Five ways to enhance images with classic effects
Enhance your images by taking inspiration from classic blackand-white printing techniques – or inventing some of your own
From the earliest days of photography, black-and-white images have been toned, printed and manipulated to create an almost endless range of effects to complete the final image. Now you can recreate these effects, or come up with some of your own, without having to spend hours in a darkroom full of acrid chemicals: they are all easily attainable through some simple software tweaks.
Here are five different treatments that will give your black-and-white shots extra impact or a different mood, or simply make it look more ‘analogue’ than a standard mono conversion. Many of these are available as presets through many software packages such as Lightroom, but you can adjust the different settings to suit your particular image, or even start from scratch to create your own black-andwhite masterpiece.
1 SPLIT-TONING
This process involves adding at least two different colours: one to the highlights and one to the shadows to add mood and impact to your images. For this shot we used the Split Toning option in Lightroom, and added a red/ brown tone to the highlights and a subtle blue to the shadows. But the choice of colours is almost endless, so you should take the time to experiment to find the best ones for your image.
2 LITHO PRINTING
Recreating the effect of traditional lithographic printing takes a little time to perfect, but can create stunning images. The basic effect relies on the contrast between strong, dark shadows and soft, glowing highlights, along with a subtle tone. This is achieved by adding noise to the shadows, and tone to the midtones and highlights. Reducing Clarity to between -20 and -50 can recreate the glow in the highlights.
3 CYANOTYPE
Cyanotypes were originally used to recreate diagrams and blue prints. The process was also used to produce prints with a cyan/ blue tone and high contrast. To recreate this, add a cyan/blue tone to your image by adding a Gradient Map Adjustment Layer and choosing a colour from the Photographic Toning options, then adjust the opacity to suit your taste. Add contrast using an S-curve on a Curves Adjustment Layer.
4 Infrared
Recreating the glowing, ethereal effect of infrared film is easily achieved. There is an Infrared preset in Lightroom and Camera Raw, which you can fine-tune using the exposure, tone and curves adjustments. You should try to achieve the dark, blocked-in shadows that are a feature of infrared images. You can also adjust Clarity to between -20 and -50 to recreate the ethereal glow that is synonymous with this effect.
5 HIGH KEY
If your image contains a large amount of light tones you can enhance this look by going for a high-key effect. This is easily achieved by adding a Curves Adjustment Layer, then raising the curve to lighten all of the tones, without losing the detail in the highlights. To achieve the opposite lowkey effect, you simply drag the curve down to darken the tones of the image, which is particularly good in images containing mostly dark tones.