HOW It WORKS HIGH-CONTRAST Mono 06

Ensure the presence of black shadows and white highlights with help from clipping warnings

01 BASIC PALETTE The Basic image editing-panel provides a range of tools to help you make a striking high-contrast mono conversion of your colour Raw file. 02 HELPFUL HISTOGRAM

This tool is particularly useful for ensuring a black-and-white image has a healthy spread of tones, with shadows represented at the left and the highlights at the right. Our start image is underexposed, so the graph will be clumped more towards the shadows and midtones at the left of the histogram when you first open it. The edited image’s histogram should look more like this, with a wider spread of tones.

03 PICTURE STYLE

Click this drop-down menu to access the Monochrome picture style. This removes all colour information so that only the greyscale tones remain.

04 CLIPPING WARNING

Click this icon to reveal clipped pixels. Underexposed shadows will appear as patches of blue. These areas will print out as pure black and be free of detail. Overexposed highlights will appear as patches of red. These areas will appear as pure white.

05 DISPLAY SETTINGS

Click this triangle to fine-tune the threshold of the clipping warning’s settings. By default the threshold is wide, but we only want to be warned about the very darkest shadows and the brightest highlights. Set the Shadow Warning threshold to 5. Set the Highlight Warning threshold to 250. Now only shadows with a level between 0-5 will appear in patches of blue. Highlights with levels between 250-255 will appear as patches of red. This helps you discover the darkest and lightest pixels so you can restore detail where needed while ensuring a strong contrast.

CONTRAST

An effective mono conversion should have some black shadows and white highlights (or you’ll end up with a drab wash of greyscale tones). Drag this slider right to create darker shadows and whiter highlights.

07 SHADOW & HIGHLIGHT

The Shadow slider enables you to selectively lighten the shadows and midtones in your monochrome conversions to reveal missing tonal details. The Highlight slider helps to claw back missing highlight detail.

08 FILTER EFFECT

By experimenting with various filter effects you can make specific objects stand out in the black-and-white version of the scene, based on the their original colours. For example, the Red filter darkens the blue sky, which helps reveal more subtle contrasting cloud detail.