Black and White Editing in Lightroom

Name: Black and White Editing in Lightroom
Author: Jeff Shaffer

In these lessons, you will learn how to work with black-and-white editing. Removing color in an image can help balance the bright and dark sections of an…

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Course: On-Demand

Hello, in today's lesson, we'll process an HDR image from a series of exposures, and apply some additional creative color and effect adjustments. Here you could see our series of exposures, ranging from dark to light. The darkest exposure is to capture the most highlight detail, and the lightest is for maximum shadow detail. As this scene is actually within the range of what could be processed as a single image, only two exposures are required here to enhance that range using HDR. Create the HDR image. I'll select both exposures, this one and this one, and choose photo, photo merge, HDR merge from the menu, the pull down menu, or I could choose it from the photo menu at the top. Of course, you can also use a keyboard shortcut, Control + H. The result is shown here. I'll click the merge button to apply it. And it now saves that file as you see here, and says marks it as an HDR image. Next I'll process this image in black and white. So I'll double click on it, see it larger. I'll go to the edit panel and start with the profile. In the pull down menu here, going to browse all profiles. I'll go down to black and white, and I'll select the black and white red filter option down the bottom here. This simulates the effect of black and white films shot with a strong, deep red filter over the lens. The red filter darkened skies considerably since a filter like this lightens its own color and darkens the other two in RGB, which in this case means blue, cyan or green, which will all become darker, and anything red or even orange would become lighter. In the profile, the amount slider is set in the middle, which is about 50%. Going back to the light panel now, you could see the exposure has come up quite a bit here. I'm gonna bring that down to about 0.52, create the mood that I'm after, contrast is a plus seven, it's just come up just a tiny bit, highlights, I could bring them down a little bit more all the way to the minus 100, that pulls in some detail here in the top. The shadows are at plus 69, open that up just a little bit, whites, we can go a bit wider on that, plus 21, and the blacks, I'll bring them up a bit just to pull up some detail in the center area here. This is already creating kind of the mood that I'm after to begin with, but the center portion of the building seems just a little dark to me, so I'll choose the adjustment brush to fix that, setting the size to five, to start with, five. Setting the size to five, the feather to 89, so a lot of feather. Flow and density are gonna be at their default of 50 and 100. And I will check auto mask which will help limit the adjustment to the areas that detects. So now, I'll take my brush and I'll dial in some exposure here. Let's try one stop to start with. And I'll paint in this area here in the center where some of the detail is obscured. Just to bring it a little bit of that out there, maybe a little bit on this part of the building here, and maybe a little here too. So you could see the areas that I've covered so far by mousing over the pin there reveals the mask that I'm making. So this area here needs to be painted in too, that's better. So that helps you check to see how thoroughly you've painted your mask in place when you're painting them by hand, this area here, just a little bit more there, oops, didn't wanna move the whole thing, paint over there. Okay, that's looking pretty good there, there's a little bit that I went over that edge there but I know couldn't worry about that. That's looking pretty good. I increase the exposure by a little over a stop, 1.04. In this lesson, you've seen how to convert an HDR architectural image to black and white and make some initial adjustments to turn a daytime image into early evening. In the next lesson, we'll continue making further adjustments using the color mixer, add texture, and color grade the image for maximum effect. So let's go check it out.

Advanced Provider : Jeff Shaffer 2 Lessons · 12m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese

Course Description

In these lessons, you will learn how to work with black-and-white editing. Removing color in an image can help balance the bright and dark sections of an image, and will in turn reflect better color adjustments in your image.

What You'll Learn

Adjust black-and-white channels within your images
Balance the bright and dark sections of an image by removing color
Improve color adjustments using black-and-white edits
Apply black-and-white editing techniques in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Key Takeaways

Removing color from an image can help balance its bright and dark sections.
Black-and-white adjustments can in turn reflect better color adjustments in an image.
The course covers adjusting black-and-white channels within your images.
The lessons demonstrate how color can be improved with black-and-white adjustments.

Frequently Asked Questions

What will I learn in this course?

You will learn how to work with black-and-white editing, including how to adjust black-and-white channels in your images and understand how color can be improved with black-and-white adjustments.

Which software does this course use?

The course covers black-and-white editing in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

How is the course structured?

The course is delivered in two lessons: Black and White Part 1 and Black and White Part 2.

What skills does this course help build?

It builds skills in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, color correction, color management, darkroom, image editing, and photo editing.

How does removing color help my editing?

Removing color in an image can help balance the bright and dark sections of an image, which in turn reflects better color adjustments in your image.