Create a street photography look

Generate a mood and feel that complements the spontaneity of street photography

My name isn’t Henri, and my surname doesn’t even rhyme with Cartier-Bresson. That doesn’t stop me from engaging in street photography from time to time. Once you’ve got your settings down, street photography is mostly about looking for scenes, then waiting on serendipity to put the finishing touches in place. Or maybe you prefer searching for the graphic in everyday places: here I’ve made use of the environment to create a frame within a frame.

To hark back to the look of old masters like Henri, we’ll take colour out of the equation. Mixed light, bright facades and modern clothing often don’t go together well. The clash of colour makes black-and-white the perfect option here.

Lightroom offers a selection of local adjustment options to recreate effects and tools used in the days of film processing and printing: paper grades (for final contrast), plus dodging (lightening a selected area of a photo) and burning (darkening a selected area) – no need to wave cards around as you print.

Convert to mono

Press V to convert the image to the Adobe Monochrome Profile. (Aim to learn as many shortcuts as possible to speed things up.) Next, go to the B&W Panel. Here you can modify the brightness of the original colours in the photo. The red can easily be toned down this way, along with its neighbours, yellow and orange. The jacket is blue and can be lightened to bring attention to it. The other colours are less pronounced in this photo, but you should try every slider to get the best look.

Adjust contrast

Contrast is a huge part of black-and-white photography. For more precision, you can use the Tone Curve. There are five parts here: Parametric, Point, Red, Green and Blue curves. You’ll find for contrast that the Point Curve (the second one) gives most control.

To increase depth, pull a point down on the left of the curve. Boost overall highlights by pushing a point up on the right. Finally, in the Basic Panel, drag your Highlights slider to -50 to recover the upper midtones.

Work on the edges

To burn in the edges of the frame, you can simply use the Radial Filter to darken down the lane. This will create even more contrast and force the eye to the centre of the photo. Select the Radial icon in the Toolbar. (It’s under the Histogram.) Click in the centre of the photo and drag out to the lane edge. The Invert checkbox at the bottom should be off: this means the setting affects outside the Radial edge. Ticked, it affects the interior. Set Exposure enough to darken the edge. Here it’s -1.19.

Add grain

For the final part of your street edit, you can go proper old-school by using Grain, in the Effects Panel. Amount sets the strength of grain in the photo, but the other two sliders, Size and Roughness, made a huge difference in how it appears.

Size, as the name suggests, controls how large each individual grain is. Roughness changes the uniformity of the grains. Greater Roughness can give a more organic feel to your photo. For this, we’ve gone with a smaller Size, but greater Roughness.