Black and white photos are great because you can enhance what you love about the photo and hide what you don’t. In today’s tutorial, you will learn how Lightroom makes it easy and fun to create striking black and white images. Here’s my example:
3 Steps for Making Beautiful Black & Whites in Lightroom
Step One:
Check the image for overexposure by pressing the “J” key while in the Develop module. This will turn on the clipping mask, which will show you highlights and shadows that have been “clipped”. Clipped highlights are shown in red, and clipped shadows are shown in blue. In other words, these clipped areas have lost all detail. No data actually exists and it registers as pure white or pure black.
In my example, the highlights in part of the sky, and a little bit on her face have lost detail, and the shadows have been clipped on some parts of her shirt and hair. I’ve reduced this clipping by moving the recovery slider to the right, lowering exposure just a tad, and lowering the blacks. The skin looks a little cool, so I also made some minor color adjustments using the temp and tint sliders. Even though we will be converting this image to black and white, we want the correct color tones so that there is a good tonal range in the final black and white version.
I then took the image into Photoshop to soften under her eyes, and clone out the bright spots in the sky.
Step Two:
In the Develop module, click on B&W. So, obviously this isn’t a great black and white. It’s muddy, with a lot of grey tones. But this is where it gets cool. Now you can darken or lighten areas of the photo based on color.
In the B&W box, there’s a little circle in the upper left. Click on it and you will see two little arrows above and below the circle. This tool enables you to adjust the black and white mix directly on the photo. So, let’s say you’re not sure what color your skin tones are. You could play around with the color sliders and try to guess. OR, you could use this tool to go directly to the part of the photo you want to adjust, and it will move the sliders for you. No guessing!
So I’m going to try to darken the green background. With the tool selected, go to the part of the photo you want to adjust. I’m going to the area above her head. Click and hold the mouse button as you move your mouse up or down, to lighten or darken the area. The tool moved the green tones down to darken the area.
Next, I wanted to bring out a little more detail in her shirt, so I clicked and held the mouse on her shirt, and dragged up to lighten. In the black and white panel, you can see that the blue slider has been adjusted.
Her lips look pale, so I did the same technique to darken her lips.
Step Three:
This is looking good, but we’re not quite there. The last step to create a really beautiful black and white is to adjust exposure, brightness, contrast and clarity in the Basic menu. Her skin tones look nice and bright, so I’m not going to adjust the exposure. I only increased brightness slightly to around +30, and clarity to +25. Each photo is different, so play around with these tools to create the best black and white for that particular image.
Photo Editing Tip:
From here you can create your own black and white preset. Go over to the preset menu on the left, and click the plus sign in the top right corner. Name it, and now you have a basic black and white preset to start from.
Here’s the before and after:
In addition to being a Las Vegas portrait photographer, Amy Leavitt also enjoys contributing to Las Vegas Photographer Magazine. Check out her blog or visit her on Facebook to say “hi” anytime!
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Thank you so much for this! I had no idea there was a tool for picking the color – that always bothered me. And the plus sign for a new preset… genius
Mary Ann recently posted..photo challenge number two
Thanks for all your great comments! It’s a neat little trick, and makes me want to learn LR even more. Have fun with it!
I think that I knew that LR could do this, but I had forgotten. Thanks for the reminder!
Rachel O recently posted..At the Cross
What?? I totally did not know you could adjust tones in a black and white like that in Lightroom. Amazing tutorial, thank you!!
I never liked black and white photos. But your conversion example has changed my opinion on that. Thanks for sharing this, I will now keep my eyes open and see which images need these conversions!
Very interesting, I’ll definitely be using that!
Thanks so much for the tutorial. I have had LR3 for a year now and I rarely used the B&W because I did not like how they looked. Now I can give this a try and see what happens! Thanks!
Very informative thnks
Thank you so much for a great tutorial. I really wanted to be able to use Lightroom and Photoshop to make a black and white without having to purchase another expensive program!
Cindy recently posted..Grandmother Smith
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