In my recent posts I’ve included a fair few black & white images, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to share with you my post processing work-flow and how I converted just one of my raw files into lovely Black & white image.

This image was shot at the kumbh mela just this morning and I decided I wanted to process it into a  black & white image. So in the develop module of Lightroom the first thing I did was to scroll down to the HSL/Color/Grayscale panel and click greyscale which has turned my image into a rather flat looking black & white image.

From this starting point I went to the tone curve panel to give the image some more contrast by darkening all regions of the curve except the highlights which I slightly increased. This can either be done with the sliders or the fantastic tool Adobe provides that, once selected, allows you click directly onto the photo and increase or decrease the tone with the vertical movements of your mouse. Either way can produce the same results. I’ve no idea what this tool is called but I’ve circled it on the image below.
Adjusting the contrast like this gives you a great deal more control over the the tones compared to using the contrast slider in the basics panel.

I  can make further, more specific, adjustments to the greyscale mix in the HSL/Color/Grayscale panel in the same way.

Many black and white images appear stronger if you add a fair amount of clarity, this slider can be found in the basic panel.

A final touch I often like to add to my black & white images is to a nice big vignette.

Viola!

A final image ready to go up on my blog. Its also important to keep an eye on your histogram during the process to make sure you don’t burn out the hightlights. Obviously every black & white image will need different treatment, so basically play around see what works for your image.

Tags: Lightroom, Processing, technique, Travel, What I've been up to