From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

758 Under the sea in strict monochrome

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

758 Under the sea in strict monochrome

- Hey, gang, this is Deke McClellan. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now, this week, we're going to take one of the worst photographs that I think I've ever captured and we're going to turn it into an absolute stunner using Camera Raw, but you could use Lightroom as well, and so here's that image, isn't it a stinker? Here I am, underwater, shooting the backsides of a bunch of fleeing scuba divers who I think do not want to be in this shot, but what interests me about this photo is when you first start scuba diving, everybody assures you that you will feel weightless, which I suppose is kind of true, but it's not the kind of weightlessness that you experience in outer space, I don't think, I haven't been there, or on a rollercoaster, rather, it's the kind of weightlessness that you experience in the deep end of the swimming pool. That is, unless you capture your image in your DSLR's raw file format and then develop it as a strict monochrome, as we're seeing here, in which case, the figures look like they're absolutely floating in space, above the surface of the world. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, so here we are, looking at this wide angle dive image in strict monochrome, and by the way, if you open this image and all the details appear gummy like this, it's a function of the fact that Photoshop is not respecting the filter mask, and so what you need to do is turn the smart filters off and then back on, and everything should be fine. Alright, I want to edit this image as nondestructively as possible. So, I'll go up to the File menu and choose Open as Smart Object, and then I'll locate this file, Dynamite Drop.dmg, which is a raw image that I captured at a dive site known as Dynamite Drop, and then, I'll click on the open button in order to open the image in camera raw. Now, I don't want to harm the original dng file that I'm giving you, so I'm just going to click okay in order to open the image as a Smart Object inside Photoshop, and that's going to remove any link between this edited file and the file on disk, and now, I'll go ahead and reopen camera raw by double clicking on this thumbnail here inside the layers panel. Alright, now the first step, any time you're editing a raw image, is to switch over to the lens corrections panel, and then turn on these two check boxes, Enable Profile Corrections, which as you can see, here, it's going to make a big difference, and Remove Chromatic Aberration. Now, I'll go ahead and switch back to the basic panel, and I'm going to adjust the color balance by selecting the white balance tool. Now, all of these tanks are neutral. They're all kind of a grayish silver in color, and so I'll start things off by partially marking this tank right here, and notice that shoots the temperature value up to 24,000, and it raises the tint value to 150. Now, just to confirm that I like those settings, I'll go ahead and scroll over to this guy, over here on the left hand side of the image, and I'll partially marquee his tank, and you can see, this time, the temperature value drops to 19,000, but the tint value remains at 150, and so I decided to split the difference by taking that temperature value up to an even 20,000, I'm going to leave the tint at 150. Alright, now I want to convert the image to black and white, which you do these days by selecting this black and white radio button up here at the top of the basic panel, but to mix the black and white image, you need to switch to a different panel, black and white mix right here, and I'm going to start things off just by clicking on the auto button, which actually does a pretty good job of mixing the image. The only change I decided to make was to take the blues value up to plus 27. So, I just clicked in that value and pressed Shift + Up Arrow twice in a row. Alright, now that I have a basic black and white mix, I'll switch back to the basic panel and I'll click in the exposure value and take it up to 0.25, then I'll take the contrast value up to 50. I'm going to bypass the highlights and shadows values, and then, I'll press the Alt key, or the Option key on a Mac, and drag this white slider triangle until I see some clipping occur, which happens at about 30, so I'm going to back it off to 20, and then, I'll Alt or Option drag the black slider triangle, at which point I see clipping around 76, 77, something like that, and so I'll back this guy off to negative 70, and then, I'll tab down to the clarity value, take it up to 77, and I'll take dehaze up to 10, and notice that the next two values, vibrance and saturation, are dimmed, and that's because I've selected to convert this image to black and white. Alright, now, let's just go ahead and zoom in on this guy here so that we can evaluate the noise, which is plentiful, as well as the detail, and so I'll go ahead and click on this detail icon, here, in order to reveal the sharpening and noise reduction values. I'm going to start in the noise reduction section and take the luminance value up to 50, and then, just to try to get rid of some of this grain here, I'll take the luminance detail value down to zero. Now, the default color values of 25, 50, and 50, respectively, are just fine, but I'm going to take the sharpening value all the way up to its maximum of 150. So, I'm feeling like living dangerously, here. A radius value of 1.0 is just fine, but you can see that I'm bringing out some pretty wormy looking grain, which is why I'm going to crank the detail value down to zero, and that's it, then I'll just go ahead and click okay in order to apply those modifications, and so this is the drab looking full color image, and this is the much improved black and white shot, with this very interesting landscape down below, and that is how you convert a raw undersea landscape to strict monochrome, using Camera Raw 10.4, 10.5, or later. Alright, now, while I'm pretty happy with the general composition of the shot, I'm not at all happy with the detritus that's being picked up by the strobes, and in case you can't quite make it out, I've got this detail that makes it very obvious. Notice all these particulates and plankton and fish poop for all I know, generally speaking, it's called backscatter, and I want to get rid of it, and I also want to add some colorization in the form of split toning, which I can do in Camera Raw, and so if you're a member of lynda.com/linkedinlearning, I have a special followup movie in which we're going to do all this and more. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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