Rich Tones In Black And White

Quite often I'm asked how I manage to get the rich tonality in my black and white images and photographers indicate this is an area they struggle with. Without going into an entire workshop on black and white workflow which may not in fact answer the question, here are some points to consider if your images look either flat or in fact harsh.

1) choose your lighting carefully. While harsh lighting can be to some degree compensated for with HDR techniques, I still find it's a lot better to photograph just before sunrise or just after, or to catch the subject just before the sun pops out from behind a cloud.

2) It's hard to get lovely tones in an image if in fact it's full of small details which alternate dark to light - eg. branches against the sky. Other subjects that have fine patterns of dark and white are also difficult. Ideal are relatively smooth objects which have nice gradations from dark to light (or to which you can add the gradations in the editing). Bottom line, some things photograph better than others.

3) Even well known photographers continue to claim they can manage without doing a lot of editing in Photoshop. While Lightroom 2 does have some basic local editing tools, it's a bit like building an entire house with a single hammer and saw - it's possible, just not convenient, efficient, or most effective. I spend hours working on each image in Photoshop to balance the tonalities and to achieve those subtle highlights and shadows. Perhaps you are trying to do it the "easy" way and shortchanging your images.

4) I think a lot of people tend to think of image editing as a "correcting" process - ie. fixing the deficiencies in the image. That's good enough for novices but that's like telling a painter he can't use his imagination, no interpretation, brush strokes or choice of colours - painters won't accept that and I would suggest that if you are serious about the fine print, you shouldn't either. Perhaps the single most important reason that people comment on the tonality of my prints is how I go beyond accurate to creative in my print adjustments. This can start with my choice of colour settings in the black and white adjustment layer in Photoshop CS3 and extends to the creative use of the curves adjustment layers, used of course with masking to control both where the effects are applied and the degree to which they apply.

In the next week or so I will show you some examples of the straight recorded file as it comes out of Camera Raw and what the final image looks like so you can get a better idea of what I'm talking about.