03:28 | So there is no way to get the
resolution I want at the print size that I want
| | 03:34 | unless I am allowed to discard some pixels.
| | 03:38 | So I am recheck Resample Image, and on
that 3861x2574, if I now put 10 in here
| | 03:46 | and 360, I'm now at 3600x2400.
| | 03:50 | My pixel dimensions are around 24
million pixels total, down from 28 million.
| | 03:55 | So the computer is going to throw out some data.
| | 03:59 | I can choose the way that it calculates
this resizing from this pop-up menu right here.
| | 04:03 | I am going to tell it use this Bicubic
Sharper interpolation method, which Adobe
| | 04:08 | claims is best for reduction.
| | 04:10 | So now I have a 10x6 at 360.
| | 04:13 | If I sent the image to the printer at
a resolution other than 360, it would
| | 04:19 | still work, and I would still get
an image the size that I wanted.
| | 04:22 | What would happen is the printer driver
would take care of doing the resizing for me.
| | 04:27 | There are a couple of reasons
that I prefer not to do that.
| | 04:30 | One, Photoshop's resizing
algorithms are very, very good.
| | 04:33 | I don't know what the ones
are like in my printer driver.
| | 04:35 | So I would rather do the resizing myself in
Photoshop because I know I'll get good results.
| | 04:40 | But the other reason has to do the sharpening.
| | 04:42 | So we'll look at that next.
I've got 10x6 at 360.
| | 04:44 | I am going to just hit OK.
| | 04:47 | My image gets resized, and here it is.
| | 04:49 | Now I need to sharpen it.
| | 04:50 | All RAW images need to be sharpened.
| | 04:53 | If you are working with JPEG images--
that is, images that were shot in JPEG
| | 04:56 | mode in the camera--the camera
probably already sharpened them.
| | 05:00 | Odds are you don't need anymore, unless
you've really dialed back the sharpening
| | 05:03 | settings on the camera.
| | 05:04 | RAW images, though, have no sharpening
applied to them, and they always come out
| | 05:09 | of the camera a little soft,
so we need to sharpen this up.
| | 05:12 | We always sharpen at 100%.
| | 05:13 | Then I've got some nice
detail to use here as a reference.
| | 05:18 | I want to sharpen in a nondestructive
manner because I don't know what level
| | 05:22 | of sharpening I want.
| | 05:23 | Now you may think, "Great!
| | 05:25 | I am going to dial the sharpness up all
the way because I really like sharpness.
| | 05:28 | I want as much sharpness as I can get."
| | 05:29 | Well, it's important to
understand that sharpening an image is
| | 05:33 | actually impossible.
| | 05:34 | We're not going to sharpen the image.
| | 05:36 | We cannot take an image that is
out of focus and make it in focus.
| | 05:39 | What we are going to do is a bit of a hack.
| | 05:41 | We are going to create an optical
illusion that's going to make the image
| | 05:44 | up here to be sharper.
| | 05:46 | What we are going to do is increase
the acutance of the image--that is, the
| | 05:50 | edges in the image are
going to become more acute.
| | 05:53 | This is the layer I created
to add a vignette to the image.
| | 05:56 | I am going to duplicate that layer.
| | 05:58 | It in turn is a duplicate of the original layer.
| | 06:00 | I am going to apply my sharpening
to this layer, and the reason I am
| | 06:03 | duplicating this layer first is I might
not get the sharpening right the first
| | 06:07 | time and so I am going to want to
be able to delete it and go back.
| | 06:10 | So I have got this duplicate layer here.
| | 06:12 | I'm going to go into the Filter menu,
choose Sharpen, and then Smart Sharpen.
| | 06:16 | There are a number of sharpening things here.
| | 06:18 | Smart Sharpen is really the way to go.
| | 06:20 | What sharpening plug-ins like this are
going to do--and you can see I am looking
| | 06:25 | at the closer a bit at my image here.
| | 06:26 | If I click and hold the
mouse button, I see the original;
| | 06:29 | if I let go, I see the sharpened version.
| | 06:31 | So my images definitely appear sharper.
| | 06:33 | What's it doing here?
| | 06:35 | It's going through and it's looking for an edge.
| | 06:37 | Every edge has a dark side and a light side.
| | 06:39 | When it finds an edge, it darkens the
pixels on the dark side, it lightens the
| | 06:43 | pixels on the light side, to
create kind of a halo around the edge.
| | 06:46 | And that makes the edge appear more acute.
| | 06:48 | I can show you a very exaggerated
version of what it's doing by dragging this
| | 06:52 | Radius slider up here, and my image is
becoming quite garish and out of control
| | 06:57 | here, but you could see what it's done.
| | 06:59 | Every edge in the image now has this
halo around it, and the image has become
| | 07:03 | incredibly contrasty, chunky.
| | 07:05 | And if I was truly sharpening the
image, I wouldn't see these effects.
| | 07:09 | I would simply see the image gets sharper.
| | 07:11 | Instead, I am seeing this weird
optical aberration thing happening.
| | 07:15 | Here you can also see it,
little halos around everything.
| | 07:18 | It makes the image look very noisy.
| | 07:20 | So it is possible to oversharpen an image.
| | 07:22 | That's why we are going to be very
careful with the way that we sharpen.
| | 07:25 | Amount controls how much of a
halo is painted around each edge.
| | 07:31 | Radius controls the width of the halo.
| | 07:34 | If your camera has a whole lot of
pixels in it on its sensor, you probably
| | 07:37 | need a wider radius.
| | 07:38 | A 12-megapixel camera needs a wider
radius than a six-megapixel camera.
| | 07:43 | These actually look pretty good to me.
| | 07:45 | I usually err on the side of less
sharpness than run the risk of oversharpening
| | 07:50 | because particularly on an image like
this with a big chunky texture in it, it
| | 07:53 | can look pretty garish.
| | 07:54 | But I think that looks pretty good.
| | 07:56 | Sharpening is the only
image edit that we make at 100%.
| | 08:01 | Looking at a 21-megapixel image at
100%, we are looking at individual
| | 08:04 | pixels that are just tiny.
| | 08:06 | We really usually don't need to
worry about things at this size.
| | 08:08 | But sharpening is one of
those things that we do.
| | 08:10 | So now my image has been sharpened.
| | 08:12 | Let me just hide the sharpening layer, so
you can see, that's before, that's after.
| | 08:16 | It's subtle, but it's there. Just a little bit
of extra sharpness that will make a big difference.
| | 08:20 | So, we are sized, we are sharpened, and
now we are ready to print, and for that
| | 08:25 | we are going to look at what we
need to do in the Printer dialog.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Configuring the Print dialog| 00:00 | I have another confession to make.
I hate messing with color management, and I
| | 00:04 | think that's probably one reason I
really like black and white, because I just
| | 00:07 | don't have to mess with color management.
| | 00:09 | One reason I hate messing with color
management is I just don't have a monitor
| | 00:12 | that's good enough to profile.
| | 00:14 | So maybe I'm just bitter about that.
| | 00:16 | But for black and white, even if I
had a monitor that was good enough to
| | 00:19 | profile, it still wouldn't matter,
because the way that I am going to print this
| | 00:23 | black-and-white image does not fit
into any color management system,
| | 00:26 | so we can just throw any of
those concerns off the window.
| | 00:29 | I have resized my image.
| | 00:30 | I have sharpened my image.
| | 00:32 | I am now ready to print my image.
| | 00:33 | As we've already seen, I am going to
be printing to an Epson printer, because
| | 00:37 | there are very, very few desktop inkjet
printers that are capable of producing a
| | 00:42 | really good black and white,
and currently inkjet printing is really the best
| | 00:47 | printing technology out there
for the consumer, or professional.
| | 00:50 | I am going to go up to File and choose Print.
| | 00:52 | I have installed the printer driver for
that Epson 3000 that you saw earlier, and
| | 00:57 | this is just Photoshop's normal Print
dialog box. So, looking okay on the paper,
| | 01:01 | I've selected the printer that I want.
| | 01:02 | I am going to hit Print Settings now.
| | 01:04 | There are a couple of things that I need
to do that are critical, and you may be
| | 01:07 | thinking, "Well, I don't have an
Epson 3000. Why am I watching this?"
| | 01:10 | The steps that I am taking here are going
to be true for any printer that you use.
| | 01:15 | You are going to have to find the
specifics for your printer, but you're still
| | 01:18 | going to need to look for
with these particular steps.
| | 01:21 | First thing I need to do is tell it
what type of paper I am going to be using.
| | 01:24 | I am not printing on photo glossy paper.
| | 01:27 | I am going to be printing say on Epson
Ultra Premium Presentation Matte paper.
| | 01:33 | And on this particular printer, I have to
be sure that I am using the Matte Black Ink.
| | 01:37 | Now the printer, by default, prints in color.
| | 01:40 | If you want to print in black and white
and get what is truly a neutral print,
| | 01:43 | you have to change the Print
mode to Advanced B&W Photo.
| | 01:48 | That's what activates its internal mechanism
for calculating neutral gray tones in a print.
| | 01:55 | Once you've done that, you have an
additional option to tone the print.
| | 01:59 | Now this is not as extreme a toning
necessarily as what we were doing by hand
| | 02:03 | in Photoshop, but I can tell it that I want it a
little cooler, a little warmer, or outright sepia.
| | 02:09 | I typically leave that Neutral.
| | 02:11 | I am usually not trying to tone prints.
| | 02:13 | Once that's done, if I wanted, I could
go in and tweak the Color Toning by hand,
| | 02:18 | but we're just talking about basic printing.
| | 02:21 | If you're printing on another printer,
such as the HP B9180, which is also a very
| | 02:26 | good black-and-white printer, you will
have a similar step where you have to
| | 02:29 | activate the printer's black-and-white mode.
| | 02:33 | This again is what's going to allow
it to create a truly neutral print.
| | 02:37 | Once I've done that, I hit Save.
| | 02:39 | Now that black-and-white mode that I
put it in, that is a driver-managed color
| | 02:45 | scheme that the printer is doing.
| | 02:46 | I know it sounds strange to talk about
color scheme when we are talking about
| | 02:49 | black-and-white printing, but it's
mixing the other those gray inks and some
| | 02:51 | color inks and some other
stuff to make this neutral print.
| | 02:55 | That means that I have to, in Photoshop,
be sure that Color Handling is left on
| | 03:00 | Printer Manages Colors.
| | 03:02 | If you normally do use a color-
managed workflow and you are used to having
| | 03:07 | Photoshop manage your color, you need
to be sure that you do not do that when
| | 03:11 | you're printing black and white on your
black-and-white-capable printer, such as
| | 03:15 | the Epson 3000, or 2880, or Epson 2400, or
2200, or 3880, or any of those printers, or
| | 03:23 | the HP printers that are very good at
black and white, or the Canon printers.
| | 03:26 | Again, there are just a handful of these.
| | 03:29 | You've got to make sure that you
let the printer take care of the
| | 03:31 | black-and-white printing.
| | 03:33 | Now I hit Print, the print
rolls out, and I take a look at it.
| | 03:36 | Probably I will find it needs an
adjustment here or there, but once you learn the
| | 03:41 | specifics of your monitor, the specifics of
your printer, you are going to be able
| | 03:45 | to get a good printout in
just one or two test prints.
| | 03:48 | And I hear a lot of people say, "Oh,
it's ridiculous. Ink is so expensive, and it
| | 03:51 | takes me three prints to get the
print right." All I can think is, "Wow, you
| | 03:55 | never worked in a darkroom, did you?"
| | 03:56 | Because to get a print right in three
prints in a darkroom is doing pretty good,
| | 04:01 | or maybe I'm just lousy at darkroom
printing. But anyway, I think the way to
| | 04:05 | think about this is,
| | 04:06 | your desktop inkjet printer is not a
substitute for the cheap one-hour photo
| | 04:10 | place or the corner drugstore.
| | 04:12 | Those are definitely going to be the
cheapest way to knock out quick snapshots
| | 04:16 | and 4x6s and things like that.
| | 04:18 | Your desktop inkjet printer is a
replacement for the darkroom that you used to
| | 04:21 | have in your bathroom where you were
paying for expensive chemicals and paper,
| | 04:25 | where you were spending a lot of time
doing test prints, and where you were having
| | 04:28 | to deal with hazardous waste
disposal when you were done.
| | 04:31 | The desktop inkjet printer is a very
easy-to-use replacement for that that also
| | 04:35 | gives you color, something you
probably didn't have in your obvious darkroom.
| | 04:39 | So if you think about it that way, you
begin to realize, wow, this is a really,
| | 04:42 | really inexpensive way to get prints,
and much better than the corner drugstore,
| | 04:47 | I have got complete control over them.
| | 04:49 | So think of it that way.
| | 04:50 | If you're a little worried about ink
prices, and I am not just rationalizing that
| | 04:53 | away. I think that really is the model
for what your desktop inkjet is. But be
| | 04:57 | sure that you configure Photoshop
properly; otherwise, it's going to send that
| | 05:01 | black-and-white print to the printer
and try and print it as a color image, and
| | 05:04 | you are going to end up with a
black-and-white print that's got a nasty
| | 05:07 | colorcast of some kind.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Evaluating a print| 00:00 | Once your print's out of the
printer, it's time to take a look at it and
| | 00:04 | evaluate and see how you did.
| | 00:06 | As I mentioned earlier, one of the nice
things about black-and-white printing is
| | 00:09 | we don't have to worry about color management.
| | 00:11 | Nevertheless, your print is not going
to look exactly the same as your monitor,
| | 00:15 | so it's important to take a look at it
and see if it needs any adjustments or
| | 00:19 | tweaks or little finesses here and there.
| | 00:22 | So what do you look for
when you're evaluating a print?
| | 00:24 | For a black-and-white print,
start by checking your blacks.
| | 00:27 | Make sure your blacks are nice and dark,
and that you've got the detail in them
| | 00:31 | that you were expecting.
| | 00:32 | You don't want fine highlights and
things that might be hidden away in the
| | 00:35 | blacks that were kind of critical to
your composition to fall into complete
| | 00:39 | black, so you want to look for those.
| | 00:40 | In the highlights, you want to make sure
that you haven't overexposed highlights,
| | 00:44 | so that they've completely
lost detail that's essential.
| | 00:47 | And then you want to check your midtones.
| | 00:48 | These are the same types of
adjustments that you would look for in evaluating
| | 00:52 | a color image, but we want to make sure we've
got the midtone detail where it needs to be.
| | 00:57 | Obviously, we want to check just
sharpness and detail in general, and make sure
| | 01:01 | there our image is not oversharpened, meaning
| | 01:03 | it doesn't have those garish halos around it.
| | 01:05 | We went to look for an overall
colorcast, to make sure our print is neutral.
| | 01:09 | But with black and white, there's
something extra we're looking for.
| | 01:11 | We're looking for that extra bit of
black-and-white silvery goodness, and
| | 01:14 | you're going to find that in midtone highlight
details--make sure that those areas look nice.
| | 01:20 | If you find your image lacking, if you
find that it doesn't have the contrast
| | 01:24 | that you want, if you think maybe your
blacks are off, it's time to go back into
| | 01:28 | Photoshop and reassess the adjustments
that you made earlier and maybe tweak
| | 01:31 | them and try another print.
| | 01:33 | That said, it may very often be that
your black levels, and therefore your
| | 01:38 | contrast, are off not because of an
adjustment that you have made or not made or
| | 01:42 | not made correctly,
but because of your paper choice.
| | 01:45 | A lot of the time the way to get
better black and better contrast out of your
| | 01:49 | printer for your black and white, or
your color, prints is to go to a higher
| | 01:52 | grade of paper, and that means more expensive.
| | 01:55 | Here is an example.
| | 01:56 | This is a cheapo paper.
| | 01:58 | It's very, very affordable, which is
great if you need to knock out a bunch
| | 02:01 | of prints and you're not going to be
real stickler about quality, but it's
| | 02:04 | got a couple of problems.
| | 02:05 | One, it's a very cool paper, so the image
looks kind of blue, maybe even bluish-green.
| | 02:09 | It also doesn't have great blacks.
| | 02:11 | They're pretty good, actually, for a
paper that isn't inexpensive, but it's
| | 02:14 | affecting our contrast ratio all the way around.
| | 02:16 | This is a more expensive paper.
| | 02:18 | It's a warmer paper, which is
giving me a nicer overall tone.
| | 02:21 | I've also got better blacks and better
contrast throughout the image because of
| | 02:25 | those better blacks.
| | 02:26 | The maximum black that a paper can hold
is referred to as its dMax value, and on
| | 02:32 | some papers, you will see a dMax rating,
and so you want a higher dMax to get
| | 02:37 | better black and white.
| | 02:38 | Paper choice is also going to
affect the texture of the paper.
| | 02:41 | This higher-quality paper
is a little more textured.
| | 02:44 | Some papers are even more textured still.
| | 02:47 | At that point, you're getting into a
purely aesthetic question: how much texture
| | 02:50 | do you like on your image?
| | 02:51 | If you're planning on hanging it on a
wall, you want to be very careful about a
| | 02:55 | very, very textured paper, because as
light hits it at an oblique angle, it's
| | 02:58 | going to cast shadows on itself
and that might look a little strange.
| | 03:01 | So considering paper texture is
something you want to think about.
| | 03:04 | Archive-ability is another thing.
| | 03:07 | While this printer is rated as being
very archival, thanks to its pigment inks,
| | 03:11 | how archival it is varies
depending on the paper that you use.
| | 03:16 | Typically, a paper that allows the ink
to stay more on the surface of the paper
| | 03:20 | rather than sinking into the
paper is going to be more archival.
| | 03:24 | The way you find out about this is,
check the printer vendor's web site, paper
| | 03:28 | manufacturer's web site, or Wilhelm
Imaging is really the one source that
| | 03:34 | pretty much everyone agrees on, paper
and printer vendors, as being the best
| | 03:38 | source that we have right now
for assessing archivability of
| | 03:42 | printer-ink-paper combinations.
| | 03:44 | A lot people when they think, "Well, I
want blacker blacks I'll run out and get
| | 03:47 | a nice glossy paper,"
| | 03:49 | that's really not the best choice.
| | 03:50 | You're always going to get blacker
blacks with better detail off of a nice matte
| | 03:54 | paper than off of a glossy paper.
| | 03:56 | On a glossy paper, the blacker black
comes mostly from the gloss, and a lot of
| | 04:00 | times you'll really suffer a detail loss.
| | 04:02 | And if you look at it next to a nice
matte paper, you'll also see that it just
| | 04:06 | doesn't actually look as black, partly
because the gloss is also reflecting a
| | 04:10 | lot of glare, and that cuts
some contrast and some black.
| | 04:13 | And that's going to, again, be
true with your color images also.
| | 04:18 | Finally, you might want to consider a canvas.
| | 04:20 | What's nice about canvas, if your
ultimate goal is to hang a picture on the
| | 04:23 | wall, is that with canvas, you
don't put glass in front of the image.
| | 04:27 | You just put it in a frame and you hang
it there just like you would a painting.
| | 04:30 | And because it doesn't have glass in
front of it--glass typically cuts contrast
| | 04:34 | and saturation if you are
dealing with a color image--
| | 04:37 | because it doesn't have glass in front
of it, your image will just leap across
| | 04:40 | the room a lot times off of the canvas.
| | 04:42 | Canvas is very, very textured though,
so again, you want to think about how
| | 04:45 | it's going to be lit.
| | 04:46 | So these are all things
to consider and play with.
| | 04:48 | Again, if you're not satisfied with
your contrast in your image, don't think
| | 04:51 | that you ought to go back to
Photoshop and crank up your black levels.
| | 04:54 | If you're using a less expensive
paper or a paper that doesn't have a great
| | 04:57 | dMax, consider going to a better paper.
| | 05:00 | If you have set up your document, as
we discussed earlier, with a lot of
| | 05:03 | adjustment levels, you're going to be
able to very easily go and tweak your
| | 05:06 | image to bring out the different
things that we've talked about.
| | 05:09 | Again, we're looking at black levels,
white levels, overall midtones, and
| | 05:13 | trying to get those extra little bits
of highlight that are going to give you a
| | 05:16 | very silvery image.
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