Joel Tjintjelaar

In part 1 of this series, I mainly talked about preparing your image for the conversion. In part 2 I’ll discuss the actually conversion itself.

I’m going to continue with the picture used in part 1.

Step 3: picking your conversion tool

As you may know by now, there are many tools that can convert your image to black and white. I already discussed some of these tools elsewhere on this site.

Basically you want much control over the conversion, but you don’t want it to be too complicated to handle. I myself use the great little program called Silver Efex Pro. This program gives me so much control over an image and there are so many presets to choose from. However…this program might be a little too much for beginners. It’s a complicated program and it isn’t free either. You can however download the 15 day trial from Nik Software’s website.

Luckily, Photoshop has a built in converter that gives us exactly what we’re looking for: great control, good results, easy operation and it’s free: the Black and White tool. You can find this tool under Image > Adjustments > Black & White.

Step 4: consider how your image should look like in black and white

This is probably the hardest step. There are no rules that say that Reds should be on 140% and Blues on 10%. It is all free for interpretation. You choose what you like. There are however some unwritten rules on what makes a black and white image good.

Contrast. There should be (almost) pure darks and whites.

Tonality. The more tones, the better. An image that consists of just one tone of gray, would be pretty boring, the image would look very flat.

Gradual change of tonality and balance in tones. This one pretty much sums up 1 and 2. High contrast looks nice, but if the contrast is too high, the tonality becomes less. Regarding balance: always take a final look at the end result and see if the image is balanced and that it exactly reflects what you had in mind. An image can be technically correct but it doesn’t reflect your vision or mood.

I think that these rules are true on some level. The most important thing however is subject and composition. A boring and badly composed image, looks boring and bad in colour and in black and white. You can change the tonality of an image with Photoshop, but you can’t change composition on subject (well, ok, you can crop and you can clone out some things, but you get the point).

Let’s just begin with the conversion.

I had my preset set on “none” and just pressed OK. This conversion doesn’t work well for me.

A few things that are wrong with this:

The sky is too gray.

Hardly any visible detail in the trees.

If you take a look at the colour image, you’ll see one tree standing out from the rest. There’s a red/purple tree on the right, between a lot of bright green trees. I don’t see any of that in this B&W conversion.

The castle looks too flat. There’s hardly any contrast.

You might want to try the same as I did. Set your preset to “none” and take a critical look at your picture. Ask yourself how you could improve this image. Compare the B&W with the original image. If I wouldn’t have compared the B&W with the colour image, I wouldn’t even have noticed that the red/purple tree disappeared with the conversion.

I must say that I exactly know what I’m looking for. When I was shooting this image, I already knew how I would convert this image. This is something you’ll develop over time. When I first started with B&W, I just experimented. A lot. This is exactly what I want you to do: experiment. Find out what you like. Try different presets, try the red filter, the green filter, infrared…whatever works for you. Save different conversions and compare them.

Step 5: adjusting the settings

So, now that you know what you want, you can begin adjusting the settings.

A note in advance about the Black & White tool. You can simply move the sliders to the left and the right, but here’s where this tool becomes great. With the Black & White tool still open, just click at any part of the image that you wish to change. If you want that certain part to become darker, just click, hold and drag with the left mouse button to the left. If you want that certain part to become lighter: do the same, but to the right.

This works much better than moving the sliders. Because you would have to know exactly how your image looked in colour. I mean, you can move the Blues slider to the left and darken the parts that in the colour image are blue, but do you remember what parts were blue? In this case it would have been pretty obviously: the sky. It isn’t however always that simple. That’s why I urge you to click, hold and drag on the parts you wish to brighten or darken, instead of moving the sliders.

I used this settings for this image.

I made the sky a lot darker and by doing so, I created a big contrast between the sky and the clouds. Which was what I saw, when I was shooting. The sky was deep blue and the clouds were very white, which creates a big contrast. Using the Black & White tool without any preset, resulted in a very gray sky with almost no contrast.

Secondly, I increased the greens drastically, that way the green trees became light gray. It also created a visible difference between the red/purple tree and the other green trees.

As you can see, there’s a big difference between using no settings and adjusting the settings after taking a critical look and asking yourself what you want to achieve.

Most people think they are done by now. And, hey, if you like what you see, just save your image and share it with your friends and family or put it on your website. There’s just one more step I’d like to take: dodging and burning. That’s the part of B&W conversion that separates the men from the boys. It’s a technique originating from the conventional dark room and has been elevated to an art form by the great Ansel Adams. The trees on the right aren’t bright enough for me. The contrast between the red/purple tree and the green trees, isn’t obvious enough just yet. Further: the castle hasn’t enough contrast yet.

After some dodging and burning, this is how the final result looks like.

Dodging and burning is highly recommend. It can change your image entirely. By the way, you can read more about dodging and burning elsewhere on this site.

I hope this tutorial has helped you to improve your black and white work!

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