Playing with black and white contrast in Lightroom Classic

Saturday 14 January 2023, 13:31 by Nando Harmsen | 4,097 views | 0 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

A black and white photo can be very striking. But you do need to work on it. Simply pressing the black and white button is not enough. You need to play with contrast. In this article, I show you how far you can go in Lightroom Classic.

Sometimes I see a black and white photo on social media and think: they only clicked the black and white button. Often, it isn't a black and white photo, but a grey photo. It only contains grey tones from the midtone range.

What's missing is black and white. In short, contrast. When you start working with black and white, make sure there is actually black and white in the image. In this article, I want to show you how far you can go. How far you want to go with your photo is up to you.

The original, unedited raw file in Lightroom Classic. This is what we'll work with.

I immediately clicked the black and white button. The result is a grey photo without contrast. This is boring and rarely desirable.

A simple adjustment to the contrast greatly improves the photo. You do this simply by increasing the contrast and playing with shadows, highlights, whites and blacks.

Look for the most optimal contrast in your photo, but be careful not to go too far. I've gone very far here, and perhaps even too far. Or perhaps not? Always do this according to your own taste, and if you no longer know, look at the result again after a few days.

I decide to create an even more extreme contrast, almost literally black and white, without many grey tones. I do this with the tone curve in Lightroom Classic. This lets you seek out the extremes.

The bright spots are very distracting in this extreme contrast. But with a mask, I can lower the exposure completely, reduce the whites, and do whatever else is needed to turn all the distracting white spots black.

This makes for a striking image, but I need a tight crop to make the image really speak.

And then the final result. It has become a completely different photo, one I hadn't imagined beforehand. But I like it.

How far you go with your editing is up to you, and it depends on your photo. With this article, I want to show you what's possible. Just don't turn it into a fairground attraction with special effects. Keep it simple, and your image will be much more striking.

There are, of course, exceptions where high contrast simply doesn't work. I’m thinking of a photo of a landscape in the fog, for example. Or a photo with a washed-out appearance. But in the latter case, remember that a black and white photo with good contrast came before that washed-out appearance.

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About the author

Nando Harmsen has been photographing for more than 40 years. He specialises in wedding photography and landscape photography. Nando also gives talks, workshops, masterclasses and photo trips, and regularly reviews new and interesting equipment.

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