Warrior 2 Sean McCormack

Looking at this file evokes thoughts of a movie poster – a gritty, character-driven movie, with plenty of action. And being a movie poster, the photo needs to a little stylised – so, to match my feel for the image, I think a black-and-white conversion would look great.

There are many ways to do black and white in Lightroom, but I think we’ll keep it simple on this one. I want to bring the sky back a bit as well: full white at the top would definitely draw the viewer’s eye away from the scene. I do want to retain detail in the shadows, despite also wanting a good deal of contrast. It’s going to be a balancing act to get this.

As I shoot a tonne of residential work commercially, I’m fixated with good verticals, so I’ll definitely correct these. Finally, I’ll use some of the Presence controls to add a touch of grit to the photo, and top it off with Grain from the Effects panel to seal the film look.

1 Black-and-white conversion

The most basic method of mono conversion is to change the Treatment at the top of the Basic Panel to Black & White. Pressing

V will achieve the same end. Both change the

Profile from the default

Adobe Color (or Adobe Standard on older imported photos) to Adobe Monochrome. The other Profile-based method is to open the Profile Browser and choose a dedicated B&W Profile that you like. Me? I’m just going to grab the Saturation slider and bring it to -100.

To fix the verticals, I go to the Transform panel and click Auto. For the sky, I go to the Graduated Filter (M). I drag this down over the sky. I bring Highlights down to -100 and Exposure down to taste: -0.22 here. To prevent the Empire State Building being dragged down too much, I set Range Mask to Luminance and set the lower point to 95, so it only affects the brightest tones.

2 Tonality

While adding grit and grain is my final step, I know that what I do there will alter what I do in this step, so I may have to come back to these. My first step here is to push Contrast: +44 looks good here. The shadows have become blocked up a bit, so I open up Shadows to +57. This brings back some detail.

Did you know that one side effect of using negative Saturation for B&W is that the White Balance slider can change your tones? Well, it can – so I change Temperature up to 6385 to bring some air to the photo.

There’s plenty of information in the photo now, but we’re about to make it more weather-beaten.

Grit and grain 3

One quick way to dirty up a photo is to start pushing the Dehaze slider. While this is meant for cutting through haze, it’s actually a great effect in itself. It also tends to darken the photo in the process, though. Here I’ve set Dehaze to 35.

The next step is to add some Clarity. This pushes the midtone contrast and looks great on buildings – I often use it to add some punch to residential photos. It also slightly lightens the photos, counteracting some of Dehaze’s darkening. The more I push it, the more

I like it, so it’s 64 for Clarity.

The photo does need proper brightening, though, so I add +0.45 to Exposure. The histogram shows a slight clipping in the highlights, so I bring Highlights to -42.

The finishing touch 4

The final step is to add Grain. For this I go to the Effects panel. I want it big and bad, so I go with 36 for Amount. For Size, I’ve gone big with 50 and bumped Roughness up slightly to 53.