Craft a black-and-white landscape in Lightroom
Knowing the right finishing touches makes all the difference when you convert to mono
For beginning photographers, landscapes offer an easy path to gaining mastery. You can go from your doorstep and find a composition around you quite easily. Once you’ve learned the basics of composition, it’s easy to combine foreground, leading lines and other techniques to create an interesting photo. You just need the light and some patience.
Going back to basics, we’re looking here at the process of creating a black-and-white conversion of a landscape photo. Historically this is where photography started: long exposures were required to capture any image, and static scenes like landscapes made that possible.
But why would you then opt to remove colour today? Well, colour can be a distracting element. If there’s a clash of colours, or if the image contains very little colour, removing colour can lift a photo and focus the viewer. Lightroom Classic offers a few ways to do this. The simplest is to remove Saturation (setting it to -100) and to boost Contrast to taste.