Become Better Photographer: Making Black and White photos with David Bergman

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In today’s episode with David Bergman and his show “Ask David Bergman” on AdoramaTV we learn about image processing techniques that would make beautiful black & white photos. What are the steps you need to take in Photoshop to turn your photo into black & white one?

Mr. Bergman answers: “First of all… is it better  to shoot in black and white right in the  camera?  I say no, I think it’s better to just  capture everything in color, and then you  have the option afterward in the  computer to post-process however you want.  It gives you a lot more flexibility,  and a lot more options.  Now why would you shoot black and white?  Well me personally –  I’ve been on the road all year with Luke Combs  on tour, and I often make my  pictures black and white, and there’s  really two main reasons why I do it.  The first one is… when the color doesn’t  really add anything to the image, there  may be color there, but it really doesn’t help in any way. “

“So for example this picture of our multi-  instrumentalist…  Kurt, he’s playing the banjo, and there’s really not a whole lot of color in the image, it’s kind of not very  saturated, there’s a little bit of blue in the background, but it doesn’t really  add anything.” 

“So if you go ahead and  convert this to black and white,  it really makes it pop off the screen a lot  more, it gets more contrasty, the  highlights look great, the lights really  flare out, and what it does is – you’re not  distracted by any other color that’s in the image. You’re really just seeing the  true frame, and what’s happening  in the image, without being distracted by  any of those other colors.”

 “That’s one reason why I might go black  and white.  The other reason really is, when the light that’s there is actually kind of  bad, right?  So for example… at a lot of  concerts they use these LED lights that  are magenta or weird blue color, and  sometimes they don’t really reproduce  well in pictures.”

“In this case we  have this picture with those magenta lights, that are hitting  Luke’s skin, and his hat, and his arm, and  it really doesn’t help the image…  it actually kind of makes it  a little bit nasty.  So I really don’t want that color now, instead if I could go in there  and selectively pick that color out, and  try to desaturate it, but the other thing  I can do is, just make the image black  and white.  A lot of times if you’re shooting,  let’s say a concert in a club,  there might be one red spotlight on the  subject, and it’s just that’s the only  color you’re seeing  is that red color. It’s really pretty nasty, so you can  make that black and white in this case.  if I just switch that picture over to  black and white, it really pops off the  screen.  You can see the spotlight popping out  and you can concentrate on Luke’s facial  expression, and just the action that’s  going on, without being thrown off by any  weird colors.”

“So how do you make a picture of  black and white?  Well there really are a  lot of different ways to do it.  I’m going to show you three methods  that can be used.  In the first one let’s take this  picture of Luke popping his head out of  the tour bus.”

“The first method is just clicking the  black and white button, well in most cases what that means is coming in and  this is in Photoshop, there’s similar  controls in Lightroom, but just going to the mode switch and instead of RGB color,  switching over to grayscale.”

“And by doing  that it just basically gets rid of all  the color, and it’s kind of like gray  right… it’s really flat, not very contrasty.  That sky is just kind of boring.  You could still see a little bit of what’s  happening there, but it just doesn’t have  much pop to it, so that’s the default way  that people sort of first start to use,  but there is a better way. “

“Well if you come under  image and you go  to adjustments and black and white.”

“Now this black and white adjustment brings up a dialog box that gives you a  whole bunch of different colors.  What this does is – you can  selectively pick the colors that are  originally in the image,  and then make those lighter and darker. So by going through the  different colors, and making adjustments  however I want, I can selectively change  the color.  So for example if you were  shooting a scene where you had a lot of  trees,  you could choose to make the green  leaves on the trees darker or lighter in  your black and white conversion.”

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