localized burning and dodging.
When you remove the distraction of
color from the equation, you’re left
with manipulating tone. By effectively
wrangling tone—determining what
should be lighter and what should be
darker—you can reveal and enhance
contour, shape and depth. The more
time I spent working with separate
dodge (lighten) and burn (darken)
layers in Adobe Photoshop, or using
several adjustment brushes for the same
purpose in Adobe Lightroom, the more
enamored I became with the precise
level of control I had to define shape
and depth in specific areas of an image.
It was through this level of control that
I came to appreciate the art of local-
ized adjustments as opposed to simply
relying on global ones.
B&W Software Options
I mentioned that my first attempts to
practice black-and-white conversion
involved me cranking the Saturation
slider to -100 and calling it a day. What
I hadn’t realized at the time was that
I was leaving a whole bunch of con-
trol on the table by taking that route. I
learned just how much flexibility you
can get using other approaches rather
than simply desaturating an image.
The good news is that there’s no
shortage of applications that make it
easy to convert your photos to black-
and-white. I’ve chosen three of my
favorites to highlight here.Adobe Lightroom CC
The first would have to be Adobe Light-
room CC, primarily because I use itevery single day with all of my photos.
And while it isn’t necessary to compare
desaturation versus a proper black-and-
white treatment in each application, it
is worthwhile to talk about the differ-
ences. The key difference is that when
you desaturate a photo, the color infor-
mation is still present. It has just been
completely toned down. And, yes, the
presence of that color information does
have an impact on the photo.
When you use Black & White con-
version rather than desaturation, you
completely remove the color informa-
tion from the photo, leaving you with
tonal information only. While that, in
and of itself, is great, one of my favorite
benefits to going through Lightroom’s
conversion process is that it exposes
a new set of tools previously unavail-
able in a color workflow, the B&W
Mixer, which provides granular control
over the luminance of individual color
channels. This allows you to carefully
fine-tune how every color in an image
is converted to grayscale tones.ON1 Photo Raw 2019
While ON1 Photo Raw 2019 offers a
wide variety of utilities and tools for
photographers, including digital asset
management, panorama stitching
and HDR tone-mapping, my favorite
would arguably have to be its effects
panel, especially for black-and-white
treatments. Unlike Adobe Lightroom,
ON1 Photo Raw opens up a number
of additional options to further stylize
and refine your black-and-white photo.
One of my favorite elements is the
Toner dropdown, which recreates specific
looks of classic toners such as Selenium,
Sepia and Copper. Another welcome addi-
tion is Film Grain, which allows you to
simulate the traditional look of developed
black-and-white film. ON1 has scanned
and replicated the characteristics and grain
pattern of some of the most classic films
such as Fujifilm Neopan and Ilford Delta.
The fact that you can refine the amount
and size of the grain is also a nice touch.Top: ON1 Photo Raw 2019.Bottom: Silver Efex Pro.58 Outdoor Photographer outdoorphotographer.com