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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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