Have you ever looked at one of your landscape photographs and thought to yourself, “I wish I would have captured this image in monochrome?” Well, all is not lost as you’ll see in this tutorial from the PHLOG Photography YouTube channel that demonstrates how easy it is to convert a color image to b&w and enhance it in Lightroom for maximum effect.
Instructor Christian Mohrle is an amazing German landscape photographer who is just as accomplished behind the computer as he is when shooting in the field. In this episode he discusses everything from making a b&w conversion to basic editing, selective enhancement with masks to adjust important variables like contrast, and proper sharpening techniques.
As with all of Mohrle’s lessons there’s a link beneath the video for downloading his sample Raw file so that you can follow along and make the changes yourself. He recommends a specific sequence that begins with the b&w transformation, then making basic global adjustments to prepared the file for the masking techniques that follow. The final step employs Lightroom’s Color Mixer to tweak contrast.
The first step is about as easy as it gets: simply open Lightroom’s Basic panel, click on the b&w button, and the conversion from color to monochrome happens in an instant. Next on the list are a few simple tonal adjustments that will make masking as easy and effective as possible. These include dropping highlights to enhance detail, slightly increasing blacks, and boosting Texture, Clarity, and Dehaze.
You’ll also see why Lightroom’s White Balance sliders will help improve the impact when working on a b&w shot. Here he bumps up temperature and plays around with tint to enhance the sky.
With the preliminaries out of the way, it’s now time to apply simple masking magic to enhance selective areas within the frame. Mohrle typically begins this process with the sky. He creates a simple selection and subtracts a Linear Gradient moving up from the foreground to darken the top portion of the sky without affecting areas closer to the horizon.
A few other masks follow and the adjustments are as effective as what Mohrle accomplished with the sky, He holds your hand throughout the entire process—as he does when adjusting color contrast and sharpening to complete the transformation. Compare Mohrle’s before/after images and you’ll be duly impressed.
Mohrle’s instructional YouTube channel is full of pro tips for everyone who shoots in the great outdoors, so make it a point to pay a visit and explore all of his very helpful videos.
This tutorial begins with an important question for those of you who shoot in the field: “Do you have a problem dealing with situations where it doesn’t matter what you do and your photos still have blown-out highlights or darks crushed into black with absolutely no detail? If so, this tutorial from Canadian pro Simon d’Entremont is just what you need.
Simon is a professional nature/wildlife photographer and a Canon Ambassador whose tutorials are always popular with Shutterbug readers. In this episode he explains how to use Exposure Bracketing to manage these situations. Be sure to watch until the end where he demonstrates a very effective technique for processing your bracketed photos.
So why is Exposure Bracketing so useful and what is the problem that we’re trying to solve? According to Simon it’s this: “There are times when the dynamic range of a scene are too great for the camera to capture in one photo.” Many modern cameras can deal with 11-14 stops of dynamic range, “but if a scene has 16 stops of dynamic range we can’t capture it all in a single shot.”
One of two things happen in these situations: If you try to make sure whites aren’t blown out, the darkest part of a photo will appear almost pure black. Conversely, if you properly exposure for dark areas, the brightest parts of the photo will look pure white—with unrecoverable details. And one conventional approach to addressing the latter problem often introduces an abundance of noise.
Exposure bracketing provides an ideal solution whereby you shoot multiple images at different exposure settings and then combine them during post processing to achieve one perfect image. Three shots are usually all that’s required; one properly exposed, another that’s underexposed, and a third that’s overexposed.
As Simon puts it, “the best part of each photo is used to create an image with the best possible quality. In less than 12 minute he walks you through the shooting and editing procedures for getting the job done. Once you get the hang of it, and it doesn’t take long, creating images with perfect exposures will be a piece of cake.
And check out the tutorial we featured recently with another post-processing expert who demonstrates how to shoot better outdoor photographs by concentrating on three different types of contrast in your scene.
