Contents

Acknowledgments
Where to find your files
How to read this book
Lesson 1 - The New York Subway
Do the Basic Retouching of the Photo in Camera Raw
Retouching the Photo in Photoshop
Lesson 2 - Ghetto Chic in HDR Black & White
Process the Photos in Adobe Camera Raw
Make the Photo a Black and White in Photoshop
Lesson 3 - Digital Blending with a Parisian Bridge
Creating an HDR Photo in Adobe Camera Raw
Processing the Photos in Adobe Camera Raw
Blend the Images for a Nice Black and White in Photoshop
Create Your Black and White in Photoshop
Lesson 4 - Creating a Hazy Black & White in Paris
Creating a Good Looking Black & White in Adobe Camera Raw
Stylize the Black and White in Photoshop
Lesson 5 - Long Exposure Black & White
Retouch the Photo in Adobe Camera Raw
Making the Black and White in Photoshop
Lesson 6 - Salvaging Blue Skies in Black & White
Retouching a Black and White Photo Entirely in Adobe Camera Raw
Lesson 7 - Creating Depth with Haze in Black & White
Process the Photo in Adobe Camera Raw
Dodging and Burning the Image in Photoshop
Lesson 8 - Sky Replacement in Black & White
Process the Photo in Adobe Camera Raw
Add the Sky in Photoshop
Dodge and Burn the Image to Create Drama
Acknowledgments
Every photographer’s journey to success is a different one. Yours will not be the same as
mine just as mine was not the same as many photographers that I look up to and who
inspire me. But one thing all our journeys have in common is that there are always people
who help us, who inspire us and who never let us give up. Rather, they insist we do better
and stick to it. I am grateful to the many friends, associates, editors and fellow
photographers who have helped me become the photographer I am today.
First and foremost I want to thank you, the reader and the many, many, aspiring
photographers who watch my lessons on the internet and use my courses. It is my greatest
hope that I can help you achieve your goals as a photographer and I thank you so much for
your support and your interaction which not only makes me a better photographer, but a
better teacher. Thank you to my many friends and supporters, without whom, none of this
would be possible.
I must especially thank my friends and staff who work tirelessly to help me in my mission
to teach photographers the skills for success everywhere. Kelvin, Christian, Bowie, Jim
and Amelie, I am extremely grateful for your hard work and friendship. I also want to
thank Dare for helping me write and edit this book, merci mon ami!
To my editors and publishers at Yellow Korner, I thank you for all that you do in seeing to
it that my photographs are reproduced at the highest quality and reach the broadest
possible audience. Your assistance, partnership and friendship are always a blessing in my
life.
To my mentor Scott Kelby, I thank you for your guidance, kindness and sharing so freely
the techniques which have helped me to become the photographer I am today.
And to my wife and children who always have been and will always be the inspiration of
my life. I love you and thank you for being there every step of the way with me. Through
the rough times you stood by my side and urged me to pursue my dream despite all odds,
and through the good times you never let me become complacent and pushed me to do
better. I love you now and always.
Serge Ramelli
Paris, March 2016
Where to find your files
Have you ever bought a book that had files that came with it and the only place you could
find where it said the files were was at the back in some obscure section of the appendix
and you were like “Why do zey do zat!!!!!!” Well maybe not with a French accent, but
still!
I’ve included dozens of RAW photo files for you to work with while learning the black
and white techniques I teach in this course as you go through this book. Each Chapter is a
Lesson which focuses on retouching specific photos, so please do take the time to
download the files and follow along with the lesson in Photoshop on your computer.
Very simply, use your PhotoSerge account (and if you don’t have one it takes 30 seconds
to sign up), and then you can download them from:
http://www.photoserge.com/ebooks

You can download them by project or as an entire package that covers the whole course.
There you go! Big, bold, easy to find, voila!!!
How to read this book
Bonjour Madams and Monsieurs and welcome to this new course on the Art of Black and
White with Photoshop. I've had many requests to supplement my video based training that
you can find on my website with an e-book format for easy download and step by step
follow along. So for those who requested it: here you are! I hope this meets your needs
and for anyone who would like video based follow alongs, these can be found on my
website.
As you may or may not know I did a fine art photography book on New York recently and
just prior to this I did one on Paris.
In this course, I am going to show you some of my best photos from Paris and New York
and different techniques you can use in Photoshop to create stunning black and white
photographs because you can do a lot in Photoshop to bring your photographs to the next
level.
If you've gotten any of my other training, you'll know that everything I teach is lesson
based. I don't recommend reading the book from cover to cover, but rather follow along
with the files I've provided to do each of the actions described in these lessons. They will
not only help you learn the individual actions required to transform your photos, but by
actually doing the steps you can avoid some of the frustration and boredom that comes
from just reading about technical subjects.
Also, while you can follow along step by step with what we are doing, if you don't have a
basic familiarity with Photoshop or Adobe Camera Raw, I highly suggest checking out
some of my free tutorials on basic retouching with Photoshop or get a hold of the
Photoshop for Photographers book or video course on www.photoserge.com. It will help
you understand some of the underlying theory and tools behind what we are doing. Also, I
use a Mac in my work, but the differences between Mac and PC in terms of workflow are
zero. You'll probably just have to press Ctrl instead of Cmd for some of the keyboard
shortcuts I use.
Ok? Turn the page and let's dive straight into it!
Lesson 1 - The New York Subway

We are going to start with a simple lesson to help get you up to speed and ensure you are
familiar with the tools we are going to be using.
In your source files for the course you should have a photo file of the building you see
above. Either right click on the image and choose to open it in Photoshop or simply drag
and drop this photo onto the Photoshop shortcut in your dock or on your desktop to open
it.
If Photoshop is already open and you drag it onto the icon in your dock, Photoshop should
just pop up on your screen.
Do the Basic Retouching of the Photo in Camera Raw
Now you might be surprised to see that Adobe Camera Raw also opens up. That's because
this is a RAW image. For those of you who don't know, .arw is the Sony proprietary RAW
image format. You cannot start working on a RAW image in Photoshop until you tell
Camera Raw how to process the image.

So this is a RAW image that I shot using my Sony A7R of a subway in New York. If you
look just under the histogram in the upper right hand corner you can see the embedded
camera data (also called metadata or EXIF data) which shows how I shot this. You will see
that it was shot at f/22, with a 13 second shutter speed and with the ISO at 50.

Having the Sony A7R gave me the option to shoot at ISO 50 which allowed me to take the
photos with the lowest noise possible and also avoid using ND filters which can often
have an intense color cast (which is why I try to avoid using them). There are more
expensive filters which minimize this, and for black and white it's really not that big a
deal. Still I try to avoid using them when I can.
Now the story behind this photo was that there was heavily clouded skies so it was very
dark in New York. I had seen the subway earlier during my trip, but hadn't liked the
lighting and I was out of time and packing to leave for the airport. It started raining
outside and I remembered this subway and thought “My god that subway's water
reflection could be cool.” So I went back there and it did indeed look very cool. There
were still people walking around so I set my camera for a 13 second exposure because at
that length they basically become invisible and I ended up getting a pretty cool shot.
I love this sort of subway and knew that I wanted to give it a very gritty sort of
Batman/Gotham/black and white look which I really like. So let's do that now.
My work flow when I do this in Photoshop is to start in Camera Raw and do some basic
retouching.
1. Open up the Shadows
In the Basic Panel go ahead and open up the Shadows to +63.
2. Open up the Highlights
Next go ahead and bring down your Highlights to reveal some more details there,
somewhere around -63.

3. Adjust the Black Point

Next we are going to set our black point. And this is simply where we push the darkest
parts of the image until they are completely black with no other image information in
them. (For more info on black points, white points and basic retouching check out the free
tutorials on my blog). To set your black point, hold down the Alt key and move the
Blacks slider to the left, but make sure that you don't push it too far, maybe around -18.

I like to have some 100% dark but not everywhere, you'll just see some areas of different
color in the otherwise white background.
4. Adjust the White Point
Next we need to set our white point. And this is simply pushing the lightest part of our
image until they are fully white with no other information. And here I don't like to push as
hard as I do on the blacks because I don't like to burn anything in the image.
As an example, hold down the Alt key and push the Whites slider to +72. This would be
way too much.
We want something closer to maybe -3.

Okay, so that's good.

5. Add Clarity
Clarity is the next slider in the panel and it is going to sharpen the edges of all the objects
in your image, or soften them if you push it into negative values. Now I really don't like to
have Clarity applied using the slider when there are clouds in the sky. But there are no
clouds in the sky really so go ahead and push the Clarity up to +33.
6. Enable Lens Corrections
The fifth tab over is the Lens Corrections Tab which is where you get lens aberrations and
distortions cleaned up to have a cleaner image.

First up, select Enable Lens Corrections.

This option is going to detect what camera and lens the photo was taken with and apply
any known corrections to fix distortion or other problems.
7. Fix Your Verticals
Now go to the sub-tab called Manual. Now this next step is really, really hard. So take a
deep breath and prepare yourself. I want you to click on the Automatic Upright button.
Whew! Tough right?

And look! It made all the buildings nicely vertical! This is hugely important when you do
photos with architecture. Make everything very, very, very straight. That is very important.
8. Clean up Spots
Look up at the top of image and there is a spot in the sky. Let's get rid of it. Choose the
Spot Removal Tool by selecting the icon at the top or pressing the keyboard shortcut (B).
We can do this now or we can do it later on in Photoshop. Since we are here in Adobe
Camera Raw let's just click on those two spots to remove them.

9. Apply Noise Reduction

Now we are going to get rid of the noise in the image. Go to the Detail Panel, it's the third
tab over in your panels area. Then go ahead and zoom in at 100% and have a look at the
sky. There really isn't that much noise.
Go ahead and set your Sharpening slider to 84 and you will see that more noise comes
back into the sky. If you go ahead and move the Noise Reduction Luminance slider to 16
it will take care of that.

The formula I use in noise reduction is that between Sharpening and Luminance the two
numbers equal 100. So in this case where I had a photo with little noise, I usually set
Sharpening to 85 and then Luminance to around 15. 85+15 = 100.
Simple. If you did 50 Sharpening then you would have 50 Luminance. It's a good rule of
thumb but always ensure to look and make sure it makes a good image!
10. Set the Workflow Options
As you can see, it's also a pretty interesting color photograph which you could play around
with using White Balance settings.

But I think it can be even more interesting in black and white. What we need to do now is
click on the little blue link at the bottom of the interface.

This is going to open a window of what we call the Workflow options.

Basically when you are in Camera Raw you are in the world of RAW files meaning you
have a lot of things you can do with it, change the white balance, do noise reduction and
things like this and it is all done non-destructively inside the interface. When you go to
Photoshop you have to decide which color space this photo is going to be so that
Photoshop understands how to interpret and show the image.
I like to work in ProPhoto RGB because that is what Lightroom works with.

Now here we could re-size it if we wanted. If you want to make a big print it is a good
idea to re-size it. You can easily change the width and the height dimension. You have
quite a few different options here such as percentage, pixels, etc. You can re-size it many
different ways, but we are not going to do that now.
Assign a ProPhoto RGB color space and 8 bits per channel which is enough because we
are going to go black and white and Open in Photoshop as Smart Object. Normally if it
was a color photo I'd choose at least 16 bits per channel.
I'll explain more on this in a second. Go ahead and click Open Object at the bottom of the
interface and let's get into Photoshop.

Retouching the Photo in Photoshop

11. Open the Layers Panel
By default you should have the Layers panel open in Photoshop and you should now see
your image full screen at the center of the interface and the thumbnail of it in the Layers
panel.
The reason I set it as Smart Object is that if I want to change my mind on something, I
can easily click on the little icon in the layer and it will take me back to Camera Raw so I
can make changes.

Just to show you how this works, go ahead and double click on it, go back into Camera
Raw and then bump the Shadows to +100 and the Contrast to -23.

I like to start with a pretty low contrast in Camera Raw and do as much as I can in Camera
Raw, we could even handle the black and white conversion inside Camera Raw, but more
on that later.
12. Convert to Black and White
Now we have to tell Photoshop how we want to convert color values over into grayscale
values. So at the bottom of the Layer panel, go ahead and click on the new Adjustment
Layer/Fill Layer icon and choose Black and White from the drop down menu.

This is going to do the basic conversion and open up the Properties panel which shows
you all of your basic colors including Reds, Greens, Blues, Cyans, Yellows, Magentas.

If you start to play around with the sliders here you will get a feel for what they do. As an
example push the Reds slider to the right at around 180 and you will see that all the areas
where there is red the image will get brighter.

And that is a nice conversion of how that area of the image looks in black and white. If
you slide it to the left it will get darker which I think isn't as nice. Go ahead and move
each of these sliders to find a combination that you like for your taste.
Two cautions. If the slider doesn't really do anything to the image, like there are no major
changes, just leave it untouched. And secondly, don't push these sliders too hard as you
will get weird artifacts. For example push the reds and the yellows to the max and you'll
see the image starting to break up inside the bright areas of the subway building.
I'm recommending to lower your blues and magentas so that we can take everything that is
cold and make it darker and everything that is warm and made it brighter to give me some
initial excellent contrast in the conversion from color to black and white. Here is where I
put things. Reds: 134. Yellows: 140. Greens: 83. Cyans: 37. Blues: -12. Magentas: -16.

13. Create a Second Copy of the Image Layer

Now we have a basic black and white. But let's try something here. Let's make our white
areas more glowing and to do this I want you to right click on the image layer and from
the drop down please select New Smart Object via Copy.
This is going to create a copy of our original image layer and I want you to double click
on this and open it in Camera Raw.
14. Create a Glowy look on the New Layer
Now back inside Camera Raw I want you to take the Clarity slider and push it all the way
down to 0.

Now go ahead and push the Exposure slider to around +0.46.

Press OK and go back to Photoshop. As you will see the initial black and white is very
glowy. It's nice but it's not nice to have everywhere.

15. Create a Gaussian Blur on the New Layer

So let's deal with this. Go ahead and right click on the new layer and choose Rasterize.

Now go up to the Filter menu and choose Filter>Blur> Gaussian Blur.

So the Blur settings pop-up is going to show up and go ahead and set it to 21.9 pixels and
you will see we really have a glowy blurred image now.

16. Experiment with Blend Modes and Get the Right Amount of Glow
Now we've got a very blurry layer so let's play around with the blend modes to find an
interesting mix. Access these by clicking where it says Normal near the top of the Layers
panel and you will get a drop down.
Just click through these to see the different looks you get. Here are a couple but really you
should click through them all to see how it affects the image.
Overlay:

Screen:
Lighten:

Lighten could be interesting. Let's work with that. Lighten is going to give it some glow
but it is way too much.
Go ahead and lower the Layer Opacity down to 43%
17. Paint a Mask on the Layer to Reveal Glow in the Window Areas.
Then go ahead and hold down the Alt key and click on the Mask icon at the bottom of the
Layers panel.

That is going to create a mask, which is black. Now when you have a mask which is black
anything that you did on that layer, which is the whole glowing part, disappears.
Go ahead and choose the brush tool (B) and put it to around 50% Opacity and Flow is at
100%. Make sure that the hardness is at zero and that it is a decent size.
When you paint with a brush that is white, anything which is painted is going to reveal the
layer underneath. And here we just want to paint over the bright window areas to reveal
some of the glow and make it like if there was a smoke machine or something. Just find
the bright windows in the subway area and also the building on the right and paint over
them lightly ensuring you adjust your brush size so that it only covers the window areas
and not a bunch of other parts of the image.

18. Add Contrast to the Image Using Dodge and Burn

Now we need to add some contrast but we want to do is add the contrast locally. There are
many ways of doing that, but for now what we are going to do is create a new empty
Layer that we are going to call Blacks. So click on the New Layer icon at the bottom,
name the layer and set its blending mode to Overlay.
So we've basically got a black layer. There are many ways of doing this, and the technique
is called dodge and burn which is how I like to do it. We are going to take a black brush
and make the sure the Opacity is around like 15%.
We are going to start painting with a very low opacity so it doesn't become comical. And
we to create contrast so take this angled building in the back and just start painting over it
to make it pretty dark, without touching the buildings behind it so that we keep a good
contrast between them.

The trick to making great black and white is to artistically select what you want to make
darker so that we have a striking image because we are making complex lighting. It isn't
just poured on, it's put in specific areas to break up the image.
This is what I sometimes call “breaking gradients” or “complexifying the light” and key in
this is doing it subtly enough so that people don't notice you are doing it. If they can tell,
you've done too much.
Okay, let me show you the before and after.
Here is before the black was painted on:
Here is after the black was painted on:

Now we are going to do the opposite. Create another new layer and call this Whites. And
also set the layer to Overlay blending mode. Now we want to swap the brush color from
black to white, so hit the keyboard shortcut (X).
And now let's start painting over our white areas bringing them up a little. Paint over the
windows and the exterior lights of the subway building ensuring that your brush doesn't
spill out past the sides and then paint the streaks in the water reflections as well to help
make them pop.
Then go ahead and add some white to the lighter buildings in the background as well as
the sky. Remember you are painting and being an artist, there is no formula for this. But
here is how I have done it:

Right now we are keeping it simple because we are only using two layers, one for the
whites and one for the blacks.
The photo starts to be interesting because we are adding contrast, but we are doing it very
locally. For the background buildings I wanted to add white to help make them look
further away. However you end up painting it, just make sure you don't see any brush
strokes. That is very important.
If you feel it is too much you can just lower the Layer Opacity so it blends better, maybe
to 79%.
So you have two layers. One with Whites and one with Blacks. That is one reason I love
to do my black and whites in Photoshop because you can really work the image adding
layer by layer of complexity as well as adding that trick on the glow. Things which you
can't really do the same in Lightroom.
19. Add a Vignette
I want to add one last vignette to this image. To do this I want you to use a keyboard
shortcut that requires 4 fingers. A 4 finger shortcut madames and monsieurs. Press
Command + Alt + Shift + E. On a Windows machine that requires Ctrl instead of Cmd.
That is going to create a layer that combines everything we have done thus far.

Now we are going to put the Blending mode onto Multiply and the photo is going to turn
super dark.
Sometimes what I like to do, I like to just take the rectangular marking tool (M) and make
a big rectangle as a selection and set the feather so that it is very smooth, for this photo
probably around 500 pixels.

Now we've got a very smooth selection, and go ahead and press delete and ta-da!
You've got a good looking vignette. It is a little strong in some areas like on the right of
the image where it was already very dark. So go ahead and add a mask to the layer and
select your brush tool (B), ensure that you have black as your foreground color because
we want to erase parts of the image and put your Brush Opacity at 50% and lightly paint
over the areas that are too dark.

If you look at my layer mask you can get a feel for where it is being painted out.
As you can see we've helped close the photo and direct the viewers eye more to the center
of the frame.
It's not a bad result, but still we can do some other things. Again using the Command +
Alt + Shift + E shortcut to create a layer we can do some final corrections on.
20. Do Final Corrections on the Photo
At the top of the sky there is another small spot which you may or may not have gotten
when you were in Camera Raw. If not simply select Photoshop's Spot Healing Brush
Tool or choose the shortcut (J).

Once selected, paint over any spots needed. It's much faster than Lightroom.
Now let's put some more contrast into this by adding a curve adjustment layer to the
image. Go ahead and then click on the icon for New Adjustment/Fill Layer at the bottom
of the Layers panel and choose Curves. When that panel opens up go ahead and set it to
Linear.

You can try out the different settings, but I find Linear to be the best for this image. But
it's still a little bit too dark. So usually what I do at the end is add two curves. The first one
darkens it and the second one brightens it.
So create another Curves layer and instead of grabbing a preset, go ahead and click and
drag up in the middle so that your values are around Input 130 and Output 146.

Now we've got two curves and here is a good little trick for rapid previews. In the Layers
panel select both curves and drag and drop them onto the little folder icon which creates a
Group that you can name Curves. Now you can quickly turn it on and off to see before
and afters.
Here is the before the curves:

And here is the after the curves:

And then one final thing I do is zoom out and look at the photo in a big size and a small
size as part of judging whether I like it or if something jumps out at me that I need to fix:
I like it! Voila! I hope you have also gotten a result that you are happy with on the photo
you are working with. Save the photo and let's move on! We've completed our first photo
in Photoshop!
Lesson 2 - Ghetto Chic in HDR Black &
White

All right so in our next example we are going to do what I call HDR black and white. If
you don't know what HDR is you should look over my free tutorials for more info on it or
pick up one of my courses on it. But in summary, HDR combines exposures from multiple
images to create one image with greater dynamic range than what is possible from a single
image.

Process the Photos in Adobe Camera Raw

Once again go to the folder where you put the downloaded photos from this course. For
this lesson there are three images of an abandoned building in Paris that is covered in
graffiti. Go ahead and drag these photos onto your Photoshop shortcut or icon and once
again it will open them in Adobe Camera Raw.
The technique I am going to show you only works in Camera Raw version 9 and above, so
if you don't have that version, go ahead and upgrade your Photoshop. If you don't have
that, and aren't interested in upgrading, then you can still follow along and in the
upcoming chapters you'll see there are other ways to work around this.
Alright, this is an example utilizing the new option of HDR that you have in Photoshop
that I really like. It is kind of hidden in Camera Raw so you need to know where it is. As
you can see on the left side of the screen we have our three photos.
The image above is the normal exposure.
This is the underexposed photo:
And this is the overexposed photo:

1. Create an HDR RAW file

The idea is that we want to create a super RAW file that is going to take into account all of
this information from the three images and combine it into one. For this go to the Film
Strip and click on the menu in the upper right and choose Select All from the drop down.
When Select All is active, you can choose the menu again and select the option Merge to
HDR.

That is going to open a new window with some options.

We don't need Auto Tone or Deghosting. In case you don't know, Deghosting just helps
clean up differences from objects that have moved between multiple exposures. Anyways,
go ahead and save the image to a folder or your desktop.

Now we have a single image which is an HDR RAW file and we are going to use that for
our base of black and white. It is a little trick but it is always good because you see the sky
is pretty blown out and we want to make a very dramatic scene. The photo itself is
interesting, I was taking my driver's license test for motorbikes and they brought me to
this place which is a couple of miles away from Paris and it looked like a Mad Max scene
to me so I came back to take some photos later on because I was really impressed by the
mood of the place. Now it's being converted into a hotel so I was really happy to get that
shot before they built the new building.
2. Do the Basic Panel Retouching
So let's bring in some real drama here. Let's start by bringing down the Highlights to -100
so we can get the details of the crazy sky.

Now open up the Shadows to +100 so we see what is going on in the shadows.

Next we need to set the Black point. Hold down the Alt key when you push the Blacks
slider to make sure you do a good black point. Somewhere around -51 is good. Remember
on the Black point you want to crush your blacks a little bit. Meaning not just one or two
pixels of pure black, but maybe two or three percent of the image should be pure black. It
helps create good contrast.

Then setting the White point is the opposite. For White we want very little, just a few
dots in the white. Remember again to hold down the Alt key when you push the Whites
slider, somewhere around +43 should work fine.
Go ahead and push the Clarity slider to +22 on this just to crispen the edges a little bit.
That's the basic retouching of the image.
2. Use Gradient Filters to Add Drama
Whenever you are working with RAW images in Photoshop, I recommend that you first
do as much retouching as you can inside of Camera Raw.
Now in our last image we had a blown out sky, very white, but for this one, we really want
to amp up the drama that is there. So go ahead and select the Graduated Filter tool
(keyboard shortcut: G) which is in the top toolbar and drag it so it covers to about the
middle of the screen like so:

Now the panel on the right has all the adjustments we can make to the Grad. Go ahead and
lower the Exposure to around -0.65.
With Graduated Filters (often referred to as Grads for short), the values you select in the
panel on the right are going to be applied at 100% to the green dot and then from the green
dot down to the red dot at the bottom they fade from 100% to 0%.
Go ahead and push the Exposure down to -0.90 and adjust the Grad so it is at an angle
like this:

You can adjust how you like but basically we want to get a crazy dramatic sky.
Now as you can see, the building on the right is becoming a bit too black. Fortunately
there is a new option in Camera Raw which I really like. If you look at the Grad Filter
options panel, at the top of it there is a little selection called Brush.

And this will reveal two brush icons, one with a + sign and one with a - sign. We can now
use this - Brush to minus out what the Grad Filter is doing. Go ahead and use the - Brush
to paint over the buildings on the left to take out the darkness the filter put on so that it is
only affecting the sky.

Now have a look at the bottom right of the Camera Raw interface, you will see some small
icons so that you can click to see Before and Afters very easily:
So go ahead and click on it and you will now be able to see the image before you applied
the retouching.

You can see how the sky is really being brought down and not anything else. Okay. That is
kind of cool.
3. Apply Lens Corrections to Fix Distortions
Alright. Now go ahead and click on the Hand tool in the toolbar to bring back the Basic
panel. Now go to the sixth panel over and select the Lens Corrections panel.
For this, just click on Auto to make the whole photo straight.

4. Apply Noise Reduction

The other thing you want to do while you are working in Camera Raw is you want to take
care of any image noise and to do that go to the third panel over called Noise Reduction.
Now go to the bottom left and select 100% zoom and go to your sky, and see if there is
any noise.
Now if you look at the noise, you will see that there is not much noise because I probably
shot this at 100 ISO. This means we will only need about 85 in Sharpening and 15 in
Luminance similar to the first photo.

Now we are going to do something that we didn't do on the first image which is apply
Masking. Masking ensures that Sharpening is only being applied to edges. Go ahead and
hold down the Alt key and push the Masking slider to around 50.
Anything which is black is not going to get sharpened, so usually a value of 50% works
fine. Now the sharpening is really only being applied to the building and then you get a
really nice sharp photo which I really want to go for because I am going to go for a crazy,
crazy, I mean crazy, pretty dramatic photo. Yes, the photo is already pretty dramatic but I
am going to go for a very dramatic black and white.
5. Apply Workflow Settings and Open in Photoshop

Okay, and this time we are not going to open it as a smart object because what we have
done in Camera Raw looks good enough. So click on your workflow settings at the bottom
of the interface and take off Open in Photoshop as a Smart Object and your option back
in the interface becomes Open Image. Click on that to hop over to Photoshop.

Make the Photo a Black and White in Photoshop

Now we have our image in Photoshop. And we are going to do the same thing we did in
the last image of converting this to Black and White.
6. Convert the Image to Black and White
Go ahead and choose the Adjustment Layers drop down for Black and White.
Next up you need to set the color conversion values like we did in the first image. Go
ahead and play around with these as you like to get an image you want to work with, just
remember not to go too far in either direction so that you don't get artifacting. When I did
it I set my values as follows.
Reds: 32. Yellows: 3. Greens: 22. Cyans: -14. Blues: -16. Magentas: 121.

Those are our basic black and white properties.

7. Using Dodge and Burn Techniques, Paint in your Blacks
Now we are ready for some real drama.
Create a New Layer that you can call Blacks and set the Blend Mode to Overlay.
You can always experiment with different Blending Modes but I like Overlay for this
technique.
Next, select the brush tool and put your Brush Opacity at around 15% and make sure you
have a large brush. Tip: Holding down Ctrl + Alt and moving your mouse up or down
allows you to rapidly adjust brush size.

Now I want you to make the top of the sky a little bit darker to start with. And then do it at
the bottom of the photo as well and then paint the buildings on the left and right of the
frame darker as well. Every stroke you are going to make is going to make that part of the
image a little darker. You should have something like this:

And just so you can see the comparison here is the before image:

It's already getting more dramatic because you are adding this local contrast. And I usually
like to close my photo which is why I add some blacks on top and bottom to help close the
photo. Remember that what we are trying to do is to break the gradient and make uneven
spots with different light on the photo. We don't want the walls or other broad areas to be
evenly lit.
8. Using Dodge and Burn Techniques, Paint in your Whites
Now let's enhance this with some white. Create a New Layer and name it White.

Now press X ensuring that white is your foreground color. Keep your Brush Opacity at
15 but make your brush a bit smaller and paint some patches of white on the sky, both near
the bottom of the sky and near the top of it so it isn't uniform.

Now on the building on the right, go ahead and paint over the 4th floor to make that
appear brighter than the rest to break the gradient, meaning we are making part of this wall
brighter than the rest.
Now as a caution, don't set your brush very high. Even at 50% your strokes will catch the
eye much easier. Let me show you, I'm going to put the brush opacity at 50% and brush
the wall on the left and a little bit of the building farther away on the right.

It may not be super visible in the e book, but if you are following along in Photoshop, try
it and you will see right away. So keep it at 15 or 19 percent. We don't want somebody to
come say, “Oh there is a light here.”
Now go ahead and paint over the areas of the road and walls near the center of the photo a
bit with the white because we want the eyes of the viewer to go to the center part of the
photo.

This is looking good. And as a note to e book readers, remember key here is to understand
the principle of what I am doing. This isn't intended to be a paint by numbers approach,
but rather a guide to show you the artistic techniques I use. So don't worry if your photo
doesn't come out exactly like mine. If at the end of this you thoroughly understand how to
break up the light in your images by using the dodge and burn techniques I am showing
you, I consider that a success because no two photos retouched by different people should
or would be the same anyways.
Alright, let's go ahead and look at it small by zooming out.
So that is kind of cool already. Plus it was in HDR to start with so we have a lot of detail
everywhere to help create a powerful photo. But looking at it small I can see that it is still
definitely lacking contrast.
9. Create a Vignette
So on this one, let's try my technique of adding contrast through the vignette effect using a
layer set to Multiply. Go ahead and press Cmd + Alt + Shift + E which will flatten all the
layers and make one new layer at the top of the stack.

Now go ahead and set that new layer's Blending Mode to Multiply and the image is
going to become super dark.

Next, go ahead and select your Rectangular Marque tool and make one big rectangle at
the center of the image leaving about 15% of the edges.

Now go ahead and from the drop downs at the top choose: Select> Modify> Feather.
And then set the Feather Radius to 500 pixels.

And then hit delete.

Check it out. Pretty crazy. It creates a heavy, heavy vignette effect. I actually like it. It's a
bit too much so let's go ahead and lower the Layer Opacity to around 65%.

I like the vignette effect. I think it brings power to the photo.

10. Add the Two Curves to Finish Up the Photo
So just like we did in the first photo we are going to create the double curves here to
punch up the photo. Go to the Layers panel and at the bottom create a new Adjustment
Layer of Curves.
With that Curves layer selected, go ahead and choose from the Properties panel the
Medium Contrast setting.

By itself, Medium Contrast is too much. But go ahead and create another Curves layer
and this time select the preset for Lighten and drag up the curve a little bit higher in the
highlights part of the curve (on the right) something around how I show it here:
For future reference, in your Curves graph, the left is the darks, the middle is the
exposure area and the right is the highlights. Play around with it and you can start to see
how dragging in different parts affects different areas of the image.
Okay now select both of the curves layers you made and drag and drop them on the folder
at the bottom of the Layers panel (or use Cmd + G) to make them into a Group and
rename this Curves.

Now you can easily turn this group on and off to see the result of the curves. And to me, at
100% it is too much. Lower the capacity of the entire group to about 40%.
Much better! We just want a touch of that extra contrast. Voila! We are now done with our
second photo. Go ahead and press F to put it into full screen mode. (You can cycle
through this by pressing F multiple times)
It looks cool. We could have done some glow, but the main thing I wanted to show you in
this video is the preparation of the HDR and also that you see more and more examples of
how to achieve this sort of very dramatic black and white.
Lesson 3 - Digital Blending with a
Parisian Bridge

The next photo we are going to work on is the book cover from my Paris book.
It was originally a very nice color HDR photo which I converted into black and white. So
let's get started by opening up the files. Now I want to show you what can happen
sometimes when you try and do this with an HDR image and don't get the exact look you
want from the HDR merge process and then how you can fix that manually by combining
different parts of different exposures with digital blending.
To start, go to your file with the lesson images and drag and drop all three of them onto
the Photoshop icon to open up Camera Raw.

Creating an HDR Photo in Adobe Camera Raw

0. Create an HDR RAW file
Once again, go ahead and Select All for the three photos.

Then go ahead and choose Merge to HDR.

And just ensure that Deghosting and Autotone are turned off.

Sometimes when you create an HDR, you lose a part of one of the images . You'll see
what I mean here in a moment. When we create HDRs, we are trying to boost our dynamic
range because what we really want is the best part of each image.
Now if you look at the merged HDR that was created, it used the very low light streaks at
the bottom right of the image and the water is very rough.
What we want in our black and white is to use the overexposed photo to get the
smoothness of the water, and to get the bright smoothness of those light streaks from the
cars.

On the other exposures we want to get the details of the sky and the details of the
buildings. So to get the image we want, we can't just create an HDR Merge and go with
that. We are going to have to do this a bit, the “old fashioned” way. Let me show you.

Processing the Photos in Adobe Camera Raw

1. Do the Basic Panel Retouching
So, we are going to forget about the HDR merge and go ahead and retouch the other
photos how we would normally do them, meaning we are going to retouch each of them
individually.
Take the normal exposure and open up the Shadows to +75, and bring down the
Highlights to -95.

Now let's Alt push the Blacks slider to get our black point at -17. And Alt push the
Whites slider to get our black point at +27.
We don't need to touch the white balance because it's going to be a black and white. But
go ahead and push the Clarity to - 9.

2. Apply Noise Reduction

Go ahead and zoom in at 100% to look at the sky. There is a little noise, not much, a little
more than the last photo so push the Luminance to around 20 and about 80 of
Sharpening.

Now go ahead and apply the Masking. Don't ever do Sharpening without the Masking
unless you don't care if you sharpen the sky. On this image you're going to need to push
the Masking to around 60 so that Sharpening is mostly being done on the buildings where
there are a lot of details.

3. Synchronize Settings on Files and then Adjust to Taste

Go ahead and zoom out and then synchronize the settings for all the photos. Do this by
selecting the photos in the Film Strip and then from the menu choosing Sync Settings.

When the pop-up comes up, just ensure that all the basic settings are selected.
Let's have a look at each of these now. The underexposed image looks way too dark.

So let's reset the Highlights to 0, Exposure to +0.50 and set the Blacks at 0 as well.
Now, the underexposed we're only going to use really for the sky so that will work. Now
let's look at the Overexposed image.

And again, this is too extreme. It's way too bright now. I'm particularly looking at the
bottom part of the image where the water is because we want the silky water so we need to
make this image darker. Go ahead and adjust Exposure to -1.70, Highlights to -100,
Shadows to +61.
4. Open Images in Photoshop
Okay, now we need to open the images in Photoshop. Go ahead and click on the images in
the Film Strip and click on the little dots under the thumbnail of each of them to give
them two stars. Then choose Select Rated from the menu.

Camera Raw is going to select all three. Now go ahead and click on Open Images.
Blend the Images for a Nice Black and White in Photoshop
The images are going to open in three separate tabs in Photoshop and that's not what we
want. If you are using Adobe Bridge, you could get them to import all in one tab, but let's
stay in Photoshop for this course.

5. Bring the Underexposed Photo on Top of the Normal Exposure

Okay select the tab that has the underexposed photo with our sky in it.
Now select your move tool (V) and then click anywhere on the photo while holding down
the Shift key (which ensures the photo is aligned to the other photo) and then drag and
drop your underexposed photo onto the tab of the regular exposure. It's going to show up
as a new layer in the Layers panel. Go ahead and rename the layer to Dark and then at
the bottom of the panel, hold down the Alt key and click on the icon to create a new
Mask.

Now, for this dark image we are only interested in the details in the sky. When there is a
layer where you want very little things of it, the best is to start off with a black layer.
Meaning it's completely invisible and with a white brush you're going to bring back just
what you need. That's why you press the Alt key, it gives us a black mask.
6. Brush in the Details of the Sky from the Underexposed Photo
Next, go ahead and select your Brush tool and press X to ensure your foreground color is
White and start brushing in the sky.

Now here you can see it too much because my Brush Opacity was at 100%, and we need
to lower this down to around 40% and it is much more subtle and it is actually blending
the exposure and not just painting one on top of the other. It's very subtle, but it's just
giving us the details we need here at the bottom of the sunset. If you look at the mask icon
in the image you can see where I've painted and match that if you want.
7. Brush in the Details from the Overexposed Photo
Now from our overexposed photo, we really want the entire bottom of it.

Go ahead and shift click drag the image onto the other normal exposure to open it as a
new layer. We are going to use a lot of this photo so just go ahead and from the bottom of
the Layers panel, create a new Layer Mask.
Now take a big brush, and set it for 100% with the foreground color as Black.

And just paint out the entire top part of the image this time, right up to the edges of the
building so that we have the nice sky from the other layers, and the nice water and light
streaks from this layer. Again, you can look at the mask icon next to the layer thumbnail to
see how I painted this.
Remember this is what the other choppy water looked like:

And choppy doesn't look nice. So can you see how the water is now nicer because we used
the part from the longer exposure? And we get all the streaky lights, so that's pretty cool.
That's what we get by blending all three exposures, we really get the best of each photo.
8. Clean up the Dust in the Photo
When you're happy with the blending using this technique of layers, go ahead and use the
Cmd+Alt+Shift+E to create one layer from all the other layers. Then go ahead and select
the Spot-Healing Brush tool (J) and brush over the dust spots in the sky to clean them
up.

Create Your Black and White in Photoshop

9. Convert the Photo to Black and White
You know how to do this. Go to the Layers panel and from the New Fill/Adjustment
layer icon choose Black and White.

And now your image should be in black and white.

Now on the conversion, let's push our Reds to around 89 and Yellows to around 78 to
make those areas brighter.

And now let's take our Greens to 73, Cyans to 63, Blues to 13 and Magentas to 44 to
darken up some other areas.
That's my basic conversion but I highly recommend playing around with these sliders until
you get a feel for what we are doing and can adjust them to create contrast by making
brights brighter and darks darker.
Now we are ready for some more black and white magic.
10. Dodge and Burn the Photo Using Quick Mask Technique
I'm actually going to show you another technique on this photo, which I learned from
Jean-Michel Berts, and which I think is really cool.
Go ahead and press B to bring up your brush tool, create a large brush and set the Brush
opacity to 100%.
Now press Q to go into Quick Mask mode and double click on the Quick mask mode
icon at the bottom of your toolbar you will get a Quick Mask pop-up. Make sure that the
Quick Mask option is Selected Area.

Next you just select a big part of the water.

If you select too much, like I did in the above image, you can press X to switch the
foreground color and now you can paint over the areas to erase parts of the mask and then
press X again to go back into painting on the mask so that you have the area of the water.
Anything which is red is going to be masked.

Now if you press Q again it will turn this masked area into a selection that we can apply
changes and effects to.
With this selection we want to adjust it so it pops more and to do this, instead of curves,
we are going to use levels. So from the Layers panel choose new Fill/Adjustment layer
and select Levels.

Now, because we have this selected, the level is only going to apply to the water. So go
ahead and open up the brighter parts of the image, you can set your slider settings to 13,
1.19 and 230.
Now you might be able to see it in the e book or not, but definitely on the RAW file on
your screen you will be able to see the artifacting that starts to happen in the water from
pushing too hard.

One trick to deal with that is you can go to Filter> Noise> Add Noise.
And you add noise usually somewhere around 10%. For this go ahead and put it at 12.5%.

And that will help take out the weird gradient artifacts if you have them. And if you don't
have them, well skip that!
11. Continue Dodge and Burn by Painting in Whites
Now, I like to mix that Q, B, Q technique with my technique of painting in the whites that
I've been showing you. So go ahead and create a new layer named Whites.
Now set your Brush Opacity to 15% for this technique and ensure your layer's blend
mode is set to Overlay. Then go ahead and paint in some white on the water to help bring
up the reflections.

Then go ahead and paint over the light streaks and the walls on the right and maybe a bit
on the trees. Remember that you aren't trying to match my exact brush strokes, you are
trying to familiarize yourself with the technique of breaking up areas of consistent light,
breaking the gradient as I say. Have fun with it. Experiment.
Now go ahead and paint over the lower part of the sky and the buildings on the left to
bring them up a bit.

Remember, we want to make sure things are not evenly lit.

Here is what it looked like before we started adding white:
Hopefully you can see that it looks good to add those little flourishes.
12. Continue Dodge and Burn by Painting in Blacks
Now we are going to work on the blacks. Go ahead and create a new layer, name it
Blacks and set it to Overlay. Ensure you've got your brush opacity at around 10-15% and
you are working with a big brush.

Okay let's start by darkening the top of the sky to help close off our photo, go ahead and
brush over that area until you are happy with how it looks.
And now do the same thing at the bottom of the image to darken the bottom and close that
off as well.

It's looking good! Voila!

13. Apply Final Curves
Now the photo is looking pretty good and we are ready for my last-minute curves that we
do in each photo.
Go ahead and create a new Curves layer and set it to Medium Contrast.
I always go for Medium Contrast. It's a bit aggressive which is why I immediately use
the other curve, Lighten, to bring it back up.

With the Lighten preset applied, grab the curve in the middle and just raise it slightly to
bring up the image a little bit more.
Go ahead and select your two curves layers and press Cmd + G to make a Group and
name it Curves.

If you look at the before and after by shutting that group on and off, I still think that it is a
bit too much.
Go ahead and set the Group layer Opacity to around 75%.
Voila! We have a very dramatic black and white! That was what I used for the cover of my
book. Go ahead and press F to put it in full screen for a final check.

It's pretty good.

We used three different exposures to get the best out of each photo, and then did the usual
classic black and white layers to do the dodge and burning and voila, we got a very
dramatic photo of Paris, France; one of the most beautiful cities in the world!
Lesson 4 - Creating a Hazy Black & White
in Paris

Okay, for our next project we are going to make a nice hazy winter photo of Le Panigale, a
beautiful restaurant in Paris under the snow. I think Paris under the snow type photos can
be very tricky to get a really good looking photo. Let me show you some ways to salvage
a photo with black and white that might otherwise be unusable.
To start, go to your file with the lesson images and open the image in Camera Raw.

Creating a Good Looking Black & White in Adobe Camera

Raw
1. Make the Photo Black and White
Ok, let's do as much as we can in Camera Raw on this one. There's not much color, so you
know what? Just go right away and drop the Saturation slider to -100.

2. Do the Basic Camera Raw Retouch

Okay let's do the basic retouch on this now. Go ahead and open up the Shadows to +85
and drop the Highlights down to -100.
Using the Alt key, set your black and white point by pushing the Blacks to around -43 and
your Whites to +68.

Then you can always lower the overall exposure if you think it's too bright. The whole
idea is to find something interesting. That's always kind of key here. Maybe lower, again,
the Exposure to around -0.50.
I don't like to do a lot of Clarity unless there is nothing in the sky, which is the case here.
When there is a lot of clouds I don't use clarity at all. On this one I'm going to use clarity. I
think it's kind of cool.

3. Do the Lens Corrections, FX and Noise Reduction

Next up we need to apply the lens corrections. So go into the sixth tab over into the Lens
Corrections panel and select Auto to correct the uprights.
Next up, I want you to apply a vignette. So go to the FX panel and do a Post-Crop
Vignette. I don't like the fact that the sky is completely white on this one and this will help
put a slight gradient in the sky, which is cool. Set the Amount to -23 and have the
Midpoint around 50.

Now go to the bottom of the interface again and click on the Before/After tab so we can
see where we were before retouching.
We've already got an interesting black and white photo, but we can do a lot better. Let's
quickly take care of Noise Reduction. Zoom into 100% and look at the sky. It's pretty
clean. Open up your noise reduction panel and we can probably do the 80/20 on this, it
doesn't have to be exact it could be 79 Sharpening and 21 Luminance or something like
that. That it balances out to 100 is the overall idea.

Make sure you do your Masking. You don't want to do any sharpening on the sky so make
sure your sky is black. Again, when you hold down the Alt key and push Masking is
when you can see it. Anything which is black is not going to get sharpened. Go ahead and
push it to around 36.
Go ahead and choose to Open Image so that we go into Photoshop.

Stylize the Black and White in Photoshop

4. Create a Glow Effect Over the Snowy Areas
Now on this image, let's try to give it a little bit of a glowy effect. Go ahead and press
Cmd + J to duplicate the layer. Do you remember how we did this last time? Same thing.
Go to Filter> Blur> Gaussian Blur.
Let's go ahead and do a very strong Gaussian blur on this one, put Radius somewhere
around 44.5.

Voila. Glowy! Let's put this layer's Blending Mode into Lighten.
Hmmm. Go ahead and try Screen.

No. Not that one. Try Overlay. Overlay can sometimes give an interesting look. Let's try
Soft Light.
No, it's making it way too dark. You know what? Let's go back to Lighten and lower the
Layer opacity down to around 45.

Now we don't want this glow everywhere, just in a few places where there is snow to
create a haze coming from it as if it was starting to evaporate. So hold down the Alt key
and click on the new mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel so that we have a black
mask.
Next create a big brush at about 50% opacity and make the foreground color white by
pressing X and go ahead and paint over the trees and the snow at the bottom of the fence,
plus the roof. Where there is a bit of snow we just want to add this sort of winter haze
going on here. A little haze going on.

5. Create a Haze Layer Using Camera Raw Filter and Camera Raw
There is another way to do this. You could also press Cmd + Alt + Shift + E to flatten
everything into a new layer and then choose Filter> Adobe Camera Raw Filter.

That's only if you have Photoshop CC. You can click on the layer and go back into
Camera Raw. In the FX panel you have a Dehaze option and if you slide it to the right it
removes haze.
But if you push it to the left it, try around -55, it creates haze, a sort of super fog.

Super foggy. Click OK to open the image back in Photoshop proper. And now let's repeat
the same steps to paint in haze. Hold down Alt and click on the new mask icon in the
Layers panel. And then start brushing it on over the snowy areas. But make sure that your
brush isn't at 100% or it will go on way too strong.
Lower your Brush opacity to about 30% and that Hardness really is at 0.

Now go ahead and brush a little bit of haze over the tree, the rooftop, the snow at the fence
and wherever else you think it would be nice. I like a little bit of haze just where there is
some snow. The reason why I like that is because the snow doesn't look very nice as it is.
It's a bit dirty. By having a bit of haze here and there you just give it a better Christmas
look.
And if you feel it is too strong just turn the Layer opacity down to around 80%.

That's just two different ways to add a little bit of atmosphere to your photo, which I think
works well on this one.
6. Dodge and Burn the Image to Add Drama by Painting in Blacks
Now we are ready to do our black layer. Create the new layer, name it Black and set the
Blending Mode to Overlay.
Make sure Black is your foreground color and that Brush opacity is at about 15-20%.
Then go ahead and brush in some blacks in the image how you like. I suggest doing them
on that brick end of the building on the left, a little bit on the sky and the bottom of the
image to close it and some down on the dark part of the fence on the lower right of the
image.

Again if it is too much just drop down the Layer opacity a little to your taste.
7. Dodge and Burn the Image to Add Drama by Painting in Whites
And now the whites. Create a new layer, name it Whites, select Brush and set Brush
Opacity to 13% and foreground color to White and layer Blending Mode to Overlay.

Now go ahead and paint a little bit over the building with the windows on the left and on
that big white wall on the right behind the restaurant. Then go ahead and add some on the
places where the ivy is holding the snow on the front of the restaurant and maybe on the
wall with the sign and the sign on the right. Remember you want to add drama. You are
just trying to break up the sameness of the image lighting and add contrast. I know I keep
saying it and I will keep saying it until the end of the book.

Paint it on until you are happy with the result and you feel that you've created the drama.
And remember if you do it and it looks to heavy, just take the Layer opacity and knock it
down to 70%.

You don't want people to notice your retouching so it's got to be very subtle. I don't know
about you but I like that sort of Christmas haze and how that works on that photo. I think
it's pretty cool. Now we need to clean up the photo a bit.
8. Clean up the Spots with the Spot-Healing Brush
We have a bunch of spots in the photo. So go ahead and press Cmd + Alt + Shift + E and
create a new flattened layer. Then select the Spot-Healing Brush tool. Go ahead and
zoom in and paint out all the spots in the sky.
Make sure you don't have any spots, because when you work with a photo like this you
can get spots.

Actually I think the original photo was made from a panorama where I merged several
photos. Some of them are out of focus in parts, but it's fine. The photo works but I
wouldn't make a printout of it because I can see those parts that are out of focus. But I like
the overall look of it.
9. Examine the Photo and Add Final Curves
Remember to look at the image big and then small to see if any problems come jumping
out to you.

We definitely need to add some contrast to it. You remember how to do this. If not, don't
worry, I'll keep showing you through the end of the book. Practice, practice, practice
makes this all become muscle memory. Go ahead a create a new Curves layer.

In the Properties panel set the curve to Medium Contrast.

Then create the second curve, put it on Lighten and drag it up just a little bit in the center
as you can see here.

Go ahead and press Cmd + G to create a Group and name it Curves.

And you can see if you turn the Curves on and off that it definitely helps the image to
have it on. This is without the curves.

And this is our final image.

That's our Le Panigale under the snow, which I think is pretty cool. Pretty cool, it's a pretty
cool photo. Go ahead and save it. And that's another example of how you can play around
with haze to put in some sort of foggy atmosphere into your photo. Don't put it
everywhere. Just put it with some little touches here and here. Voila, voila, voila!

Lesson 5 - Long Exposure Black & White

Alright so in this lesson we're going to do some black and white with a very, very long
exposure.
To start, go to your file with the lesson images and drag and drop the photo on the
Photoshop icon to open the image in Camera Raw.

Retouch the Photo in Adobe Camera Raw

That's the photo. This was 180 seconds of exposure. That's a lot when you realize that the
maximum we've done so far is 13 seconds. I did that because I wanted to see the clouds
moving and I wanted them very stretchy. I also had people walking around the photo and
having that long of an exposure will effectively make them vanish. So to get that exposure
I had to put on a Neutral Density filter at ND 1000 and because it was sunset time I put
my camera at f18 and ISO at 100. This was shot with a Canon 5d Mark II several years
ago and it's still a pretty decent photo. So let's develop it.
1. Do the Basic Retouch
Go ahead and open the Shadows to +100.
Then go ahead and close the Highlights down to -100.

Go ahead and hold down the Alt key and push your Blacks to around -17.
Then do the same and push your Whites up. Now +85 would obviously be way
overcooked.

You just want a few speckles of white, somewhere around +57 is better.
Now because there's some details in the sky we're not going to use a black and white
conversion using the Saturation slider, we are going to get a better result using the layers
in Photoshop so that we can decide which color we're going to effect or not. But first let's
do as much as we can in Camera Raw.
2. Straighten the Image
Already you can see better how the clouds get very stretchy over 180 seconds. But you
can also see that the verticals aren't straight so go to the Lens Corrections panel and
choose Auto.
As you can see the colors are off and that's the problem when you when you put an ND
filter on, you get a color cast especially after 180 seconds, you see how everything is kind
of magenta. That comes from the ND filter. Fortunately, this photo will work in black and
white!
3. Apply Some Dehaze to get Nicer Clouds and Boost Exposure
Also, you can play around with the Dehaze effects because for a sky like this it can make
it look better. So go to the FX panel and push the Dehaze to +33.

Then go ahead back to the Basic panel and boost the Exposure a little bit, maybe around
+0.25.
I like what it does to the sky, it gives a good contrast. So now we've got a good contrasting
photo, let's deal with the noise.
4. Clean up the Noise
Zoom in to 100% and look at the sky. We have a lot of dust, but we'll clean that up in
Photoshop. There is also quite some noise, so let's put Sharpening at around 70 and
Luminance at 30.

Then do your Masking as usual around 50 because we don't want any sharpening over the
sky.
5. Apply the Lens Corrections
Also now being at 100% I can see there are some other things we need to take care of. Go
to the Lens Corrections panel and Enable Lens Corrections.

Now I also want to Remove Chromatic Aberration. In case you don't know what that is,
look around the edges of the elephant and you will see a small green and magenta fringe.
It doesn't really matter for black and white but it is a good habit to get into and just select
Remove Chromatic Aberration every time. So just go ahead and do it.

And wow! There is a lot of noise here on the elephant because it's so dark so we need to
go back and deal with that. You see it's like green color noise, color noise. So go back to
the Noise Reduction panel and push the Color slider to around 60 and move the
Sharpening to 60 and the Luminance to 40 to take care of that.
That's what happens because the photo was a bit too dark. But it cleans up fine. I did print
this photo and it works really well. Yes, it's an older photo from five years ago or so, but I
like the result. And despite some of the problems that can arise, I also encourage you to
shoot with ND filters because they can give you great photos despite color cast problems.
Okay so we have our basic correction now done in Camera Raw. This was our before
image.

And this is where we are now.

Go ahead and select Open Image and we are going over to Photoshop.

Making the Black and White in Photoshop

6. Do the Black and White Conversion
We're going to open up the image and we're going to do the black and white conversion
using the new Fill/Adjustment Layer> Black and White.

And this will give us our image in Black and White with the default conversion.
Now let's play around with the settings to get a more dramatic conversion. I found I got
the best result with these settings: Reds: -23. Yellows: 87. Greens: 46. Cyans: 17. Blues:
73. Magentas: 88.

That's our basic conversion.

7. Clean up the Dust and Spots
Now there is so much dust on this one that we should clean it up now as it is a bit
distracting from the image. Go ahead and press Cmd + Alt + Shift + E to flatten and
create a new layer. The newer cameras have better sensor dust handling so this isn't as
much an issue any more. Then go ahead and choose the Spot-Healing Brush tool and just
paint over all the spots. Do this zoomed in at 100% to make sure you don't miss anything.

I've had times where I printed big prints especially with the ND filter and I had a big dust
particle and you just see that and it's very distracting. That's not good so you really have to
be careful to make sure you get it all. If you are over F13 or something you are going to
see a lot of dust especially with older cameras.
8. Start to Dodge and Burn by Painting on the Whites
Create a new layer and name it White and then put it in Overlay mode. I'm sure you are
getting the hang of this by now.
Select your Brush tool and put the Brush opacity at 13%. Let's start by painting some
white in the sky and also on the middle floor of the building on the left.

Now let's zoom in on the elephant and make his muscles more visible by painting over his
two foreground legs and his ear a little bit.
Now tackle the building in the background and add a little white to the brighter part to
bring it up even more to break the gradient. I know I keep saying that phrase: breaking the
gradient. I invented that expression and I wasn't trying to be confusing, it just means you
can pass over these areas to make things a bit brighter or a bit darker to make it more
visually interesting.

Let's do the same on the buildings on the left. Breaking up the surface evenness of the
lighting by adding some white.
And now let's look at the overall effect of adding the white. This is the before.

And this is the after.

I think it looks good! Just work it until you've broken up the even areas of lighting and
you are happy with that.
9. Continue to Dodge and Burn by Painting on the Blacks
Go ahead and create another new Layer, set it to Overlay mode and name it Blacks.

Select your Brush tool and set your foreground color to Black (X). For this just go ahead
and paint a little at the top of the sky and the bottom of the image and some on the left and
the right.
10. Create a Multiplied Layer for Strong Vignetting
Now, for this one, let's do the technique of darkening with a multiplied layer. Press Cmd +
Alt + Shift + E to create a new flattened layer and then put it into Multiply.

Go ahead and make a rectangular selection and then choose Select> Modify> Feather
and feather it 500 pixels.
Then delete it to erase that middle selection and leave the vignette.

It's still too heavy so go ahead and drop the opacity of the layer down to around 60.
That's better, but it's still too heavy on the sides. Go ahead and press Cmd + D to deselect.
Then go to your Layers panel and create a new Layer Mask. Then take your Brush tool
and put it the foreground color to Black (X) and the Brush opacity at 50%.
Now gently paint out the sides of the image where the vignette is covering the buildings so
we reveal those once again and the vignetting isn't so heavy on them.

That looks much better and it works fine on the rest of the image and really helped to
close the photo and make it much more dramatic. But looking at it now, we should paint it
a little more white so go back to your Whites layer and set your foreground color once
again to White. Set the Brush opacity to 25% so it is a little stronger and then brush over
that building right at the corner of the street in the background.

Then go ahead and paint some more on the street to help bring up the reflections and then
the building on the left we painted earlier, pour some more white onto it to help it pop out.

And by doing these whiter areas towards the center we are helping attract the viewers eyes
to this area because it is brighter and eyes naturally go to the brighter areas.
11. Add the Final Contrast Curves and Inspect the Final Image
You know how this goes by now. Create a new Curves layer and set it to Medium
Contrast.

Then create a second curves layer, set it to Lighten and pull up the middle of the curve
ever so slightly to brighten the image more.

Then go ahead and press Cmd + G to create the Group and name it Curves. Check your
before and after by turning the layer on and off to see if you like what it did. It seems a bit
strong to me so lower the layer opacity down to around 70%.
Okay let's look at the photo in full screen mode. Just hit (F) on the keyboard twice to
black everything else out but the photo.

I find it good to walk away from the photo for a bit. You know, go do something else and
then come back to it after a bit, maybe even the next day to see if there is anything I
missed or that I should add to it.
Like right now I'm thinking why not try to add a little bit of haze? No problem. Press
Cmd + Alt + Shift +E to create a new flattened layer and let's apply the Filter> Camera
Raw Filter.
Go straight to the FX panel and put the Dehaze at -53.

Then go ahead back to the Basic panel and put the Clarity at -78.
Then go ahead and click OK to go back into Photoshop.

In the Layers panel hold down Alt while clicking on new layer mask to make that layer
invisible for the moment.
Select your Brush tool and put the Opacity at 24% and make sure that you have White as
your foreground color and we are going to paint a little bit of haze back there in the street
as it goes away up to the sky. And then just a little bit at the left of the elephant in front of
that other building at the bottom.

Not much. Just a light touch but it helps add drama and interest and makes for a better
photo. And the truth is you can retouch forever and sometimes I have to tell myself to stop
messing around with a photo and move on to the next one. Like now.
Go ahead and look at the photo small.
And then go into full screen mode using F.

Okay I like that. I think it's a good dramatic black and white with a very long exposure at
180 seconds. And viola! Next!

Lesson 6 - Salvaging Blue Skies in Black

& White
Alright this is going to be a quick lesson as I am sure you are starting to understand the
basic skills I am showing you. In this lesson we're going to tackle a photo that turned out
very boring in color. It was disappointing because I got up very early that morning, at like
5 or 5:30 in the morning to get up in Paris before everyone. I knew the sun was going to
rise there and I was expecting clouds. But you know what? There were no clouds
whatsoever. So it was a bit of a wasted shot, but not really.
I have this saying: If the colors are a bit boring, go and try black and white, which is what
we are going to be doing. Once again, go to your file with the lesson images and drag and
drop the three photos for this on the Photoshop icon to open the images in Camera Raw.

Retouching a Black and White Photo Entirely in Adobe

Camera Raw
The whole idea of this lesson is to show you how you can also do a whole black and white
conversion using the Camera Raw engine alone. It's actually really powerful, and I love to
do that, too. It's very similar for people that own Lightroom, and you will see why.
1. Create the HDR Photo
So the above image is the normal exposure. We also have an underexposure to capture the
highlight information and an overexposure to capture the shadows information.
So go ahead and from the Film Strip, Select All and then Merge to HDR.
That's going to create a little preview. All I'm trying to do is create that super RAW file
that's going to get all the information that we need for doing a nice retouch. Ensure that
Autotone and Deghosting are off and then click ok.

It's going to ask where you want to save it and go ahead and put it in your folder or on the
desktop. And it's going to do its magic. It's going to create a fourth file here in the Film
Strip, which is the one we're going to convert to black and white.

2. Convert the Image to Black and White

How do we convert it to black and white? Well, you can use the Saturation slider as I've
already shown you.

But the more powerful way is to go to the HSL/Grayscale panel and click on Convert to
Grayscale.

Once you click Convert to Gray Scale you've got this new window that opens in Camera
Raw which is the same one that we have in Photoshop where we can play around with the
different colors to decide on how they get converted.
After playing around with it these are the settings that I recommend. Reds: -13. Oranges:
-15. Yellows: -11. Greens: -33. Aquas: -19. Blues: -4. Purples: +3. Magentas: +4.
Now we can agree the sky is too bright. But let's go into the Basic panel to work this over.
3. Do the Basic Retouching on the Photo
Go ahead and open up the Shadows to +68 and the Highlights to -43. Check this out.
Because it's a super RAW file you've got a lot of information. If you are playing around
with the images on your computer you will be able to see this for yourself. We don't need
to go all the way with either the Shadows or the Highlights.

Let's do the black and white points. Press the Alt key and use the Blacks slider and push
it to around -44. We want some parts of the image fully crushed into blacks.
And then remember that on the Whites you want to go the opposite. You don't want to
burn the sun, so push the Whites slider to somewhere around +9 and we are done.

You can click here to see the before and after and you will see that there is not too much of
a difference. It's not an amazing black and white. One way to add some ooomph to your
black and white is to do what is called “crush the blacks.” We're going to do it in two
stages.
4. Add Graduated Filters
The first thing we're going to do is, we're going to click here on this icon, called the
Graduated filter.

We've talked about it a little earlier. It's a very powerful tool. I'm going to click on it and
I'm going to drag and drop it on the image and then one good trick is to simply click on
the minus sign on Exposure for example, it will zero everything else out except that one
slider. Go ahead and set your Exposure to -1,05 and that will give us a darker sky.
Remember, when you do a gradient between the edge of the photo and the green spot, the
assigned values in the panel are being applied at full density, at full strength. From the
green point to the red point they're applied on a gradient from 100% down to 0.
The other thing is that we really want to do a dramatic photo because the sky is boring as
such. One cool way of adding drama that I find really cool in black and white is when you
can get a blue sky to become sort of black. Let me show you how to do this with the
Radial Filter tool.
5. Add Drama with Radial Filters
Up in the tool bar, select the Radial Filter tool and drag and create an elliptical shape at
the center of the screen with the Effect setting in the Radial Filter panel set to Inside. It
should still have your settings from the Grad Filter with an Exposure setting of -1,05.

If you follow my videos you know that usually when I apply radial filters, what I do is use
the Inside mode more than Outside. Meaning that whatever settings you apply for the
filter when it's Inside, is only going to apply inside the circle and when you click Outside
whatever you do is only going to be outside the circle. For this image set the filter to
Outside.
What is it doing? It's lowering the exposure so everything outside the circle is darker. I'm
doing this on purpose to create a more dramatic light. You can grab the center of the
Radial filter and move it where you want. Go ahead and put it over the bench in the
foreground so that everything around it is darker except the bench. You get the idea?

Move it a little higher to the center of the photo. We really want to go for a dramatic effect
here. You can also make a duplicate, go ahead and right click on the filter and choose
Duplicate.
On this Radial filter, set it to the inverse by turning the setting to Inside.

Now boost the Exposure to +1,45 and put this over the bench.
And what we want to do is imitate a sunbeam so we need to rotate this filter. If you hover
over the top edge of the filter you will see the icon change into a rotate arrow.

Go ahead and turn it to mimic that there are some rays coming from the sun onto the
bench.
With just two radial filters I can do this effect. And you can play with the strengths of the
Exposure settings to make the effect stronger if you want.

The whole idea is that the more interesting you make your light, the more fascinating your
photo is going to be. I think this whole idea where we have just one ray of light onto the
bench really makes that photo be something really interesting. You could also duplicate it
and do more rays if you wanted just make sure your feathering is at 100 percent on your
radial filter to ensure you get a smooth effect. And that would make a great photo. Also if
you want to see the image without the dots, you can turn off the Overlay setting at the
bottom of the Radial Filter panel.
6. Use a Heavy Vignette for a Simpler Dramatic Look
Let me show you another way to make this photo interesting that's a little bit simpler. Go
ahead and click on the toggle settings at the bottom right and either reset the radial filters,
or delete them. Then go to your FX panel and we are going to play with a Post Crop
Vignette.

The Amount slider is going to control how much of the Post Crop Vignette is applied.
Let me exaggerate this to show you what I mean.
It adds a strong vignette evenly around the edges to make everything from the center out
darker. Using the Midpoint slider you can control how far in this comes towards the
center. Let me put this on an exaggerated setting again to make the point.

We obviously don't want that. It's just too much. But try putting the Amount to -28 and
the Midpoint to 36. Something like this.
There are also three different kinds of vignetting. The above is Highlight Priority which
is the one I like the most. You can check out Color Priority.

Doesn't do much on black and whites. You can also check out Paint Overlay which
doesn't do much either.
So Highlight Priority is the one you want to go for on a black and white. That's kind of
cool. Now go back to the Basics panel and maybe add some more contrast by pushing the
Contrast slider to +14 and the Shadows to +80 so that the ambient light is a bit better.

I think we have a nice sunrise in Paris in black and white. You could go ahead and open
the image in Photoshop and do some of the tricks I have shown you with dodging and
burning different parts of the image. But for this photo I really wanted to show you how to
do everything in Camera Raw.
Let me show you in full screen here.
Voila. That's a nice black and white done only in Camera Raw, and it's actually an HDR
black and white. Hope you like it!

Lesson 7 - Creating Depth with Haze in

Black & White
On this video, I want to show you a really good example on how you can play with depth
on a photo using black and white. Go ahead and find the lesson photo and open it in
Camera Raw.

Process the Photo in Adobe Camera Raw

Let's be frank: it's a pretty boring photo. But after I retouched it, I made it very interesting
and it even ended up in my book on New York. So I want to show you why and how I did
it.
1. Do the Basic Retouch in Camera Raw
Let's first do our basic Camera Raw correction. You know how to do this by now. Put your
Shadows around +93 and the Highlights around -61, Blacks at -27 and Whites at +27.
We just want to bring some basic contrast back into the image.

2. Enable Lens Corrections

One thing that we want to do is to go to the Lens Corrections panel and Enable Lens
Profile Corrections and that will actually get rid of some of the vignette in the image as
well as some slight distortions caused by the lens.
Now we need to get our verticals straight up and down. Go to the Manual tab and choose
Upright.

As usual, that really did a decent job, but sometimes when you choose Upright it doesn't
work perfectly. So let's take a quick look at how to fix your verticals manually. Let's focus
on the Empire State Building in the background and push the Rotate slider to +1.8
degrees.
Then we still need to shift this a little bit to get the buildings on the side looking right. Go
ahead and use the Vertical slider and push that to -7.

Everything looks pretty good but as you can see, we now have missing pixels on the edges
so we need to crop the photo. Go ahead and select the Crop tool from the toolbar and re-
crop the photo taking into account what we've just done. I think we should crop out that
building on the right that is creeping into frame and maybe just a little of that chair on the
bottom. Something like this.
When you've got it how you want it, press Enter to accept the crop.
3. Convert the Photo to Black and White
That's the basic retouching, let's take the image into black and white. Go over to the
HSL/Grayscale panel and select Convert to Grayscale.

Okay now we need to work the settings to get the best possible conversion. Do as you like
to see if you can get any additional initial contrast. My suggestions are: Reds: -13.
Oranges: -13. Yellows: -43. Greens: -29. Aquas: -18. Blues: -3. Purples: 0. Magentas:
-8.
4. Simulate Haze to Create Depth in the Background
Now if you look at this image. It's kind of confusing because there is so much happening
in it. There is a lot going on visually and so my challenge was to play with what was
happening in the foreground, middleground and background to make this is an interesting
photo and simplify where the eyes are drawn.
To do that we are going to start playing with clarity, whites and haze. I want to push the
whole background of the image so that it looks like it's far away, and one way to create
depth is through the illusion of haze. Let me show you a way we can do this. Create a
Graduated filter and drag it over the top of the photo. Click the + next to Exposure so
that everything zeros out except Exposure and push that way up to +2,05. A lot of
Exposure!
Now we could also add a lot of minus Clarity, say around -85.

Now by doing this, it does become sort of out of focus, but it's a bit too much. I don't want
this building on the left to seem like it is also behind this haze because it compresses the
middleground and background somehow when we are trying to separate them.
So what we can do as I showed you in an earlier lesson is use this new option in Camera
Raw, which is really cool. Inside the Grad filter panel you can click on Brush, and you
see it's got two icons here. One icon has a + and the other one has a -.
You can select the - Brush and we can brush over the building on the left where the
Graduated filter is and remove the effect from that part of the image and only that part so
we leave it on the other parts that are in the background.

You can adjust the brush size as needed to ensure you don't erase too much. And if you do,
just use the + Brush to paint it back on so that maybe just the beginning of the buildings
closest to the back have a little on them but the ones at the left edge of the frame are still
clean.
Now that is one way to do it. But remember you also have the Dehaze slider which you
could push all the way down to -68.

That's obviously way, way too much. But try this. Go ahead and leave Dehaze at - 62 and
the Clarity at -68 but reset the Exposure to 0.
Now try resetting the Clarity to 0.

I show you this because sometimes the haze gives an even better result, and I think it's
doing pretty good here. Still a bit strong but let's take it off some of the foreground objects
by selecting the - Brush again and erasing it off everything in the foreground.
Now that's interesting, and one thing that would be cool to help sell this effect is if we
could get this lamppost to stick out, and that's going to be difficult because you're going to
have to zoom in at 100%, use the space bar to move around and use the - Brush very
small to erase it off the post.

One tip that will help is that if you hold Shift and then click at the top of the post and then
click lower while holding down the shift key and it's going to make a straight line of that
brush.
And then just work your way around the post painting the haze off it making the brush
bigger or smaller depending on the area you are painting out.

When you are done at 100% go ahead and select Fit Into View at the bottom and look at
the whole image again.
So that's another way of doing it. And since you've already painted everything on your
graduated filter you could easily revert the settings from Dehaze to 0 and push Clarity
and Exposure back up to have the effect you created earlier.
The good thing when you work in Camera Raw is that it's all non-destructive. You can
change your mind and easily go back to how you had something. For me, I think I actually
prefer the look that adding white and minus Clarity gives, maybe a little bit of dehaze on
top of it but just a little. Dehaze is so strong so maybe just - 4 of Dehaze. Now we've
combined a bit of the three.
But that's not finished. The contrast is still off.
5. Add a Grad Filter at the Bottom
You know what's wrong with this photo is that the contrast is still very gray. If you look,
yeah we have some white, but we have very little black in this photo. What you can do is
of course you could go back to the Basic panel and add some more Blacks, maybe +37.
But I still find that the bottom part of the image is too white and therefore boring.
Create a new Graduated filter with the Exposure set to -1.35 and drag it over the bottom.
We're just trying to sort of close the photo. Something like this.

6. Add Interest with Radial Filters

Now let's see how we can add even more contrast and more interest to things. Here in the
table area where people are sitting you see all this is the same color. We need to break it
up.
Create a new Radial Filter and put it right here in the middle just where the people are
and set your Exposure by clicking on the + and moving the slider to +1,55 and then set
the filter to Inside.
We're just adding exposure inside the circle just to add a bit of light here. The more you do
that, the more you're going to get something which gives an extraordinary light, so be
careful because if you overdo it it's going to look fake, but if you do it right it's going to
look okay.
This is a bit too much, lower the filter Exposure down to +1,00 and that will look more
realistic.

It's looking okay, but you know what? Let's take it into Photoshop to finish it. If you want,
go ahead and do Noise Reduction on the photo, but for the purposes of what I am trying
to show you in this lesson, I'm going to move ahead. Click on Open Image.

Dodging and Burning the Image in Photoshop

7. Dodge and Burn in Photoshop
We've got the image pretty good in Camera Raw, and now we are going to use Photoshop
to take it to the next level. Go ahead and create a new layer, name it Whites and set it to
Overlay mode.

Go ahead and select your Brush tool and get the Brush opacity set to around 15% and
foreground color to White. Then go ahead and paint a little bit of the buildings on the left
so they don't look all the same color. Just break up their evenness.

You can do it in two passes and it even looks better if you do that. Once you're happy with
that, let's do the trick where we add even more vignette effect everywhere but at the top.
So go ahead and create a new layer and again set it into Overlay mode and name it
Blacks and then choose your Brush tool and set foreground color to Black.

Now go ahead and paint in the blacks on the bottom and just lightly on the edges.

Now you probably did it perfect, but I put on too much black so I'm going to press E for
Eraser tool and get rid of some of that.
There we go, I like how it gives depth to the photo.
8. Add the Double Curves to Pump Up the Contrast
You know what's next right? Curves! Real photos have curves! Just kidding. Go ahead and
add the first curve and set it to Medium Contrast like in the previous lessons.

Then for the second curve that we're going to boost in exposure. On this one, for some
reason my curve layer has inverted, meaning if you go up, it gets darker and that means
the curve is inverted. Fixing that is easy, just drag down instead of up!
It's looking good! Press Cmd + G to put it in a Group and then click on the eye to see it
before the curves.

And then after.

Yeah, that's more interesting. It was much too gray. Now we've got some real whites,
we've got some real blacks. This is darker, so there's more contrast. Let's look at in full
screen mode by pressing F.

Then go ahead and look at it small and big and then it's good to walk away from the photo
for at least 15 minutes and then come back to it and look at it again.
For me, it's always interesting to see the process of making a good black and white photo.
And for this lesson I really wanted to show you adding depth. And actually there is
something else we can try. Let's play around and experiment a little here, which is always
good to do, you never know what might happen!
Go ahead and use the shortcut Cmd + Shift +Alt + E to create a new flattened layer. Then
set the Blending mode on it to Multiply.
And then do the technique of taking the Rectangular Marquee tool, making a big
selection in the center leaving about 15% of the edges and then choosing Select> Modify>
Feather.

Remember to set the Feathering to 500.

And then delete it. We're just trying to add drama and we've added a lot of vignetting.

It's too much, so lower the opacity of your layer down to around 16%

You can play with it to your taste but at this setting and with that added vignette I think
we've got a good photo! We have some real contrast between the background and the
foreground and made the photo a bit more interesting. The whole idea of this video could
be called “How to Make a Boring Photo into a Nice Black and White.”
Having the haze in the back makes it a much more interesting photo, because now all the
sudden we have the attention on people here. And you know what? Maybe just add a little
more white here in the area with the table and on the people to really push the eyes there.
You can just click on your white layer and brush it in real quick.

Voila! How to make a boring photo into an artistic black and white.

Lesson 8 - Sky Replacement in Black &

White
Ok so this is our last lesson for this course. And in this image which I took in New York, I
really, really wish that I had clouds in the sky but I didn't and so I had to add clouds to get
the look that I wanted. I'm going to show you how I did this.

Process the Photo in Adobe Camera Raw

We're starting with this photo of the Manhattan Bridge, a very nice bridge going from
Manhattan to Brooklyn. I really wanted to make this photo special and I want to show you
how I think I did make it special. If you haven't already, open the image of the bridge in
Camera Raw.
1. Do the Basic Retouch
As usual the first thing we need to do is open up the Shadows and Highlights to +100/-100
to see a bit more inside of the photo.

When I do this with the shadows and highlights, what I'm trying to do is get my histogram
and get my information more spread out between the darker tones and the brighter tones.
If you look at the histogram it makes a huge difference.
Now go ahead and set your white point by pushing the Whites to around +70. Remember
to hold down the Alt key because that helps you see how far you can push it, and on this
photo that's quite a ways. Have a look at the histogram and you can see we are really
spreading the information over the whole range.
Then repeat with the Blacks pushing them somewhere around -70 to find a good black
point.

That gives us some good contrast to start with. Go ahead and boost your Clarity just a
little bit to +8. Whenever I have small clouds I don't like to do Clarity as a global
adjustment because it makes the small clouds look very HDR if you know what I mean
and I don't like that look. But here we have no clouds so it's not a problem.
2. Apply Lens Corrections and Noise Reduction
This photo's got a lot of things wrong with the distortion due to the fact that I was shooting
up. So let's fix that. Go into the Lens Corrections panel and choose Auto Upright.
Boom!

It made this whole photo look perfect. The horizon is straight. The bridge structure is
straight. I'm very happy about it.
Okay, now go over to the Noise Reduction panel. Zoom into 100% and look over the sky.
Very little noise which is good. So when there is very little noise I do something around
80/20 so go ahead and push the Sharpening to 82 and the Luminance to 17.

Then put the Masking around 50. Remember the whole idea of the masking, you have to
hold on the Alt key to see that. Any thing which is black is not getting sharpened. We
don't want to sharpen the sky, hence Masking.

3. Create Some Haze in the Image Using a Graduated Filter

There's one more thing that I want to do that's very important. One effect you can do is all
about having something where you really see more dimension of this is very close and this
is very far. One way to achieve that which I have shown you already is the Dehaze slider.
But we don't want to dump it on the whole image, just grab a Graduated filter and drag it
in the upper right corner down towards the center.

It's a little bit too much on the bridge and the water so let's stretch it out a little bit to
minimize that.

There is still too much haze on the water. On the bridge is kind of cool, I like that but just
not so much on the water. So just grab the - Brush and paint it off of the water. Easy.
Voila! Let's head over to Photoshop to do the rest. Go ahead and click on Open Image.

Add the Sky in Photoshop

4. Embed the Sky File as a Layer
You've got the main bridge image in Photoshop, but we still need to pull in the sky.
There's many ways to get a file into Photoshop. One way I like to do it, is that you can go
to File> Place Embedded.

You now have to navigate to wherever you have the sky file saved. I love this sky that I
shot in Florida and it will work great for this composite. Now what Place Embedded is
going to do, is that it is going to open the sky file as a layer inside the current Photoshop
tab and allow you to manipulate its placement before accepting it. So before accepting the
placement, go ahead and set the Blending mode to Multiply.

Multiply is an amazing mode because what multiply basically does is it makes everything
darker by multiplying the color values of the layer on top with that underneath. In simple
terms it is going to take anything which is white and it's going to make that transparent
and put that on top of the layer below. Remember, we did the dehaze thing. By doing that,
we made a lot of the sky very transparent because anything which is white is going to be
transparent which is really cool. So go ahead and click and drag at the bottom of the sky to
bring it to the horizon line of the bridge photo and click Return to accept the placement.
5. Blend the Sky
Now on the Sky layer you need to click on the icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to
create a New mask. Then select your Brush tool and make it nice and big with the
opacity at around 34 and start blending the sky by painting out the parts that cover the
bridge and the buildings unrealistically.

It's a very good way to blend different things together. It looks weird because the first
photo is very colorful and the second is almost black and white. We don't want that but
don't worry we'll fix it. Just make sure that the sky isn't covering anything it shouldn't.
Most of it should be at the top of the image anyways.

6. Make the Photo Black and White

The next thing to do is to create a new adjustment layer that is set to Black and White.

And you can see that the two images blend together a lot better now.
If you think the clouds are still too strong, you can always lower the opacity of the clouds.
But I like how it looks. I just wanted a bit of clouds there because I thought it was lacking
of clouds.

Dodge and Burn the Image to Create Drama

7. Dodge and Burn the Photo to Add More Haze and Drama
I think we should add some more of this haze going on as part of the crazy weather that
was happening. For this, we're going to use my techniques of the whites and the blacks. So
create a new Layer and call it White but this time set the Blending Mode to Soft Light
to try something a bit softer. Then set foreground color as White (X as needed).
Make sure your brush is between 15% - 20% and now just brush the sky to make it look
like the sun is trying to peek out in a few different places.
Now if you feel your brush strokes are too visible. You can just select your White layer
and go to Filter> Blur> Gaussian Blur.

And you can just blur with a big value around 90 and that will mush out all strokes
completely so there is no problem.
You get the idea I am sure. Let's repeat all this for the Blacks and create a new Layer for
it.

Then go ahead and paint along the bottom of the image to close the photo and then paint a
bit over those huge uprights on the bridge
And then paint a bit over the horizontal structure to help it pop out from the haze.

And remember when you can see the brush strokes use the blur trick, this time it will be at
the top of the drop down and if you choose it from there it will use the last values you set
it to.
And it's going to make your black brush strokes go away.

Go ahead and jump back onto your Whites layer and brush in some more details on the
bottom of the bridge.
And when you are done, you can choose the Filter again from the top and it will just
reapply the settings to the White layer and make every stroke have that even blur.

Some people go too far with the dodge and burn where you can really see brush strokes
and I don't like that which is why I make sure to check it and blur as necessary.
I like how this photo is looking. It's kind of cool. Actually, when I shot this photo, the next
day, it was raining a lot and this is kind of how it looked and for this shot it was just
missing some clouds so I thought I would cheat and create clouds. Don't tell anyone!
8. Apply the Double Curves to Get More Contrast
You know the drill. Create a new Curves layer and set it to Medium Contrast.

Then create a new curve set to Lighten and drag it up to brighten it slightly.

Voila! Take the two curves, press Cmd + G to put them in a Group. Then you can turn
that on and off to see if you like how it deals with the contrast and lower the Layer
opacity if you feel it is needed.
Once happy, press F to look at it in Full Screen mode.
Then check it back both at the smaller and bigger size to see if anything pops out at you.
Looking at it, I think we need to give some more details on the bridge. Just go ahead and
zoom in on the pillar and paint some more whites on the bottom legs.

Remember just accents. Break up the evenness of it like along the bottom edge of the
railing of that curved outlook area.
Possibly also at the top to put a little more detail back in.

That bridge is beautiful. I really love that bridge and photography speaking, I love bridges
in general and have been shooting them for many years. The Brooklyn Bridge is very
different from the bridges of Paris but this is still beautiful.
That's the idea and of course the first time I retouched it, the photo came out different
because no two retouches ever come out the same when you are adding artistic flourishes
like we did. So don't worry if yours doesn't match this! Make something beautiful and that
you are happy with. Keep practicing until you do!
This brings us to the end of the book and the end of this course. I hope you enjoyed it and
that it helped you improve your black and white skills. If you want more training on
photography, just go to my website www.photoserge.com for tons of free tutorials and
more in depth courses.
Until next time my friends!