I’m drawn to extreme contrasts in lighting, which I guess a lot of photographers are. This gets me into trouble, though, because very often a scene will have a wider dynamic range, or brightness range, than the camera can capture.
It’s easy to convert a color image to black and white in any photo editor, Lightroom included, but to get a strong black and white look you often have to do a little more besides. Here’s a look at the B&W mode, B&W panel and the Tone Curve.
What’s wrong with this photo of a boat on a shingle beach? I used a prime lens with a wide maximum aperture to get a shallow depth of field effect for this simple composition and that part has worked well. But the boat is just a little too dark and the sky is a little too bright. This is a common issue in outdoor photography.
What’s especially clever about Lightroom presets is that they don’t just include global adjustments. You can also create presets with masks. These can be either manual masks which you can move around manually, AI masks which adapt to the contents of images they’re applied to, or combinations of both.
I like to using toning effects in black and white photography because they can often give images more depth and mood. So to speed this up, not just for me but for anyone else who works in black and white in Lightroom, I’ve created this set of 16 free Lightroom presets you can download via the link.
A LUT is a very interesting thing. LUT is an acronym for LookUp Table, a conversion profile that, basically, takes a pixel value in the original image and looks up an alternative value in the LUT file. LUTs are used widely in cinematography to recreate a specific and consistent ‘look’, but they’re also appearing more and more in still photography.
Adobe’s October 2023 update adds a new Lightroom Lens Blur panel. It’s flagged as Early Access, so it’s still in development, but you can use it right now and it’s actually rather impressive!
LIghtroom has many limitations and restrictions. I’m talking about the web-based Lightroom here, not Lightroom Classic. But at the same time, Lightroom has some clever features that use Adobe’s Sensei AI technologies. One of these its AI-powered preset suggestions.
These Control Lines can already be found in DxO PhotoLab 6, but they are new to the Nik Collection 6. Control Lines are a special kind of selective masking tool. They work like a linear gradient tool, but with an eyedropper which can be moved around to select the tones or areas you want the mask to be applied to.
This under-the-pier shot is a classic composition in black and white – you’ve probably seen a lot like it already – but the color original looks very ordinary indeed. So here’s a step-by-step guide to how I transformed it into a powerful graphic image in Lightroom.