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Black and White Photography (part 4)
Black and white photography offers tremendous scope for creativity. This section covers some of the more creative manipulations you can do to a monochrome image.
Colour Toning
If you have just converted a colour image to monochrome, you may, depending on the conversion method you used, need to convert the image back to RGB mode before you can apply any colour tinting to it. (in Photoshop, go to Image > Mode, and if GrayScale is selected, change it to RGB color)
There are various ways to colour tint an image - one of the easiest in Photoshop is to go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation, or to use a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. In the dialog, make sure that the check box labelled colorize is selected. Then simply move the Hue and Saturation sliders until you get the colour tint that you like.
For example it you want to create the popular Sepia tint, set the Hue to about 30, and the Saturation to between 10 and 20 to control the amount of tint.
Photo Filters
Another simple method to create a colour tint in Photoshop is to use Photo Filters (found on the Image > Adjustments menu). This has a selection of preset filters (some representing popular 'real' filters such as the 'Warming Filter 85'), or you can create a filter based on any colour you wish.
You simply pick the filter or colour you want and select the density (how strong an effect you want). You'll notice a preserve luminosity check box - this is very useful. If unchecked, the image gets darker the higher the density (just like a real glass filter) - however if you check this box, the image brightness is preserved, and only the strength of the colour tinting changes.
Here's a few examples of tinted images that can be creates easily using either of the above to methods.
 
 
Top left: the original colour image. Top right: the image converted to greyscale
Bottom left: Sepia toned (using Sepia 'Photo Filter' with density set to 80%).
Bottom right: Split toned image (Blue photo filter for highlights/midtones ; Sepia photo filter for shadows). See below for details on Split Toning.
Split Toning
This is a technique where two different colour tints are applied to an image - one to the highlights, and the other to the shadows. The point in the tonal range at which the image blends from one colour to the other (usually around mid-grey) is usually adjustable depending on the method used to create the split toned image. Below, I will briefly explain two methods.
The first it to use the Adobe Camera Raw software and carry our the split toning directly to your Raw image file as part of the Raw conversion. To do this ...
1. Select 'grayscale' on the 'basic' tab
2. Select the 'Split Toning' tab which has Hue and Saturation sliders for both highlights and shadows - as well as a balance slider to adjust the point in the tonal range for the blending point between the colours.
The second method is to use any of the normal tinting tools described at the start of this page in a selective manner ...
1. Goto Select > Color Range and pick highlights from the drop down list. This will create an image selection of just the highlight parts of the image.
2. Use one of the toning methods to change the selected area into the colour required.
3. Repeat 1 and 2 for the midtones, and then again for the shadows.
The split toned image of the lighthouse above used this method - with a blue photo filter (density 25%) used to tint the highlights and midtones, and a sepia photo filter (density 66%) used to tint the shadows.
Using the blue for the lighter colours in the image creates a very cold feel to the image which I prefer to the completely sepia toned image.
There are many more toning methods you can try in photoshop too, for example Duotones, Tritones and Quadtones can be created by first converting you photo to grayscale (image > Mode > grayscale) and then selecting image > mode >duotone.
From here you can select the overprint colours that will make up your image.
Yet another method for split toning is to use a "color balance" adjustment layer on a black and white image. This allows you to select colours to tone the highlights, midtones and shadows separately.
Adding grain
I spent many years developing my own black and white prints in a darkroom and one of the things I loved was the film grain you would get when using high speed film. If you want to give your pictures a bit of a gritty edge to them and maybe lessen the sometimes 'oh so perfect' colour gradations you get with digital cameras, you can easily add some grain into the image. Simply select the option to 'Add Nosie' (Filter > Noise > Add Nosie in Photoshop), then select Gaussian Noise, and move the slider to select the amount of grain required.
Using the lighthouse picture above, here's 4 versions of the picture - I've only shown a partial crop of the image so you can see the grain more clearly.
 
 
Top left: original mage - no noise added
Top right: Gaussian Nosie 1.7%
Bottom left: Gaussian Noise 3.0%
Bottom right: Gaussian Noise 3.0% but with a little dodging and burning.
Some of you may notice that Photoshop has an filter called 'Film Grain' under Filter > Artistic. I've tried this and found it to be a little harsh - natural film grain has a slight softness to it. If you want to experiment with this, you can creat a more realistic grain by following these steps:
1. Create a new raster layer and fill it with a mid-grey colour
2. Change the blend mode for that layer to 'overlay'.
3. Apply the Film Grain filter to this layer with a reasonably high grain value
4. Finally, apply a Gaussian Blur to this layer (pixel radius between about 0.2 and 1.0)
5. You can now also control the strength of the film grain using the layer opacity slider.
Here's the lighthouse picture above done using this technique.
Texturing
An alternative to adding noise it to add a texture to the image - a popular one being a canvas texture. In Photshop, you can go to Filter > Texture > Texturizer to achieve this. Select Canvas and use the relief slider to set the strength of the effect (don't overdo it otherwise it will look incredibly fake). Here's the same picture with a texture applied.
When it comes to tinting, texturing or adding grain, have a play around and see what works best for each image. Often none of these will add anything to your picture, but sometimes, a little bit of creative thinking can lead to some interesting effects.
Printing Black and Whites Photographs
So you've worked through the last few sections on black and white photography and created your masterpiece. The last stage is printing it - however, just as with cameras, printers are basically colour devices. The printer will create the different shades of grey in your image by blending different amounts of the colour inks. However, variations in how the inks react to different types of paper can lead to your black and white image taking on a colour cast.
You could of course just select to use only the black ink rather than the individual colours (usually an option in the printer properties). The problem with this is that a single ink is not able to create the smooth transitions between all the different shades of gray, and the highlights in the image may take on a rather 'dotty' appearance.
If you are likely to be printing a large number of black and whites, then you should consider getting a printer that is designed with this in mind. Some of Epson's professional photo printers are excellent for this as they contain special grey inks and/or dedicated photo black ink.
Alternatively, calibrate your printer to remove any colour cast - but if you go to the effort of doing this, it is best to stick with the types of paper you know well.
A final option for serious photographers is to consider buying dedicated black/grey inks from a specialist supplier. One popular name is Lyson (www.lyson.com) that produce a set of inks called 'Quad Black' for a range of Epson and Canon printers.
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