PROCESS MONO LANDSCAPES
Enhance the best qualities of your images
Any successful digital photographer working at a professional level understands the importance of bespoke image processing. No two images benefit from identical editing settings, and when working with genres as different as colour and monochrome photography it is even more crucial to identify how and why the processing recipes differ.
As we are working without colour, white balance correction is an area we can be less concerned about, but this doesn’t mean that colour can be ignored entirely. Depending on those present in the landscape, it will often be necessary to adjust contrast via the HSL panel in Lightroom or Camera Raw and the dedicated Black and White controls in Photoshop. These can also be used for creative effect, to alter the balance of tones based on the distribution of colour values throughout the frame.
The element that is of paramount importance when processing a monochrome file, after the basic conversion is complete, is the distribution of light and shadow, since these are all we are left with once the colour has been stripped. Dodging and burning on a local scale is a powerful method of contouring shape and form within the landscape.
In a coloured scene the viewer’s eye is drawn to both areas of strong colour contrast and extremes of brightness. As the latter takes almost total control in a mono shot, with the exception of varying focus, the process of directing attention is simplified at the processing stage.