More Black & White Adventures

Photo editing software makes converting a photograph from color to black and white a rather enjoyable and adventurous exercise.  The software gives you the chance to make more than one black and white image in the same way you can change the look of the color photograph. Here's the photograph on which I'll be working this time.

 

This is the Bollinger dry dock on the West Bank of the Mississippi river seen from the Algiers Ferry just after sunset.

Call me crazy (as so many people do) but I like this photograph. I like the reflections on the water and the perspective (there's that word again) created by the Crescent City Connection and the Riverwalk just visible on the East Bank.

Since I shoot RAW files for my fine art photography I had the option of creating my black and white version of this in Adobe's Camera RAW editor or in Photoshop CS4. I also could use Adobe's Lightroom which has the same RAW processor as the Camera RAW editor. I chose Photoshop CS4 because I'm more comfortable doing most of my work there even though I do a lot of editing in Lightroom and ACR. It really depends on the status of the photograph. If I'm just importing the file from the camera I'll do so with Lightroom and make my initial adjustments there. If I'm revisiting a photograph to try something different I'll probably make my adjustments in ACR and/or Photoshop.

Wherever you decide to make your black and white adjustments you'll be given the option of changing the intensity of the basic colors that were in the color photograph. Those colors will show up as shades of gray but you'll be changing them as individual colors. That gives you a world of possibilities. Here's my favorite version of the photograph of the dry dock.

Using the Photoshop version of the black and white converter I was able to darken the sky and brighten some of the lights on the equipment. I was even able to darken some of the reflections on the river and increase some of the lights on the bridge and the Riverwalk.

Here's the black and white version of the photograph with the black and white conversion dialogue and its color sliders.

Look at the blue slider. You'll see that it's set at -44 to darken the sky.  The -61 setting on the magenta slider darkened some of the reflections on the river. I like this look but...

just for grins here's the black and white conversion with the blues increased.

Everything you do in Photoshop is non-destructive but it's even nicer if you do these things as an adjustment layer so it's easier to revisit the adjustment and try new things.

The same is true for Photoshop Elements. The difference is the reduced number of sliders in the black and white conversion dialogue box.

In this image from lynda.com, my favorite learning site, you can see that the Elements conversion offers you several presets which you can then tweak with the sliders on the right.