Correcting a B&W image for print

- This week on the Practicing Photographer, Pigs! I have here this lovely picture of some pigs taken by our esteemed producer, Heather Schuler. And this is a great image. She really worked to get the right moment. Compositionally, your eye does just what it's supposed to. You just lock eyes with this pig and around here you see all these piglets. It's really great. The baby pigs are very cute. The trees make a nice background. It's really just a well-captured moment. She wanted it in black and white which I think is the right choice. The original color image doesn't have much color in it.

And this is the stock Adobe Photoshop gray scale conversion. There's not a lot wrong with it but if we take a look at the histogram here... when I say there's not a lot wrong with it what I mean is that there's not much you can do with this image because there's not a lot of color in it to begin with. So we can't tone a lot of different areas, different things through our black and white conversion. But if I look at the histogram, here' s black, here's white. Most of my tones are clustered in this area here meaning the image is really suffering from a lack of contrast.

It may look a little washed out to you here on this screen and that's because we don't have some strong blacks. But that's mostly this monitor. What's really going to happen is when we print it, it's going to be pretty dark because most of our tones are on this side of middle gray and there's not a lot of variation in tone. I happen to have a printed version of the image right here, and you can see that it is in fact pretty drab. It really needs some punch. So if you stop here with your edits, if you stop here with your conversion and you print it, you can get an okay image.

But there's something much better to be had by doing just a little bit of work to get that histogram looking a little bit healthier throughout the image so that you can have some reasonable contrast. I'm just going to walk you through those edits right now to give you an idea of the type of stuff I do to get an image ready for print. I do almost all of my work through levels adjustment layers and the reason for that is because of a fantastic feature that Photoshop provides while I'm working. And I'll show that to you momentarily. I'm going to start by just thinking about the bottom half of the image. The trees are going to need an edit of their own.

I'm worried about this part right here. This is where the action is, this is where your eye goes. And what we've got in here right now is mostly a lot of similar tone. There's not a lot of difference between the dirt here and the color of the pigs. Now there's not a lot of difference in them in reality, so we're only going to be able to do too much to separate the pigs from the background. But overall this is just a single mash of monotone. So we want more contrast in there. So, ignoring the sky, I'm going to set some points here. I'm just going to ballpark it and put my white over to about here.

I'm going to pull my blacks in. And now right away this area in here is looking much better. If I turn that layer off, you can see I've gone from this to this. Wow! It's immediately got more pop. But it's blown out a lot of stuff in the sky up here. So what I'm going to do is fill this mask here with black so these edits won't impact my image at all. There a number of different ways I can do it. One speedy way to do it is just to invert the mask. It's white right now. If I invert it, it'll be black. I can do that by making sure the mask is selected and hitting command or control I.

And now I'm going to take a paintbrush and some white paint and just start painting in here. And where ever I paint I'm going to get that contrast. Now I'm not going to paint everywhere. I'm going to manipulate the line a little bit here because while I could brighten this stuff up over here, well, here let me just show you. I can brighten up all this stuff up and get more contrast into all of this kind of wall of gray that was in the foreground. Except now I've got this bright area over here.

I don't like that. It's distracting. So I'm going to switch back to black and just keep that masked out. That area of the image I'm not going to correct at all. I actually think the monotonous tone of gray is working for me. Now I said before that I do most of this with level adjustments because of a wonderful feature that Photoshop provides. And here's what that feature is. My histogram is now updated to show only a histogram for the unmasked area of the image. So now I can really precisely place my white point so that I don't clip anything.

I can place my black point where I want it. And I think I'm going to open these mids up a little bit because the majority of the tones are over there on the left-hand side. So, before. After. Big difference. Watch this area over here though as I turn that on and off. You can see no changes happening there. I'm leaving that part of the image unedited. My idea is that I want to pull some light into the middle there to really draw the eye in there once and for all. Let's think about the trees back here. They are a pretty monotonous wall of gray also.

So I'm just going to do that exact same thing. Exact same editing trick, but I'm going to mask it off for the trees this time. Now there are some bright sky bits there in the background that I'm possibly blowing out. Except those bits are already pretty blown out so I'm just going to go ahead and let them go. I don't care that that stuff goes all the way to complete white. And again, one thing to notice my histogram is blank now. It's a little bug in Photoshop. I need to click on some of these to get this histogram to update.

There we go. So I'm going to pull my blacks in a little bit, stretch my whites out. And now I've got more contrast in there. Here comes a before. After. Watch this area in here. This is mostly uniform gray until I turn my edit on and then it just opens up into all this contrast. So that's much nicer. This is almost there. I could print it right here and probably have a pretty good image.

But I'm thinking still I want focus right here. So I'm going to brighten this up. Actually, I'm going to do two things. I'm going to brighten this area up and I want to make the little piglets, the baby pigs, I want to give them a little more contrast to try and pull them off the background a little bit more. Let's do the baby pigs first. I'm going to actually be willing to crush the shadows on those piglets. That sounds far more violent than it is. No piglets will be harmed in this process.

So what I'm doing is a very aggressive contrast adjustment, and now using a mask to just paint that adjustment into the pigs. And, I'm hoping that since I've darkened the shadows up makes them more contrasty, they'll pop off that gray background a little bit more. That's looking pretty good. I don't know what I need to do with her. Oh, she looks a little bit better with some extra black on her too. So, before. After.

That extra shadow detail really helps them stand out a little bit. So last thing let's think more about this area. I want it a little bit brighter. I'm going to try that with an exposure adjustment layer. This is just like dialing exposure compensation up and down on my camera. I'm going to go down about a third of a stop to about there. And I'm just gonna paint some of that in here. I'm being careful of her snout because it's already overexposed.

And I think that looks pretty good. Before. After. Very often you know your ideal lighting is to just have light shining on your subject. And very often you don't have that. There's no reason you can't fake it. Just paint it in with a levels adjustment. So I did this set of edits already or close to this set of edits already. And I'm going to show you before and after so you can really see the difference on paper. So this was our before print. This was the one with low contrast generally muddy. This was straight out of the black and white conversion in Photoshop.

This is new, improved pigs which has a lot more contrast but it's a controlled contrast. I didn't do a uniform contrast throughout the image. I made sure that I had control of the contrast up here separately than down here because I had different needs up here. But I also mostly focused on bringing detail into this area. Brightening up the middle, pulling the pigs off the background by giving them more contrast and not bothering to punch up this area over here on the side. And nothing back here. It's all about trying to make sure that you've got good black to white in the areas that need it.

And what's so great about Photoshop is the fact that my histogram shows me the true histogram for the masked area that I'm working on. It makes it really easy to target these areas and get black and white exactly right. If what you've just seen has left you completely flummoxed or you think you understand it and you'd like to know more, I have an entire course where we do nothing but this. We start with an image and we correct it for print. And we do that over and over and over. It's actually designed to get you to practice. You'll get a whole set of images and you can do these types of edits over and over until you really get your eye trained to see the kind of stuff that I'm seeing now.

It's really what's necessary to get good results on paper.