Go gracefully grey
You can selectively lighten or darken greyscale tones in a mono conversion based on the original colours of the image – George Cairns explains all
Use Lightroom to selectively lighten or darken greyscale tones in a mono conversion by tweaking the original colours of the image
When shooting with black-and-white film, photographers can place a coloured filter over the camera’s lens to produce more striking pictures. Different coloured filters lighten or darken the greyscale tones of specific objects in the scene. For example, if you place a red filter over the lens it makes blue skies appear dark grey in the monochrome print, so lighter clouds pop out in contrast.
Your Nikon’s Monochrome Picture Control setting enables you to produce a black-andwhite photo in-camera. You can even set it to apply colour filters that help lighten or darken greyscale tones in particular areas, such as blue skies or green fields (you’ll find this in the Monochrome Picture Control’s advanced settings). This in-camera approach can be hit and miss, so we’ll show you how to take more control of greyscale tones in your monochrome conversions in Lightroom.
There are several ways to create a monochrome image in Lightroom. If you simply set Saturation to 0, you’ll get an instant mono conversion, but you risk producing a drab wash of greys, especially if the shot consists mostly of midtones. An eye-catching monochrome photo has a wide range of tones, from black shadows to white highlights. Let’s see how to get better black-and-white images…
If you simply set Saturation to 0… you risk producing a drab wash of greys