Hamperium Photography & Communication: Tutorial / Lightroom: black and white

With summer well and truly over in this part of the world, the sun seems to have taken a leave of absence. After we posted the soft autumn colours of a very early morning, we now dedicate this post to black and white photography. Black and white (B/W) can give your picture a completely different atmosphere than a colour picture. But what picture is good for B/W? When to go to B/W?

Take for example today. A bit of an overcast day. Now there's a good start for some B/W photography. B/W also works really well when there's plenty of shadows in your image.

When the object of your shoot is to have great B/W images, please don't forget to shoot in colour. This might sound contradictory, but when you shoot in colour you've got all these dimensions to work with in post processing. You loose all this when you start out shooting in B/W. Next step is to load your images into Lightroom.

There's more ways than one to convert your image(s) to B/W.

The easiest way is to desaturate the image. Yes, that does give you a B/W image, but a very meager one. I'd suggest to stay away from this method.

Let me tell you about our most used method:
We start editing the image in colour, highlights / shadows, blacks and whites. Sometimes a bit of contrast. The latter depends on your taste: if you prefer your B/W images to be very contrasty, go for it with the contrast slider. We prefer to have it just right, not too little, not too much. And ofcourse if needed or desired, this is the point where you do some local adjustments.

Now is the time to go from colour to B/W. Go to the HSL/Color/B & W panel. Click on black and white and your image changes from colour to B/W. With the sliders, you can change the specific colours. This is where the use of shooting in colour comes in. For example the blue channel for the sky. You can brighten or darken it with the slider.

Here is an example of a picture from Valencia that is converted to black and white. With some local adjustements, we added some contrast: brush,radial filer and graduated filter we added contrast.

Some people like more contrast and use the Tone Curve panel.

Within the panel you can choose between lineair, middle or strong contrast. Just go for it, to see how it works in your picture. And to see what you like best.