Why I shot this in black and white and why I edited it this way

I decided I would do something different with this post. Instead of working on a single image or showing how to use this feature or that dialog, I thought I would try to explain a few things, like why I shoot in black and white, and the editing style I use. Most importantly, though, I wanted to look at how to edit a sequence of images so that they form a cohesive whole.

You may recognise the subject. It’s the Barbican in London, a delight for any fan of brutalist architecture like me! It was a hard, bright morning full of dazzling sun and dense shadows, and rather than trying to compress all that contrast into a full range of tones I decided to exaggerate it.

My original RAW files are in color, and there’s nothing I can do with them – in color. For me, they only come to life in black and white. And my editing tool of choice for this project? Capture One. If you want to know why, I’ll explain below.

My editing style

The editing used here is pretty straightforward; it might even seem crude. It starts with a preset from Capture One’s B&W styles pack (I don’t see this on the site any more, sadly) which adds grain and contrast and a yellow filter effect to darken the blue sky. I added a vignette for a little more contrast and drama and then one more thing – a radial gradient mask with increased exposure to add pools of light to the scene exactly where I wanted them.

That was my plan – think ‘dense and luminous’. That’s how the Barbican Estate felt that morning and that’s what I wanted to try to capture.

Here’s a screenshot showing just how quick and basic my masking technique is. It doesn’t matter That this tool creates a simple ellipse – the secret is in how you rotate it, resize it and feather it. More than anything, it’s placing this adjustment in the perfect position to enhance the existing lighting without being too obvious.

Why Capture One?

Good question. Nik Silver Efex is the usual go-to black and white plug-in for many and I’m pretty sure I could have produced almost exactly the same results in Lightroom.

But your editing software is like your camera. It either gels with you or it doesn’t. Much as I admire Lightroom’s organisational capabilities, it doesn’t feel like ‘home’ in the way that Capture One does. Capture One has a particularly clean and clear interface where I can see and assess my images properly. It also has particularly straightforward Copy/Apply buttons so that when I’ve perfected the style for one image I can quickly transfer it to another and make any necessary tweaks image by image while still preserving the basic look.

There’s another reason for using a non-destructive editor like Capture One. In one of my recent posts I worried that I was never ‘finishing’ images and just collecting more and more experiments. I’m still struggling with that. This issue for me is that sometimes I feel I have to evolve and perfect a style slowly. I need to keep going back to check and finesse some detail or other. I would love to be able to make an edit, know it’s right and commit. I’m sure that’s the way to move forward – I’m just not quite there yet.

In my defence I have done something different this time. I haven’t made a bunch of black and white Versions alongside the color originals. This subject on this day only works in black and white, so these are the only Versions I’ve kept.