Low Key Black & White Edits

By Richard Bryant

I have been spending the winter learning more about photography and editing.

Step one has been diving into Rich and Tom’s excellent training.

Step two has been going through other tutorials on You Tube.

One element of editing I have began dabbling with is Black and White. I thought this was a simple matter of hitting the Black and White button in Lightroom and it was job done. I soon discovered there is far more to editing black and white.

There are many techniques. One I found was provided by You Tuber Mark McGee. This is the technique I applied to my image of this Vistara B787.

What did I do?

I started with some basic edits. Reduce exposure by -1.00 and Blacks by -35. Boost Shadows +50 and Whites by +58.

Next this technique desaturates all the colour channels in the HSL slider to -100. After this move the Temp and Tint sliders all the way to the left. A touch of positive clarity +20 and I have a black and white image. I then turn off the HSL sliders to see which colour channel is affecting the image. This is then corrected by moving the luminosity slider right +100.

To create the black background I added a background mask reducing Blacks (-60), Texture and Clarity (both -100). Then added some brush adjustments to the aircraft.

I created my own preset as a base to apply for the future. As with all presets they work well in some instances and not so well in others. I have found this technique works well on images where the background is a blue sky.

These steps produced this black and white image. I then took it a stage further to use this preset to create selective colour edits. The difference here is moving the Temp and Tint sliders back towards the middle before adding the saturation back on the colour I want to retain (see Kuwait 777 image below).

I would love to hear more about how you make your edits work.

Next up for me is developing my Photoshop skills.

Richard