We started out with a basic assignment: take some photos of a local historic area, convert your favorites to black and white, and return later to present them to the group with a description of what you had done to achieve your conversion. Some of the people that presented images spent literally hours on one photo. To me, thats way too much time to be spending on a single photo unless your intent is to sell that photo for millions (which likely isn’t going to happen). Other people, who seem to be more like me, believe in more time taking the photos and less time tweaking them. One of the members is even known for setting an egg timer at 4 minutes to remind him that he’s spent too long on one photo.

Sure there are special methods to enhance your image, like adding extra grain, textures, burning and dodging to enhance contrast, etc, etc. But thats not what I’m touching on here. Instead, I’m speaking of the simple task of just converting your color image to a black and white image and getting certain parts of your images to “pop” without spending too much time post processing.

So with that being said, I presented the following image to the group:

And the converted sample:

First, let me explain a little about this photo. It was taken at about 11am, on a sunny and, as you can see, nearly cloudless day. In its original state, it is a very basic photo that you would glance at quickly without a second thought and not really remember much. Therefore, my goal with this photo was to give people something actually worth looking at. For those of you that are curious, I took it with a 15mm fisheye lens exposure time was 1\60th sec at f\16, ISO 100.

As you can see, the difference between the two images went from dull to something that’s considerably more interesting. Granted there’s still more I can do to enhance the image in many ways to make it even better, but the important thing to remember here is that I spent only about 2-3 minutes on this image.

Now, on to how I did it!

I am and always have been a big fan of Adobe Photoshop, but lately I must say that Adobe Lightroom has become my software of choice for the post-processing of my images. Lightroom is available in both Mac and PC formats and is certainly a lot cheaper on the pocketbook than Photoshop is.

First off, I shoot primarily in RAW format. Mainly because it allows me to fine tune my images with more control, the way that I want to, without my camera’s software adjusting them however it thinks is correct. Secondly, because it’s a lossless format, it allows me to do all the tweaking to my images that I want to do without losing my original data. There is and always will be controversy on whether shooting in RAW or JPG is better, so please, save those comments for later!

In Lightroom’s develop module, about half-way down on the right you’ll see this panel:
Simply clicking “Grayscale” at the top, you will see your image desaturate and become what by all definition is a “black-and-white” image. But, it’s still lacking something. So let’s fine tune the image a bit!

If you press the Y key in Lightroom, you will be shown a before and after preview of your image. Using this view, compare the original (color) image to your grayscale image. You will notice that some of the more neutral colors like blues, greens, and reds tend to lose their contrast once adapted.

To get that contrast back, look at your color image and decide which colors that you would like to see represented as lighter and which colors you would like to see represented as darker.

Now, go back to the grayscale panel on the right, and find the first color that you want to lighten or darken. As you move the slider side to side, you’ll notice that anything in your image that matches the color on the slider you’re adjusting, will go from a black (left side of the slider) to a white (right side of the slider). Do this for each of the colors that you want to adjust until you achieve the contrast that you’re looking for.

Keep in mind, however, that you can only ask for so much adjustment before you start seeing some undesireable effects. For instance, moving the slider too far to the right can create some artifacts in your image that may not be desireable. Or, alternatively, moving them too far to the left can create an unnatural looking haze on the colors surrounding the one that you’re adjusting.

Therefore, you should always keep an eye on other parts of your image other than the part that you’re adjusting. Doing so, you may catch another part of your image turning for the worst when all you’re trying to do is darken the sky, etc.

For my sample above, I darkened the blue channel, in order to add more contrast between the sky and the rest of the image. I darkened the orange channel in order to make the “Repair” sign on the left side of the building stand out. And I darkened the red channel to make the bricks on the ground stand out a little more.

After adjusting the colors, I darkened the corners of the image using the “vignetting” sliders, this helps lessen some of the surrounding distractions. I then made a small contrast adjustment, and sharpened the image. As you can see, this isn’t a lot of work to get a good looking black and white conversion.

Aside from Lightroom, this can also be done using the Adobe RAW Converter that is built into Photoshop CS3 and newer. As well, it can be done using actions or plugins in Photoshop (More on those in the future!).