Improve Your
Monochromes
Black and white photography remains as popular today as it ever was
and as you’d expect Lightroom supports monochrome photography
with a wide range of dedicated features. Lightroom especially supports
conversion from colour to monochrome, with great effect.
1
Successful monochrome photography is all about
lighting, contrast and texture, so the best monochrome
conversions will be images that emphasise these qualities.
Artistic portrait studies, modern urban architecture and
rugged rural landscapes are all good candidates. For our
example, we’ll be using this shot of a coastal sunrise.3
Open the Presets tab and then click on Lightroom B&W
Presets to see the list of available built-in options. They
include high and low contrast settings, as well as five special
presets that add effects such as vignetting, film grain and
coloured filters. You can try these out and then undo their
effects by using the History tab.2 For quick results, Lightroom comes with a number
of built-in presets for converting colour photos to
monochrome. You can find them in the left-hand sidebar,
not too surprisingly in the Presets tab. There are presets for
B&W Filters, B&W Toned processing and also for simple B&W
conversion. Let’s take a closer look at these first.4 If you look at the Basic and HSL/Color/B&W tabs in the
right-hand sidebar, after clicking on one of the B&W
conversion presets, you can see that both instantly switch to
Black & White mode and several of the sliders will move to
new positions. If you click through one preset after another
you’ll see the sliders move each time.This tutorial
content is
available for
download70
IMPROVE YOUR IMAGE: THE DEVELOP MODULE
BDM’s Made Easy Series | Volume 22