The Art of Black & White Photography - Part 3

 Creating Black & White Fine Art Photographs using Luminosity Masks

Original Colour Image (Just so you know where I am starting from.)

Shot on Fujifilm X-T4 (RAW) with the Fujinon 23m f1.4 lens @ 5.6

          Original black & white conversion   -   Edited version using Luminosity Masks

Final cropped version edited using Luminosity Masks

Wow. Where do we start with this one? Personally I like black & white photographs more than most colour images. Maybe that is because when I started my journey in photography back in 1970, shooting in black & white was the only way to go if we wanted to process our film and make the prints ourselves.

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy editing and printing colour photographs but black & white is where it's at for me. The most difficult thing for people who never photographed in black & white is actually pre-visualizing what it is that we want to photograph. It is difficult because there are many colors that end up looking similar in tone in a black & white photograph. This is where the use of color filters would come in. The most common were, yellow, orange, red, green and blue. When I was a photojournalist shooting in black & white, very often I would place a yellow filter over my lens to lighten skin tones. You see, camera meters are set up to give an average exposure. For example, the main subject matter is metered for middle grey. Well, our skin tones, for the most part are not the brightness value of middle grey (Zone V), but rather just a bit lighter (Zone VI). So rather than dodge and burn people's faces for newspaper publication, I would just shoot normally, process the film normally and then make a straight print to go to press.

Since most photographers today shoot primarily in full colour and then after the fact, choose to create black & white versions of their colour photographs in image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop. There are many other pieces of image editing software on the market today that are capable of doing these conversions but since we are on the topic of Luminosity Masks and since I have been using Adobe Photoshop for over 30 years now, I'll continue to reference Adobe Photoshop.

Anyways, let's continue with Luminosity Masks. Luminosity Masks are a way or method of making precise and selective selections based on brightness values or tonal ranges in your images. Using these masks allows us to edit the highlights, midtones and or shadows separately in our images kind of sort of.

The term Mask(s) comes from pre-digital imaging when we wanted to mask or protect an area on our sheets of film when exposing using stat cameras in the pre-press department at the newspaper. The masks in those days were predominantly a shade or translucent red known as a red rubylith mask. Also depending on the sensitivity of the film being exposed, yellow masks were also used. But I digress ...

One of the quickest and easiest ways to create a luminosity mask in Photoshop is to go to the image's Channels Panel and Command/Control + Click on the RGB Composite Channel at the top of the Channel Panel. After doing so, you will notice an active selection in your document window. This selection is your Lightness Channel Mask. At this point it is wise to save this active selection so we can call it up again if we ever need to. To save an active selection simply go to the Select Menu and choose Save Selection. Photoshop stores this Saved Selection as an Alpha Channel. Be sure to give this selection a unique name such as Highlights. Now save your document to make sure that this new alpha channel is actually saved in your image file.

Hold down the Cmd key (Mac) Control key (Win) and click once on the RGB Composite Channel at the top of the Channel panel.

Doing so will load the lightness (luminosity) of the image as a selection. You can see the active selection in the image below.

Once you create a selection in Photoshop, you can actually save it inside your Photoshop document so you can come back to it at a later date and load it up again. The easiest way to save an active selection is to go to the Select Menu and at the bottom of the fly-out menu, choose Save Selection ...

When saving selections, it's always a good idea to name these selections with descriptive names and in this case I will name this one "Highlights". Click OK to complete this process. Great, now we have a selection of the lightest or brightest areas in our image and we can lighten them or darken them as we see fit. Next, we want to create a selection of our darker regions in our image.

Here is something else you will notice when working with black & white images; making the "Highlights" channel as the active channel as opposed to the having the RGB Composite as the active component in the Channel Panel, one looks identical to the other in the document window. Interesting ...

In essence what we want is the exact opposite of our "Highlights" channel that we just created. So let's Cmd click (Mac) / Control click (Win) on the "Highlights" channel in the Channel Panel to load it as an active selection.

Once we have done this we should see the active "Highlights" channel is our document window. But, we want the exact opposite of this so let's go back to the Select Menu and choose Inverse.

Now that we have done this, we have created the shadows channel. We will want to save this active selection as well so, once again back to the Select Menu and this time choose Save Selection ...

This time I will name this new channel "Shadows" and click OK.

Back in the Channel Panel I have clicked on the new "Shadows" channel to make it the active component in the Channel Panel. Take a look in the document window. What we now see reminds me of a black & white negative from the film days ...

Luminosity Masks (Alpha Channels) are greyscale documents - there is no colour information in them. There is only white, black and shades of grey in them. To verify this navigate to the Channel Panel and click on the alpha channel named Highlights. You should now see this channel in full view in your image window. Take a good look at it and study what it is that you see. 

When it comes to Alpha Channels or saved selections, as mentioned earlier, you will have black, white and many shades of grey. The way channels work when using them on layers in our Photoshop document is this; whatever it is that we are trying to do to our image be it lightening or darkening, increasing or decreasing saturation, enhancing colour(s) and so on; the white areas in the Luminosity Mask allows what we are doing to pass through to the image on the layer below and where you have black, the Luminosity Mask blocks or prevents that effect from coming through. White reveals and black conceals. Levels of grey allows the effects to partially pass through depending on how light or dark the amount of grey is. Kind of like a gradual thing and the best part is it is all based on the density of the image itself.

There you have it. You just created two Luminosity Masks and saved them as Alpha Channels with unique names for better identification.

I have also shown you two different ways to load your saved selections. You can load a saved selection by going to the Select Menu and from the fly-out menu choose Load Selection and from the resulting dialog choose your selection. This method works great if you are working with/in the Layers Panel. The other way is to work in the Channels Panel and Cmd click (Mac) / Control click (Win) on the selection you want to load up.

So this is what I believe is going on; when you created the first Luminosity Mask, the brightness values that were selected were from middle grey (Zone V) and lighter (Highlights). When you created the inverse, the brightness/lightness values selected were from middle grey (Zone V) and darker (Shadows). 

Let's take a look at what we can do with these two new Alpha Channels we just created: Highlights & Shadows.

First we will work with the Highlights in the image. In order to do that we need to load the Highlights channel (highlight selections) and from within the Layers Panel, create a Curves Adjustment Layer. The Curves Adjustment Layer has two components to it; the curves adjustment icon and linked to that is the layer mask which has the "Highlights" selection loaded into it. What Photoshop users usually do at this point is click in the middle of the curve in the graph and then drag up lighten or drag down to darken and that will work but I want to show you a different way to lighten and darken our image with a lot more precision and control.

Notice that this new curves adjustment layer has a blend mode of Normal and an opacity of 100%. Let's change the blend mode to "Screen" to lighten the image. Screen mode at 100% is going to be way too light but it's a start. Click the visibility icon of this layer on and off to see the effect it has on our image.

Notice that the highlights are really blown out at 100%. We will adjust this percentage a little later on.

Now let's load up the "Shadows" selection like we did for the "Highlights" and create another Curves Adjustment Layer but this time change the blend mode to Multiply. By default the layer's opacity is set to 100% and this as well is too strong of a value. See how dark thins got.

In order to really see the effects of this adjustment layer turn off the visibility of the "Highlights" layer by clicking on the tiny eyeball to the left of the adjustment layer icon itself.

Don't forget to rename these curves adjustment layers. It just helps identify which one is which. 

Click on the "Highlights" layer to make it the active layer and click the visibility eyeball so that it is in the on position (also make sure the "Shadows" layer is not visible) and set the "Highlights" layer opacity to 30%. The easiest way to adjust the layer opacity is this; Tap the "V" key to select the Move Tool and then tap the "3" key. This sets the layer's opacity to 30%. Tap the "5" and you are at 50% and so on. Now hit the "3" key once again so we are at 30% opacity.

Click the layer visibility icon to see the before and after. We have lightened the image ever so slightly.

No repeat these steps for the "Shadow" layer. In the image below, you can see that both the "Highlights" and "Shadows" layers are set to 30% opacity. To see the before and after of how these two adjustment layers are affecting our original image, simply hold down the "Option" key (Mac) / "Alt" key (Win) while clicking on the Background layer's visibility icon.

So here we have adjusted both the highlights and shadows in our image. If you find that 30% is not enough or too much, then by all means change the percentage values to your liking.

Ideally we would want to not include Zone V, Zone VI & Zone VII in the Highlights Channel and we would not want to include Zone V, Zone IV & Zone III in the Shadows Channel. Creating a Mid-Tone Luminosity Mask to affect the Mid-Tones separately from both the Highlights & Shadows can be somewhat challenging. Let's take a look at intersecting both the Highlights Channel and the Shadows Channel and only taking the common ground from them which theoretically would be the Mid-Tones.

Creating this Mid-Tones' Channel using this intersect method produces something that resembles what I will call "mud", at least in my experience, so I want to explore a different method of  creating a mask of just the Mid-Tones.

Let's see what this "Mud" is that I just mentioned. In order to do that turn off the visibility of both the "Highlights" and "Shadows" layers and click once on the Background layer to make sure that is the currently active layer in the Layers Panel. Also, double-click on the Properties Tab in order to collapse this group so we are not distracted by them.

The Properties Panel is grouped with the Adjustments and Libraries Panels just above the Layers and Channels and Paths ... oh my ... (Sorry, I just had to).

I have already loaded the "Highlights" selection and here I am loading the "Shadows" selection but this time I am choosing the Intersect with Selection in the Operations portion of the dialog.

What results from this usually confuses so many people because we do not see any active selection in the document window. The alert dialog reads as follows: Warning: No pixels are more than 50% selected. The selection edges will not be visible. Do not worry. There is an active selection you just can't see it or better yet, Photoshop can't display it - it all has to do with the density of the pixels selected.

Once you click Ok in the alert dialog this is what you will see. Doesn't look like anything is happening does it. No worries as the next step will take care of that.

With the Background layer selected in the Layers Panel, click on the Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel like we did for the "Highlights" and "Shadows" adjustment layers and create another Curves Adjustment Layer. Notice there is something in the adjustment layer's mask but not very obvious at this point.

Option-click (Mac) / Alt-click (Win) on this layer mask to make it visible in the document window. Examine it for a minute or two and then Option-click (Mac) / Alt-click (Win) again to bring us back so we can see our image as it really is. 

With this adjustment layer set to the Normal blend mode we do not see any change in our image.

Let's change this layer's blend mode from Normal to Overlay. This blend mode lightens the lights and darkens the darks in your image. Notice the subtle change in contrast.

Here I have chosen the Overlay blend mode and renamed this adjustment layer to Midtones. Go ahead and click the layer visibility icon on and off to see the effect this adjustment layer has on our image.

Now turn on the visibility of both the "Highlights" and "Shadows" layers to see the full effect of our edits to this point.

To do a before and after comparison simply hold down the Option key (Mac) / Alt key (Win) and click once on the Background layer's visibility icon. Option/Alt clicking on a layer's eyeball turns the other layers visibility on and off all at the same time.

Here only the Background layer is visible in the document window.

Here all layers are visible. Save your document. Much better don't you think? I think so.

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Until next time ...