Subtitles of the Movie

Now, we touched on gray scale in a previous lesson, but let's focus a little more on gray scale or black and white so that you can know all of the capabilities that are available in Lightroom. Of course, we saw over here, in the Presets area, where we can do an automatic black and white adjustment and then we can adjust from there, low contrast, high contrast, cold tone, and so on, but I think there's a way to do this that's a bit better than using these presets. Let's collapse that so we can see our image. We come over here to the right column, and let me collapse some of this so that we'll have a little bit more room to work with. We see this gray scale and we click on that and it renders our image black and white. Now, that's just straight across the board, equal boost on all the color groups, gray scale conversion, but it's a little flat. It's not particularly appealing. Some of the detail is missing and I think we can improve on how this looks. There's a couple of ways to go about it. We take the gray scale image and we go up to our tone curve, and again, I wish this were an exact duplicate of Photoshop, but be that as it may, we deal with that we have. What I think would look good is to punch these highlights to here, punch the lights as well, and then come down on the darks. You've got to play with this to kind of balance it out, but I think that looks much, much better. It's got a little punch. It's visually appealing. Let's bring those shadows up just a bit because we have some detail right in here. Here's the ball and that's kind of what we want to see, so let's go ahead and bring this up just a touch and then we look at that and we see off-on in that regard, but this is what we're interested in, before and after, before and after. I think you would agree that the second choice gives you a much punchier, a much more interesting black and white image to look at. Now, let's take this tone curve out and let's take a look at what we can do, as we've seen in a previous lesson, but it bears repeating. We can take the red and boost it, and there's a lot of red in this image because the Bulldogs have red uniforms, and you can see the reaction there. If you want to darken, you can do it that way. There's a little bit of orange. I think it might do good to darken the turf just a little bit because it helps to focus attention on the players. Of course there's green in this image. Not a whole lot of blue. There's some purple, but let's boost that purple. It brings out some of the detail in the darker images. Not much magenta. Let's boost the reds. Let's boost the oranges. There we have, you know, the adjustment on a black and white image. I think that looks tremendous, if I do say so myself. There's before and after, before and after. See how the illumination and the focus of the image has shifted to the players, where we had all this light area down here, in the turf, where we don't need it, and the players were dark. You couldn't even see the ball. You look at the adjustments we've made here and we see a much improved gray scale or black and white image. So those are the black and white image capabilities in Lightroom.