Black and white colour toning

I’ve been getting a few questions by Twitter about how I do black and white. So I thought I’d do a quick tutorial. I must first list some disclaimers.

1. I am an idiot – I don’t know very much about anything.

2. Just about everybody is better than me. That’s better at Photoshop, better at taking photos, has better gear and is probably a plain better quality human being.

3. I use Photoshop. There are other photo editing picture editing software packages out there…but I don’t know how they work.

But you asked, so I’m answering.

Okay, so you’ve got a cool shot that you want to make look even cooler by turning it into a luscious piece of black and white goodness. Here’s my Fannich Weir shot….it looks a bit boring in colour so time for some black and white drama.

There’s several ways of doing this in Photoshop. You could create an adjustment layer and choose the ‘black and white’ option. This brings up a load of different sliders and you can either be lazy and choose the ‘auto’ option or you can tweak the sliders until you find a pleasing combination. I use this route occasionally but find it a bit fiddly.

Or, you can use the ‘channel mixer’ adjustment layer, tick monochrome and play around with the Red, Green and Blue sliders. This is a really good way of getting an ‘infra-red’ type black and white shot, but I’m going to show you another way….

A “true” (and I can’t emphasise the quotes enough) mono image is done either by creating a saturation layer. – Click the little adjustment layer button at the bottom of your layers palette and yank the slider all the way to the left. And voila, you now have a mono picture….okay it’s completely lacking in contrast, definition and probably just looks washed out. You could just leave it there…or…

Now that you have a mono image, let’s make it bit more dramatic by putting a little colour back in…I really like this, but please remember disclaimer 1 and 2. To give it a subtle colour boost, open another adjustment layer but this time choose curves. Curves scare people, they used to scare me…really they are just funky contrast controllers and will kick the “Levels tool” square in the ass in this respect. Before you start playing with the graph…change the drop down so that you are just adjusting the green channel colour curve. Now...click the line of your graph about 2 thirds along the line and pull it up a bit. Now do the same about a third from the bottom of the line but pull in the opposite direction so that you get a subtle ‘S’ in your line. Marvel at the color tint and then click okay. Your shot should now have a green tint to it…wow…

Open another curves layer, and if possible leave your computer somewhere where your friends can see it whilst you go and get a coffee. They will think you’re a really clever individual who knows software editing inside out because it now looks very complicated. Once you’ve had your ego suitably buffed by friends/family you can change the curves layer to either the blue or the red channel and repeat the ‘s’ curve approach.

You can do the ‘s’ curve approach on all three channels, but I tend to stop at two…and KEEP IT SUTBLE! You’re going for a slightly colour toned black and white image, not some weird quasi-coloured hybrid…well maybe you are, but this isn’t the objective of what you’re reading.

Right…you’ve done your desaturation, then brought in a subtle (or otherwise) amount of colour back into the picture. Well done…now open another adjustment later and choose ‘contrast’. Because the shot is black and white you can be far more aggressive with contrast than you normally would be so give it a good punchy injection of contrast.

You’re nearly done. Go into layer, flatten image which will squash all of your layers into something that you will shortly be exporting as a JPEG. But before you do, go into filters and choose unsharp mask and give it a good sharpen before you save and upload to flickr for the praise from your peers you so richly deserve.

The other question I’m getting asked is about making skies exciting…I’ll answer that if you like this one.