So – I recently read an article that went pretty in depth on color contrast in Black and White images in Adobe Lightroom.  Well, I don’t own that.  I prefer to just use the tools given to me in Photoshop and Bridge.  These are great tips if you shoot in Raw format especially, but can be applied to any photograph using most softwares.

The big deal of the digital era is that what we do is no longer permanent.  Experimentation is everywhere.  In the days of film photography, once you began the development process, the end result was already decided.  Today, we can mess around, hit undo, redo or just trash the file at no expense besides time.  Black and White photography benefits a great deal from these developments.  In the old days, if you wanted a black and white photo, you had to make that decision before even taking the shot.

Unfortunately, a lot of potential black and white photograph masterpieces go unnoticed because of bad black and white processing.  I want to give a quick tutorial on how to keep contrast in your photo.  I’m choosing to use a shot I took just tonight, that has very little contrast to begin with, but makes for a great black and white, or even color, photo.

Step One – Open Camera Raw

You should see a window like this one:

This is my image in the camera RAW interface through Adobe Bridge

I wanted to show what would happen if you just pulled all of the saturation out of the photo, instead of converting to grayscale, like so;

Saturation Slider set to -100

Sample Image

So – it looks nice, but it could look better.  Click the HSL/Grayscale pane at the top of the slider menu (you’ll see the icon change in this next image);

Step Two – HSL/Grayscale

The real fun comes in playing with these sliders.  Because we photographed in Camera Raw, and your color information is still saved in the image, Adobe is able to allow you to manipulate eight colors.  This doesn’t exactly entail, “Oh, I want to add blue back in” – rather, it gives you the ability to adjust how light or dark you want the particular color to appear in the photograph, thus giving you color contrast.

I went a bit crazy;

And here’s what I got:

The most important part of all of this is to just have fun, and make something pretty.  Have some trial and error.  Not every shot looks good Black and White, and some need little amounts of adjustment.  Here are some samples of other ones I did that I’m particularly proud of.