Craft a powerful portrait style

Use the Clarity and Texture sliders in Lightroom or Camera Raw to add impact to your mono images

While most of the work in your black-and-white character portrait is being done by the lighting style you’re using, you are still going to need a few image-editing techniques to add more impact.

Whether you use Lightroom or Camera Raw for your processing, you’ll find all the tools you need in the Basic Panel. The most important two sliders are found under the heading of Presence, and it’s the Texture and Clarity sliders that we’re going to concentrate on.

Normally you need to be careful with both these controls, as pushing them too far can make an image look over-processed – but as we are creating a hyper-real mono portrait, you can be quite gung-ho. As you increase both sliders, you’ll immediately see the effect, with a strong contrast and detail boost adding bite.

The basics

In Lightroom’s Develop Module, click on Black & White or press V to go mono. Take the Whites slider right and Blacks left, just to make sure you are using all the tonal range. Pulling Highlights back helps keep all the detail you need.

Add definition

It’s time to really make the shot gritty with the sliders under the Presence heading. Push both Texture and Clarity as far as you want, and the Dehaze slider can be pushed to the right for extra contrast, too.

Simple, direct and full of detail, a simple head-and-shoulders portrait looks great in black and white.