From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

B&W pop

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

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B&W pop

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- [Instructor] Hello friends and welcome to another episode of Photo Tools Weekly. Thanks so much for joining me this week. You know, last week I shared a technique which was all about extracting detail for a landscape photograph, and I received a question about applying that to other types of photography like portraiture. So, I wanted to illustrate how we could do that here with this portrait that I captured here. This one's captured with all-natural and available light. It's pretty simple and straightforward, but let's see if we can't make this image pop in a couple of different ways. One, a black and white version, and another one which is color. To do that, we'll start off in Lightroom. We'll be working with two different versions of the image, which we will combine together in Photoshop. First up, virtual copy. Remember the shortcut to do that? It's Cmd + ' on a Mac, Ctrl + ' on Windows. With the detail one, we'll go to black and white. We know that we're gonna boost shadows, we're gonna bring blacks up as well, clarity, and dehaze. Of course, we can fine tune exactly how we wanna do this, so we can sort of tinker around with some of these controls here, and try to find just the right values for the image. It's also a good idea to go to the Detail panel, and do some sharpening here on some of the smaller details that we have, and we can zoom in if we need to, 1:1 to really see those, and basically what I'm looking to do, is to bring out some of the smaller details higher than I would normally. Lemme exaggerate for a moment. See all those little teeny details? Because when we blend them in with the blending mode, some of them will fade away, so we can have this a little bit higher than we would normally, sharpening and detail value. This is a pretty high res file, so I'm gonna bring the radius up a touch there as well. Always bring in a little noise reduction, at least for most of my work, I find that helps the images. Well now that we have done that and kind of prepped that file, let's go back to the other one. With the other one, sometimes it's nice to start off with auto, and then just modify it. Auto kinda gives a sort of an even, flat image, so I always like to have more contrast. I like to boost up things a little bit. I don't like to have vibrance on portraits, I just don't like the look that that creates. So I'm gonna try to find something that's a little bit more interesting in regards to the color, and experiment with these sliders, just modifying them around until I get a look that I like. Yeah, something like that's kinda cool. Now that we have two images, what we'll do is we'll be working with these two files to combine them together. So the way that we can do that is we select them, right-click or control-click, and then choose Edit In, and select Open as Layers in Photoshop. So you right-click or control-click on the film strip where you select them, or if you're in the grid view, you can do that right on the images, the thumbnails up here, you can right-click control-click, and then again Open as Layers in Photoshop. What this will do is it will apply all of our settings that we've applied to the images in Lightroom, and send those two files over to Photoshop, open them up in a single document in Photoshop with a couple layers. You can see it's doing that right here, and I'll press F to go to full screen, and then I'll zoom in so we can see this image a little bit better. Alright. Now, what can we do with this? I like to drop the color image underneath, and I wanna illustrate a couple of different ideas or things that you might consider doing. One is to just convert the image to black and white, so have a black and white layer above, so that we have our original photograph here, and then we have the one with all the detail underneath. Sometimes, just using the detail as is is actually kind of a cool look, or having it higher than you might be comfortable with, because it looks a little too HDR, and then bringing in just the right amount of sort of pop or snap, so now at 40%, I think that's kind of cool, or you could also mask it into a specific area. So if you wanted to have the hair or the hat, we could paint this in in a specific area, so you can always do that. So that is always a good option. Another thing you might wanna try is a blending mode of soft light or Overlay. This is going to lose a little bit of the detail snap, but bring in some contrast, so you can see it's contrast with a touch of detail. This is a little bit more of a natural look, if you compare this to the normal. All of a sudden the normal has a little bit more of a HDR feel. Soft Light is gonna say "well, no. Give me a little bit of that kind of pop, but do so without overdoing it.", and then of course you can dial in how much you want. Now we know that Overlay is like Soft Light, but more intense, and so you could do that one as well. I tend to not use Overlay that much, it's pretty rare, but Soft Light is the one that tends to work well. So one option of course is black and white. Let's remove that layer and talk about what about doing stuff with color. Well, for color, we just take this off for a second, and go back to the original image. For color, what we might try is to use this on our Soft Light blending. We see it gives us a nice snap. And then adding other adjustment layers to further modify the way the photograph looks. So in this case, I wanna go for a little bit more of a high key type of a look, which means an overall brighter image. I'm gonna go for a lot of brightness. You can kinda see how I'm brightening that up, still have nice vivid colors, but I'm able to do this with this layer, which is giving me this little bit of pop. Then other times what you can do, of course, is fine tune color further, like you could use a Color Balance adjustment layer and say "Hey, what if we brought a little bit of cyan and blue into the image?" Go into the Shadows, and maybe cool those colors off even more, so we're getting a little bit more into toning and creating a touch of, it almost looks like it was capture with film in a way, and you can see that before and then after. And with all of these different layers that we have here, it's the combination that makes the image come to life. And then it's also fine tuning, right? Maybe you just want a hint of that color so it isn't quite so dramatic and strong, or maybe you just want a little bit less of that Soft Light pop, so that it's a now much more subtle look. And the beauty of this type of approach is you have all of this control, it's almost like you're mixing different ingredients together in order to come up with the right recipe for the photograph. Alright, well that wraps up our look at how we can use this technique on a portrait. I hoped you picked up a few tips and tricks here, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.

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