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Colour photography is now the norm, and is perfect for most situations; however, there are some times when you want the power and simplicity of a black and white photo.

Black and white photography requires a different set of skills to colour, as the picture is formed purely from areas of light and shade. These days, black and white film is increasingly hard to come by, and unless you’re lucky enough to have a specialist lab near you, you’ll find the sort of machine processing they do at “one hour” photo places leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to processing black and white film.

Many modern digital cameras have a dedicated black and white mode, but mostly they just desaturate the picture and make it look washed out. It often works out better to shoot in colour and convert the picture in Photoshop.

Of course, the easiest way of making a colour photo black and white in Photoshop is to convert the mode to grayscale (Image > Mode > Grayscale), but this does limit your options if you want to enhance the picture later on.

In traditional black and white photography, coloured filters are sometimes placed over the lens to create a dramatic contrast. This is done because hues that seem quite different in real life (in colour) can merge into one shade of grey when seen in monochrome. The intensity of the colours are the same, even though the actual colours are different.

For example, a blue sky with white clouds can appear weak and washed out in a black and white photograph. If you place a red filter over the lens, it will darken the blue sky and make the white clouds stand out more. This is because the red filter blocks the blue colour waves more effectively than it does colours that are nearer to red.

The great thing about Photoshop is it enables you to experiment and get the effect just right. The method I find works best involves keeping the picture in RGB mode, and adjusting one of the colour channels.

If you go to the Layers palette, click the Channels tab, then click on (say) the Red channel, you’ll see an image that resembles a red filter over the lens of a camera with black and white film. The darkening of the blue tinted areas will make a moody, sophisticated image. For comparison, click on the Green channel and then the Blue. The results will be surprising — and very different!

I like to then fine tune the result by adjusting the Levels. Keep your chosen channel selected, and then go to Image > Adjustments > Levels, and adjust the sliders until you get the desired result. Then be sure to save the picture as a new file to preserve your original.

Incidentally, if you apply this process to two channels at the same time, you can get some pretty stunning colour effects too!

Siri Stafford, my art director at the time, suggested this stock image for me. She asked me to make the image because she thought my specialty of using Photoshop to create conceptual stock images made me a logical choice for the job. I truly loved the idea; but what the heck would lightning hitting a tree really look like?

I turned to that technological development that has so radically changed the world of commercial photography…the internet. I simply typed in to Google’s image search “lightning and tree”. In just a few minutes I had found some obviously amateur images…but ones that were nonetheless stunning actual images of lightning hitting trees. Now I had something to work towards.

In my mind I pictured a lonely expanse of land with a single oak tree. A lightning bolt is caught as it hits the tree and illuminates the scene around it. The bolt travels down the trunk of the tree illuminating the leaves both from above and from behind at the same time. The sky is dark from storm clouds gathering at dusk.

Photographing the Oak Tree

There are many oak trees near my home in Marin County just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. I scouted an open space nearby and found an oak tree that suited my needs. I photographed it just before noon with a slight back lighting. At that time I was still using film and captured the image with a Hasselblad medium format camera on Kodak Ektachrome film. Due to the steep slope of the land I couldn’t get the whole tree in the frame, despite my wide-angle lens, unless I turned the camera to a diagonal angle. In the same space I found and photographed an open expanse of land with a foreground of wild oats. From my files I found a photograph of cloudy skies and some distant low mountains—shot in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a dirt road winding through the composition.

Getting a picture of a lightning strike

During a recent winter trip to Ladakh, a region in Kashmir often referred to as “Little Tibet” I got my lightning. It was long after dark and I was suffering both from altitude sickness and a case of the flue exacerbated by the extreme cold in my unheated guest room. A flash of light lit up the room and immediate rush of thunder testified to the closeness of the strike. Being as how I had never managed to shoot lightning (rarely do we get lightning in the San Francisco Bay Area), I managed to drag myself out from under the covers and grappled for my camera. With my head spinning from my physical condition I groggily shoved a roll of film in my F100, steadied on the windowsill, open the shutter and waited. Boom! Another flash. I repeated the procedure until I had shot a roll then climbed, shaking, back into my cot. As a stock photographer using Photoshop to composite so many of my images together, I am always on the look out for elements that I will be able to using in my stock composites. That effort finally paid off, I thought, as I scanned two of those lightning shots for this image. I made the scans using my Scanmate 5000 drum scanner and scanning the images at 100 megabytes each.

Using Adobe Photoshop to combine the images into a stock photo

I began assembling the image by using layer masks to paint together the landscape and cloud images. I merged the layers, duplicated the new layer, lightened it up with an adjustment layer of curves, and then used the layer masking to paint in the area to be “illuminated” by the lightning. The Tree was selected using the Color Range, magic wand, and lasso tools in conjunction with alpha channels. Making a selection of a tree with thousands of leaves is quite a challenge and in this case required not just the above sequence of operations, but also considerable time going in at 100% magnification and by hand, using the lasso tool, “cleaning up” even more of the tree selection. With the tree selected I copied and pasted it into the background. I duplicated the tree layer twice, darkened one with the curves and lightened the other. I then used layer masking to create the effect of light and dark areas where the lightning would be lighting up the leaves closest to the lightning bolt. Finally, I brought in the lightning bolt itself, pasted it in, and then setting the layer mode to “lighten” only. By setting the mode to “lighten” the pixels in the lightning image that were lighter than the underlying pixels of the rest of the image become the only ones visible…thus there was no need to “strip” the lightning bolt out of it’s dark background (I used the curves to darken the image enough to eliminate all but the lightning bolt itself). I used the liquefy brush to “fine-tune” the path of the bolt.

A timeless fine art image or stock photo

In the end I have not just a pretty picture, but a conceptual stock image that can be used to illustrate a number of marketing concepts. The image is exactly the kind of image that I strive to create, dramatic, useful and timeless. 

Welcome to the cadillac of photo-enhancers: Photoshop CS!

Retouching in Photoshop can be a breeze… but not until you learn how. The Photoshop CS program is such a powerful application you could spend years just mastering the basics.

Most of us, however, don’t really need a Masters in Photoshop. What most of us want is the flexibility, integrity and vast array of choices that Photoshop provides.

Let’s look briefly at some of the most basic photo corrections in Photoshop CD, the ones you’ll really need. Here are the first steps recommended by the experts, and they represent the process they apply to every photograph:

1- First and foremost, duplicate your original and work only on the copy.

That way, if something goes wrong, you’ll always have the original. This is a great habit to get into.

2- Next, assure the correct resolution. There are two basic categories of “resolution” in computer graphics: the monitor resolution and the image resolution.

Image resolution varies from low (about 72 pixels per inch, or “ppi”) to high (anything 300 ppi or larger). Of course, the higher the resolution, the bigger the file.

To change the resolution of your photo, click “Image,” then “Image Size.” On the bottom left of the box that comes up, type in the ppi you want, for example, 300 ppi. (You will probably want to change the size at this point. That’s fine, you will still retain the ppi you chose.)

3- Use your Crop tool ( ) from the toolbox to shape your picture the way you want it.

Many people don’t notice the width and height options underneath the top menu, but it’s a very handy feature.

At times you have an exact measurement you need to fill; rather than fiddling with the numbers after you crop, the proper way is to insert the width and height immediately after clicking the Crop tool, and then making the crop, dragging down diagonally with your mouse. You will notice the exact measurements appear without a struggle.

4- Experiment with your automatically adjusting features. Click on “Image” in your top menu, then “Adjustments.” You will see options for automatic levels, contrast and color. After you’ve tried them, you can go ahead and hone in to polish, if you like.

You can also try Image> Adjustments> Shadow/Highlight (or “Variations”). You’ll be astonished at the variety of preset options there.

As you gan imagine, there are endless variations on the themes represented by these basic steps and the choices made therein.

But Photoshop expands past them and out into the great beyond, offering an unlimited palette and a universe of options.

Your only problem will be how to tear yourself away.