Making Mono Conversions in Camera Raw - Dark Sky Effect

If you want to produce high-quality black & white photographs, the only option is to shoot in raw mode. If the capture data starts out in colour, you’ll have the chance to make use of the colour data information to determine what is the most suitable black & white outcome. If, on the other hand, you shoot directly in black & white in JPEG mode, you’ll lose the opportunity to get creative.

When editing raw files, the main things that affect the outcome of a black & white conversion will be the selected white balance and the black and white slider settings (such as in the HSL/Grayscale panel). When using Camera Raw or Lightroom, you may find it useful to select the Target Adjustment tool and use this to click on an area of interest in the image (such as the sky), and drag upwards to lighten or drag downwards to darken. This will set the black and white sliders automatically. Interestingly, the sliders in the Camera Calibration panel can also be used to apply further fine-tuned adjustments. You should find that these provide an extra level of control with which to enhance a black & white conversion.

The Split Toning panel controls in Camera Raw and Lightroom can be used to add colour-toning effects. The sliders in this panel can be used to adjust the hue, colour and saturation for both the highlights and shadows. There is also a Balance slider that lets you offset the balance between the shadow and highlight colour toning and provides a nice finetuning control for your split-tone effects.

CONVERSION TO CREATE A DARK-SKY EFFECT

1 STARTING POINT
This shows the colour original, which was shot outside the famous 72oz steak house in Texas, in the USA. The steak is free if you can eat one in an hour (I chose the Caesar salad). I selected this particular image to demonstrate a black & white conversion because it had a good mix of colours to work with.

2 CONVERT TO GRAYSCALE
First, I went to the HSL/Grayscale panel and checked the Convert to Grayscale box. This converted the colour image to black & white using a default conversion, in which all the sliders in the HSL/Grayscale panel were set to 0. As you can see, there is not much drama in the black & white conversion this produced.

3 WHITE BALANCE
I then adjusted the White Balance, with the Temperature slider dragged to the left to 3000, combined with a Tint setting of -100, applying a cooling white balance to the underlying colour data. This in turn affected the outcome of the black & white conversion after I clicked the Auto option in the HSL/Grayscale panel (see Step 2).

4 SPLIT TONING PANEL
I adjusted the Highlights and Shadows, dragging the Hue and Saturation sliders to achieve the warm split-tone effect. You’ll notice that adjusting the Balance slider will also affect the outcome. Even if the Highlights and Shadows settings are identical, adjusting the Balance slider can still have quite a subtle effect.

5 FINE-TUNING
To produce a stronger black & white conversion effect with more impact, I needed to manually adjust the sliders in the HSL/Grayscale panel. In this instance, I dragged the Yellows and Greens sliders to the right to lighten the grass, and dragged the Aquas and Blues sliders to the left to darken the sky.

6 CAMERA CALIBRATION
For stronger and even more dramatic black & white conversions, you can also use the Camera  Calibration panel sliders. Here, you can see that I adjusted the Green Primary Hue and Saturation sliders, as well as the Blue Primary Hue and Saturation sliders to produce a really dark sky and a high-contrast effect.

Tutorial 2:39 PM