Lessons
Lesson Info
Split Tone & Black And White
So we are gonna now look at working with split tones, and black and white. So I'm gonna just open this one up here. Okay, so here we have a picture. This is Brooke. And we wanna make this a black and white. It's not really a very exciting color picture, but I think it would make a great black and white. So, I'm just gonna show you the basic steps of working with black and white inside of here. Now one of them that we all know, is we can just click on black and white, and it'll take us into black and white. That's a great way to start. And that works really well. The other way is the profiles. I almost don't want to open these yet, because we're gonna do a whole section, but I will show you under here, we have a Adobe Monochrome. So we can go there and we can apply that. It's a good starting place. I'll explain all that in a little bit. And then of course, we've got other tools we can use in here, HSL. We can play around with these. So, here's the cool thing about going black and white,...
why don't we just go here and we're just gonna choose the black and white here. So the first place that you wanna work in black and white is an area you wouldn't normally expect. And, that is under the color temperature. So watch this. If I change the color temperature here, notice how that's really changing the black and white. Look at that. This has a huge impact. Same with the tint. So a lot of the time, when I do my black and whites, I'm gonna start in here. And the reason for this is, when it converts it to black and white, it doesn't just suck all the color out. What it does is it looks at the different areas inside the photograph, and tries to balance them out. So it works with the channels, you know the color channels, the red, green, and the blue channels. And so when we go and we make those adjustments on the color temperature, it's adjusting the way that those black, white, RGB channels are interpreting it into black and white image. So it's taking those channels and changing the balance between those channels. So you start off with an equal amount of red, green, and blue. Well you start to adjust that temperature, you're starting to push it more to the blues, or you're pushing it more to the oranges, and that's affecting the way that it's converting into that black and white. It's pushing more of the blue channel, and less of, say the red channel for example. So that's kind of why that works. Obviously we've got all these other adjustments here that we'd use, like before we do exposure, we wanna cover our highlights so we don't blow out our skin tones. Don't wanna do a lot for shadows on this one. Push it up to the whites, and crunch those blacks. Something about black and white for a real crunchy black looks nice. Alright so let's move on now to some of these other sliders. See we've got these black and white mix. Well, wasn't that a different slider a minute ago? Yeah it was. It was HSL. But when you convert it to black and white, HSL, which is hue, saturation, and lightness, which is everything inside a photograph. The hue is what is the color, red, green, or blue, yellow, saturation, how much of that color, and brightness is the gray scale information, the luminosity, the thing that defines it. That's what we're looking at right now. There is no HS anymore. There's no hue and there's no saturation. All we're working with now is L, which is the lightness, or the luminance, or luminosity, whatever you would like to call it. Gray scale value. So what happens now, so all the different colors here, instead of adjusting the colors and changing the colors, what it's doing is seeing where the reds are, or where the oranges are, or where the yellows are. We can increase them or decrease them, make them lighter or darker. So if we take the reds, see what happens, not a lot. Go down to the oranges. Not a lot. Let's go to the yellows. So, there we go. So we've definitely go some blues in this image. You can see how that's adjusting it. So literally, as you go down there, where those blues are, we're seeing a big difference. See that? And so the reason it's going like this and only working in the blues, I'll tell you why, is because we set our temperature, all the way to the blue. That's why. So if I pull these back a little bit, and we go back here, see now we're seeing more adjustment there. So just be aware of that. It's not broken. Most of the time it's so easy for us to say Photoshop's broken but we've just hit the wrong setting. (laughter) So if you're finding that, "Oh I was only working in the blues," that's because I've moved that color temperature. So, you know, what I was showing there, when I was dimming that, I never, just to let you know, I never change that at the very beginning. I go do all this, and then go to that at the end. So let's go back here. So we can make some adjustments in here. You know, now we're adjusting our skin tones. Do we want the skin blown out or do we want it dark? You know, you can adjust the lightness, usually between the reds and oranges. Mostly oranges will give you the skin. What do we wanna do here? See those gloves? We can make those, the purples, magentas are really gonna get in there. There we go. Look at that. Cause remember those gloves were kind of pinky, magenta? That's a good way to show where it really works. So we can say, you know, "Do we want it that way?" And see how much control we have over this color now. So we can change that, you know obviously not like that. And so we're making those adjustments there. So essentially, that's when we're working with a black and white. So you want to do the black and white mix, but you also want to play around with these. See what I'm doing now is I'm playing around with these colors, the tints. See a big difference those are making. And, you know, you make all your adjustments like that. So here's the other cool thing is, once you've got all this and you're happy, if you maybe want to give this all some clarity, we wanna make it look kind of gritty, we'll increase that a little bit there. Alright, so we've got a black and white there. It's pretty cool. Now if you want to save this as a preset, just go into your presets and click here. BW strong, because it was a pretty strong conversion, click okay, and now we've saved it, so we can come back and we can use that again at anytime. So, for example, if I wanna reset this, hit the out or the option key, hit on reset. There we are back to the original image. Go back to my presets, and under my user presets, just click on it, and we can apply it at anytime. So, that's working with the black and whites. So pretty basic right? But it gives you a lot of control, a lot more control over some of the other methods.