Table of Contents for

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC Book, Second Edition

Black-and-White Conversions

There are various ways you can convert a color image to black and white. You can click the Black & White button in the Basic panel; you can select a black-and-white profile via the Profile Browser (circled in Figure 5.1); or you can use the keyboard shortcut. Figure 5.1 shows the main panels associated with black-and-white conversions. It is important to understand that when you create a black-and-white image, Lightroom is not permanently converting a color image to black and white. Rather, it is creating a black-and-white version of the color original. When you select a black-and-white profile or adjust the B&W panel controls, Lightroom blends the grayscale information contained in the individual red, green, and blue channels that make up the composite RGB image. If you have ever played with the Channel Mixer settings or the Black & White adjustment in Photoshop, the B&W panel controls will probably appear familiar. In Lightroom, you have eight color sliders to play with, and these provide you with some nice, subtle control over how the color component channels are blended in the conversion process to create custom black-and-white conversions. To make things a little easier, the B&W panel has an Auto button that, when you click it, applies an automatic black-and-white conversion that is determined by the White Balance setting in the Basic panel. You can then further vary a black-and-white conversion by adjusting the Temperature and Tint sliders in the Basic panel and re-clicking the Auto button if necessary.

Black-and-White Conversion Options

In the early days of black-and-white photography, film emulsions were fairly limited in their color response. Most were mainly sensitive to blue and green light only, which is why the skies in old photographs often appear very light and why photographers could process their films in the darkroom using a red safe light. As film emulsion technology improved, panchromatic black-and-white films began to emerge, and film photographers were able to creatively exploit their extended color sensitivity. This section shows you how to continue that tradition when working with digital-capture images.

How not to convert

Some photographers limit their black-and-white options unnecessarily, simply because they are unaware of the black-and-white conversion techniques that are available to them in Lightroom and Photoshop. For example, some people may set their cameras to shoot in a black-and-white JPEG mode. This restricts not only the tone adjustment, but also the black-and-white conversion options. The camera’s onboard image processor decides on the fly how to blend the color channel information and produces a fixed color-to-black-and-white conversion. You are consequently left with no room to maneuver, because all the color data has been thrown away during the in-camera JPEG conversion process. Then there is the RGB-to-Lab mode method in which you delete the a and b channels and convert the remaining, monochrome Lightness channel to grayscale or RGB mode. There is nothing to be gained from this approach, because, yet again, you are throwing away all the color data rather than making use of it in the conversion.

Temperature Slider Conversions

Let’s now look at some of the different ways in Lightroom to convert a color image to black and white. The most direct way to do this is to click the Black & White tab in the Basic panel (circled in Figure 5.4). This applies a default black-and-white profile conversion in which the Auto slider settings are linked to the White Balance settings. The Step 2 and Step 3 examples opposite show two possible black-and-white outcomes that can be achieved by first adjusting the Temp slider in the Basic panel and then clicking the Auto button in the B&W panel. The Step 2 version shows a white balance with a warm bias. Notice how the red and yellow colors appear lighter when converted this way. When I dragged the Temp slider in the opposite direction, as shown in Step 3, the red and yellow colors ended up darker. You can also vary the black-and-white conversion by adjusting the Tint slider. For example, in Step 3, I set the Tint slider to –100, which had quite an effect on the outcome. There is also an example coming up on page 385 where you will see how a green Tint slider adjustment can be used to simulate an infrared look.

Black-and-White Profiles

The new Lightroom profiles can be accessed via the Profile Browser (circled in Figure 5.1). These expand the range of options you have when processing an image, whether in color or black and white, as you now have 17 B&W profile options to choose from (Figure 5.5), plus the default Adobe Monochrome black-and-white profile. If you are editing an image in color mode and click the Black & White tab in the Basic panel (or use the shortcut), Lightroom applies this profile by default. If you then select any other B&W profile, Lightroom selects that profile when you next switch from color to black and white. Basically, when toggling between color and black and white Lightroom selects the last used profile for that particular image. However, doing so will zap any B&W panel settings. The Adobe Monochrome profile is a fixed Adobe raw profile, which means there is no Amount slider available with which to adjust the intensity of the profile adjustment. But, you can still use the B&W panel to further adjust the individual sliders to modify the black-and-white conversion. When any of the other B&W profiles are selected you will see an Amount slider, and this can be used to modify the conversion outcome. In the following steps, you can see how selecting a B&W profile other than Adobe Monochrome and adjusting the Amount slider offers extra potential to control the black-and-white conversion process before editing the B&W panel sliders. In most instances, I find the Adobe Monochrome profile always makes for a good starting point, but I also like using the new B&W 10 profile as a next-best alternative for standard conversions. I should add that when editing non-raw files the default profile option is simply “Monochrome,” but you can still access all the Enhanced profiles in Figure 5.5. Also, color images that start out in Adobe Standard are converted to Adobe Standard B&W, rather than the newer Adobe Monochrome profile.

Manual Black-and-White Adjustments

The profile selection is now the most important first step when converting to black and white. But subsequent B&W panel slider adjustments gives you almost unlimited freedom to create any number of different types of black-and-white adjustments. This gives you even more control over how light or dark certain colors will be rendered in a black-and-white conversion. The following steps show how I was able to improve upon a B&W profile setting and add more contrast between the piano player and the sky. Although you can adjust the B&W sliders by dragging them, you may find it easier to select the Target Adjustment tool mentioned in Steps 4 and 5 to edit the image directly. You can use [Mac] or [PC] to enable the Target Adjustment tool and use [Mac], [PC] or to disable it.

Black-and-White Infrared Effect

Now watch what happens when you take the White Balance settings to extremes. The following black-and-white infrared technique illustrates just one of the ways you can achieve a creative black-and-white conversion using Lightroom.

Refining Black-and-White Conversions

As long as you have a good profile for your printer, it should be easy to obtain a neutral gray print. It does not even matter how well your display is calibrated. If an image is in black and white, you should be able to produce a neutral gray print regardless of how neutral the photo looks on the display. If not, there may be something wrong with your printer profiles. Or, the print heads on your inkjet printer may need cleaning. Many times, I have gone to make a print and the colors have been distinctly off, all because it was several weeks since I had last used that particular printer. Usually a quick nozzle clean is all that is required.

Split Toning Panel

The Split Toning controls (Figure 5.6) let you add color tones to a photo after it has been converted to black and white. The Hue sliders can be used to adjust the hue color in either the highlights or the shadows, and the Saturation sliders to apply varying strengths of color. If you hold down the key as you drag a Hue slider, you will get a saturation-boosted preview that can help you see more clearly which hue color you are selecting without having to adjust the Saturation slider first. Clicking on either of the color swatches opens the color picker shown in Figure 5.7. This lets you quickly select the hue and saturation in one step. Click anywhere in the color ramp to select a color. You can even select colors from anywhere on the display, such as an image that’s opened in Photoshop. To do this, click the color ramp and drag outside the color ramp to anywhere you want. You can save a new color swatch as a preset by clicking in any of the preset swatch boxes to the left of the main before/after color swatch box. To do this, click to change the selected preset to the current selected color. You will notice that the color picker displays both the Highlight and Shadows color positions on the color ramp, so you can judge the relative positions of the two color sample points. (The current selected color is the one with the thicker border.) Incidentally, if you click in the Highlights swatch, you can -click (Mac) or -click (PC) to select a color for the Shadows (and vice versa). And, there is a slider at the bottom you can use to adjust the saturation while keeping the hue value locked.

Split-toning a color image

The Split Toning controls can also work well on regular color images. If you want to give your photographs a distorted color look, here is how to create a cross-processed effect in Lightroom. It is really easy to vary the effects shown here and save favorite color split-tone effects as presets.

Desaturated Color Adjustments

There is another, less obvious way to convert to black and white. If you go to the HSL panel and drag all the Saturation sliders to –100 (Figure 5.8), you can desaturate the color completely to create a black-and-white version of a photo. On the face of it, this would appear to be the same thing as dragging the Basic panel Saturation slider all the way to the left, but the key difference here is that the Basic panel Saturation slider applies its adjustment upstream of all the other color sliders, thus rendering them inoperable (apart from White Balance, Color Noise, and Calibration). The HSL desaturate method cleverly gives you full access to all the color controls in the Develop module, and this is where it can sometimes score favorably against regular B&W panel adjustments. You see, when you work with the B&W panel, the Vibrance and Saturation sliders are both unavailable and appear grayed out. This is a shame, because when you use the HSL desaturate method, the Vibrance and Saturation sliders provide you with added control over the outcome of your black-and-white conversions. With the HSL desaturate method, the Saturation slider in the Basic panel can act like an amplifier volume control for the HSL Luminance adjustments. So, increasing the Saturation can therefore magnify the effect of the HSL slider settings. The Vibrance slider offers a more subtle, fine-tuning control. But interestingly, a Vibrance adjustment can sometimes appear to have an opposite effect to the Saturation slider, and decreasing the Vibrance can sometimes make certain colors (such as blue) appear darker when converted to black and white.

The HSL black-and-white method in detail

To create an HSL black-and-white conversion, go to the HSL panel and set all the Saturation sliders to –100. Before you do anything else, it is worth saving this adjustment as a preset setting, as shown in Figure 5.9. At the end of Chapter 4, I suggested that you use folders to organize your Develop presets, so my advice here would be to save a setting like this to a dedicated folder for storing HSL black-and-white presets such as the HSL Black & White folder I previously created and then selected in Figure 5.9.

Calibration panel adjustments

You can also use the Calibration panel sliders to apply further fine-tuned adjustments. Here, things do get a little more unpredictable, and it can be a matter of playing with the sliders and seeing what happens. Even so, this method still offers more opportunities for experimentation that are otherwise lacking with a standard Lightroom black-and-white conversion.