Lightroom Black and White Conversion
There are multiple ways to create black and white images inside Lightroom. The first option for most is to use the presets shipped with Lightroom. These presets use the saturation slider to covert your image to black and white by lowing it all the way down to 0%.
The second option is to click on Greyscale on the HSL panel. This was my preferred option as you had the ability to control the luminance of each individual color once converted to black and white, allowing you to lighten or darken certain tones to add or reduce contrast.
But a month ago I took one of the images to the printer to have a 11×14 print made of my black and white portrait. I was really disappointed with the results. The print was very pixilated and splotchy in the bokeh areas. I first thought it might have been the printer, but coming back to my computer and zooming in on these areas, I saw that the image itself was splotchy. I couldn’t figure out what caused this.
Yesterday I was listening to the latest episode of The Digital Story Podcast and he shared a top he learned from Katrin Eismann. It was to reduce the saturation in the HSL panel of each of the colors, then adjust the Hue and Luminance sliders by color to tweak your black and white image. By doing this you were supposed to get a smother black and white image. I gave it a try, and my splotchy bokeh areas were gone. Very cool.
So, I created a preset to reduce the saturation of each color in the HSL panel and will probably be using this going forward instead of clicking on the Greyscale option.
Here are some 100% crops of an image that I adjusted using all 3 options so you can see the effects.
Full Image
Lightroom High Contrast Preset
Lightroom Greyscale
Lightroom Desaturated by Color
I really like the way the new method came out.
Hope this helps someone out there. Thanks to Derik and Katrin for the tip.
Add comment January 11th, 2008