Create Black and White Images

YOU’LL NEED THIS

PHOTOSHOP Or Photoshop Elements.

NIK COLLECTION Download the plugins from www.

google.com/nikcollection.

A SUITABLE IMAGE Many pics benefit from this trick.

ONCE, ALL PHOTOS WERE BLACK AND WHITE. It wasn’t until 1935, when Kodak introduced Kodachrome film, that color photography became remotely mainstream. When shooting with black and white film, a photographer needs to be able to mentally picture the finished image in all its shades of gray, and the better you’re able to do that, the better your final picture will be.

Today, black and white photography still thrives. Thanks to the likes of Instagram, it’s never been easier to change color photos to black and white, and add processing artefacts that would once have taken hours to achieve. Rather than use the same one-shot filters as everyone else, however, why not cook up your own in? It’s straightforward to create striking and unique looks.

While it’s possible to set many digital cameras to produce monochrome images, once you’ve discarded the color information in-camera, it’s gone for good. Much better to shoot in color, then manage the conversion to black and white on your PC.

1 OPEN YOUR RAW FILE We’re starting with a raw file, so have opened it in Camera Raw [ Image A]. You could do the same thing in Lightroom, or any other raw image processor if you wanted. We’re increasing the contrast at this point, but if you’re working with a JPEG, you could do the same thing with the Levels window, stretching the histogram so the tones are mapped as widely as possible.

2 LIGHTEN AND DARKEN Photoshop, of course, has its own built-in black and white conversion tool (“Image > Adjustments > Black and White”). Open it up, and your photo pops into monochrome, and you’re presented with a panel of color sliders. This may appear counter-intuitive, until you consider how black and white photography works. Or worked, at any rate. Photographers would place colored filters over their lenses, the effect of which was to lighten that color in the resulting image, and darken its opposite— indeed, there’s a preset menu that emulates these filters. In our image, the eagle has a beak that’s a similar color to the background, so if we want to darken the background, by pulling the yellow slider to the left—the equivalent of a blue filter over the lens—we’re going to darken the beak, too.

3 WORK ON A NEW LAYER To get around this, we use the Quick Selection tool to select the yellow beak and eye areas, and copy them to a new layer with “Layer > New > Layer Via Copy” [ Image B]. This enables us to work on them separately because, despite being on the Image menu, Photoshop’s black and white conversion only applies to the currently selected layer, not the whole file. Once you’re happy, give it a heavy sharpening with the Unsharp Mask tool [ Image C], then flatten the image and save it. Done, in less than half the length these tutorials normally run for.

4 DOWNLOAD NIK COLLECTION Interestingly, however, Google’s Nik Collection of Photoshop and Lightroom plugins became free earlier this year, and that means the excellent Silver Efex Pro 2 is now easily within every Photoshop, Lightroom, or Elements owner’s reach. It’s about a 430MB download from www.google.com/nikcollection, and easily installed by running the .exe file. The next time you run your image-editing app, there’ll be a new floating palette right in the middle of the screen, looking like it doesn’t belong there. It can be easily minimized and moved off to one side, however.

5 ADD SOME BLEMISHES Before we explore Silver Efex, let’s first look at Analog Efex, the Nik Collection’s film and camera

simulation plugin. Selecting the “Analog Efex Pro 2” option on the palette opens the plugin. It’s GPU-accelerated (GTX 400/Radeon HD series or above), but even so, can take several seconds to analyze your image. Use the “Cameras” menu at the top-left to select black and white options, then scroll through them. We like the sepia tones of filter number seven, but choose whatever suits your image best. Once you’ve chosen a filter, you can move to the right to further edit it. It placed a number of dust spots and scratches over our image, which turned out to be caused by a “frame” around it, rather than the “Dirt and Scratches” menu. There’s a huge number of ways available to ruin your photo, each with a strength slider that can be pushed to the right to make scratches in black, or to the left to render them in white.

6 EXPERIMENT WITH EFFECTS When you’re done playing with Analog Efex, use Photoshop’s History palette to return your image to its original state, then it’s time to look at Silver Efex. Once it opens, you’ll find oneshot filters for quick adjustments on the left, while on the right are controls for manual and selective adjustments—it’s very similar to Analog Efex. One of the nicest features of the Nik Collection is that once you press “OK” on a filter or edits, they’re applied as a separate layer, on top of your original one, so you’re free to blend the two together in any way you choose. We found that blending our mono and color images together using the Multiply blend mode gave us a very high-contrast but still colorful look. 7 FINAL TOUCHES For a really gritty, high-contrast, black and white result, some of Silver Efex’s push process presets are perfect [ Image D]. Mix these with the “Film Types” menu on the right, and you can get a very authenticlooking result. We chose an ISO 1600 Fuji Neopan Pro film and a yellow filter, then added a bit of lens fall-off around the edges for an image that looks like it was taken a long time ago, and roughly treated in the meantime. A tiny bit of sepia toning, then additional darkening with Photoshop’s Levels tool, finishes it off. Remember to save as a PSD file to retain the layers for further editing.