A black and white conversion

In this post I would like to show you how I did the black and white conversion for the above photo.

Atmosphere

I took the photo when I sat down at this spot, next to a man with his dog. It was a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon. Two boys were fishing a bit more to the right just outside of the frame. I also took a picture of them just moments before I took this one. I noticed the two women sitting more to the left and the one girl lying down, resting her head against the woman next to her. Everyone was so absorbed with their phone. It is not that I want to make a statement about that with this image. It just struck me because there was so much to see and enjoy, but still we need a screen to look at. I love my phone too, trust me, I’m guilty… but… I love my camera more and that’s when my eyes are open and I am aware of my surroundings. Hallelujah! haha. Ok, let's get back down to earth.

Tech

Some technical details about this image, not that it really matters, but still, here they are:

iso 160
1/900 s
f/5.6
23 mm (fujifilm X100V)

The Goal

What I mostly love about black and white images is tonality. Lots of different shades of gray give depth to an image. You also need pure white and pure deep blacks somewhere in the image to make it pop. Ansel Adams “invented” the Zone System. It was all about optimal film exposure and film development to get the most tonality out of black and white negatives printed onto photographic paper. The zone contains 11 steps from 0, pure black, to 10, pure white, and all the shades in between. Analog or digital, it’s all about tonality.

RAW development

On the left in the above image you can see how I developed the raw file in color. I tried to bring in as much as detail as possible, in the sky, in the highlights, and also in the shadows. The color image looks pretty flat this way and also a bit too saturated. I would never edit it this way if I wanted the color image to be the end result. This edit is just to give me as much tonality as I need when I do the conversion to black and white in Silver Efex Pro and Photoshop. The saturated colors can help me control the tonality because in Silver Efex Pro you can adjust the sensitivity of the “film” to certain colours. Making them darker or lighter.

Grayscale, nothing but gray

Sure you could also go into photoshop and choose, Image, Mode, Grayscale, and there's your black and white image…. but…it would make me very sad and I would cry for days on end. Not helping the image at all! 😭😝 After all, black and white is so much more than removing color from an image, right? See the differences below:

Analysing

Ok so now what. Lets see, this image can be divided into three parts very easily. The sky, being the top part of the image, the people, being the middle part, and the foreground leading up to the subjects. Like this:

The reason for dividing this image into three parts is the following: I want the middle part to stand out from the rest. I want to darken the foreground so your eyes are pulled in to where the people are. For the sky, I just need that to look great in tonality with the clouds and all.

Silver Efex Pro

The next step was taking the color image into Silver Efex Pro. I use Silver Efex Pro as a plugin from photoshop but you can also use it as a stand-alone application. Results are the same. As you can see in the above screenshot, Silver Efex Pro also knows about the Zone System. See the green rectangle top right? You can hover your mouse over the eleven little black, gray and white squares and it will show the corresponding zone in the image. You can also click the squares / zones and keep one, or more, visible in the image. Very nice and helpful.

Presets

I have created about 48 presets in Silver Efex Pro. These are just different settings used for one of my images I processed earlier. If I liked the result I saved it as a preset. To make it easier for myself I have numbered them from 0000 to 0048. Preset nr 0000 is just all settings set to zero, or neutral, as in the above screenshot. The only thing it has baked in is the small black image-border and the kodak Tri-X film grain which I like. The other 47 presets are all totally different, settings wise. The only thing all presets have in common is the small black image-border and the same Tri-X film grain. Now you might ask: Why is that? I’ll explain later.

Walking through all the presets I can see many different things happening in the image. It sometimes happens that one preset is already great and maybe I only do a little tweaking and done! Sometimes I’ll start with preset 0000 and adjust everything from scratch. Very often though, and also the case with this image, I walk through the presets and look for certain parts that I like.

Remember the parts I divided the image in? Top, middle and bottom in this case, that’s what I looked for, walking through my presets for this image: to see what preset I liked for which part. If I find a preset that gives me a great sky, I maybe tweak it a little and then apply it. It is saved as a layer in photoshop. That’s also how I treat the middle and bottom part of the image. In this case that is. Every image is different but this one was an easy and great example for this way of working.

Photoshop

Now we have three layers for the three parts. One layer for the middle, most important part: the people. One layer for the foreground, darker than the middle one, and one layer for the sky. All made with different presets.

In the above screenshot you can see the layers in photoshop. The bottom layer is the export of the coloured RAW file from Capture One Pro. On top of that there’s a folder called “middle part” in which you can see the export from Silver Efex Pro. In this case preset 0034 which I liked for the middle part.

Next I exported preset number 0029 and used it for the foreground. As you can see the folder “foreground” has a layer-mask only showing the bottom, now darker part, of the image, the white part of the mask.

For the sky I exported preset 0019 because it made the sky look great in my opinion. I placed that in the folder “sky” and masked it so only the sky will show: the white part of the mask. The top layer called “D”, which stands for “Dark” in my world, is a layer in which I’ve brushed a little bit of black paint to darken the left side of the image a little bit more. A little more vignetting so to say. This layer is set to multiply so it will not interfere with the texture of the grain but only darken the pixels a bit. And that’s the final image / edit.

Border and Tri-X film grain

Now it becomes clear why all my presets have the same border and the same Tri-X film grain. I do this so I can brush in certain parts in photoshop without changing the grain of the image. You can’t see where one part stops and the other one begins. Same with the border. That’s the reason.

Is this the best edit ever? No of course not. It is all a matter of taste and very subjective. I just like the way it looks now.

This is one pretty simple example of an image that lends itself for this way of working. As I said earlier, every image is different and asks for a different treatment.

Hope you enjoyed this little insight. Thanks for reading!