Creating Black-and-White Landscape Photos with Photoshop

Learn how to evaluate and adjust color landscapes and transform them into majestic black-and-white landscapes with Photoshop.

Photographers like Ansel Adams taught us to look differently at nature: not in terms of color, but instead emphasizing tone and contrast. Converting images to black-and-white reveals these hidden depths of composition and focus a viewer's attention on forms, textures, and fabrics. In this course, Taz Tally teaches you how to use modern techniques to transform color images into majestic black-and-white landscapes, using the modern photographer's favorite tool: Photoshop. Learn how to evaluate images with the Info tool, convert RGB color images using Photoshop's time-saving black-and-white presets, and make more advanced adjustments with the black-and-white custom sliders, masks, and adjustment layers. Plus, learn finishing techniques, like sharpening, that will make your images look their best when it comes time to print.

Introduction

• Welcome
• Using the exercise files
• Choosing images with the right composition for black and white

1. Basic Black-and-White Conversions

• Exploring methods for creating grayscale images
• Using the Black & White adjustment layer for basic grayscale conversion
• Measuring grayscale values using the Histogram and Info panels
• Adjusting Highlight and Shadow values to improve brightness and contrast
• Fine-tuning a basic conversion
• Challenge: Convert a color image to black and white
• Solution: Convert a color image to black and white

2. Fine-Tuning Black-and-White Conversions

• Creating contrast from colors
• Improving overall brightness and contrast
• Adding punch to the sky with layer blending
• Enhancing foreground-background separation and contrast
• Saturating sky contrast
• Challenge: Create a fine-tuned black-and-white conversion
• Solution: Create a fine-tuned black-and-white conversion

3. Advanced Black-and-White Techniques

• Creating contrast with masks
• Controlling contrast with masks
• Enhancing contrast with gradient masks and clipping-masked curves
• Fine-tuning results by editing masks and balancing adjustments
• Using overlapping masks to blend complex areas
• Challenge: Using masks to perform a complex black-and-white conversion
• Solution: Using masks to perform a complex black-and-white conversion

4. Finishing and Printing Black-and-White Images in Photoshop

• Sharpening with nondestructive tools
• Performing selective sharpening
• Performing selective blurring and sharpening
• Best practices for exporting and printing black-and-white landscapes

Conclusion

• Next steps