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Scott Steinson's picture

Buntzen Lake in Black and White

New to Black and White. I love the look of the water. For post production all I did was look at the Fuji Black and White/Acros film simulations and chose the one I liked the most. How do I improve this photo?

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8 Comments

its a little flat play with the color sliders to see if you can bring out the details that you think are important also you can do curves masking and levels masking to accentuate certain things i try an example but i would refer you to Phillip on this as he has a better eye for B&W detail

Editing from a B&W photo is a bit more difficult than starting with a color original, but I worked up a quick edit to add a little tonal range to the image. The dark mountain on the right was a little flat, so that got a little more detail. You should be able to get better results from your own original image.

I would suggest saving all your images as RGB files instead of Grayscale. While 8-bit Grayscale will save you some disk space, there are fewer and fewer apps that play well with the limited palette. I had to convert this to RGB just to work with it in Silver Efex Pro.

Good job, Phillip! Trust you. I especially like the luminosity in the water - mid-tone contrast?

I used control points in Silver Efex to adjust the Brightness, Contrast, and Structure at three points in the water. I felt it needed a little more "pop."

Thank you Phillip. I appreciate your help and expertise.

Tried reprocessing again from scratch, got the exact same result. I think I'll spend some more time learning about Lightroom before I bother you folks again.

As long as it's not too discouraging for you, Scott - "bother" us please! I learn something from almost every discussion, and it's interesting to see others' work - and struggles. We all have them! They don't stop. Your work is good, and I always look forward to seeing what you're up to.

What Chris said. Don't stop posting just because you think the comments are discouraging. The best way to learn is by finding out what you can do better and the only way to find out what that is is by hearing it from your peers.

And by the way, I don't use Lightroom. For the version I created, I used an app called Silver Efex Pro. Until today, I told people it's a free app. Turns out it was acquired by DXO and it's now $69 for the full Nik Collection of editing apps that includes Silver Efex. I happen to think it's still a bargain for the results you'll get.