Darker Skies in Black & White

Many black & white edits one can see nowadays contain these really striking, dramatic and dark skies. It is often attributed to the combination of a red filter with a polarizer, but from my tests with a red filter I can assure you that it is not possible to get that effect straight out of the camera - at least not with digital (depending on the time of day, the red filter will have surprisingly little impact to the brightness of the sky). Maybe things are different with film - I don't know.

Anyhow, it's not all too difficult to achieve a similar effect in post processing, and it's not really necessary to use specialized black & white conversion filters/plugins for it - Lightroom alone does the trick pretty well.

I've explained how to achieve an infrared look in post processing with Lightroom before and the technique I described there to get really deep and dark blue tones can be further enhanced with local adjustments. That can be the local adjustment brush, or a graduated filter, like in my example below.

Here's the - otherwise finished - image with a "normal" sky (click to enlarge):

And for your comparison, here's the "more drama" version with a graduated filter to darken the sky (again, click to enlarge):

The "trick" is to combine a decreased Brightness/Exposure* with increased contrast on the local adjustment/graduated filter. More contrast means: dark tones become darker, and bright tones become brighter - by compensating the increase of brightness in the highlights (due to contrast being at +100) with a decrease of Brightness/Exposure, we can get a darker sky while the clouds appear almost unaltered.

Needless to say - the source material is important, just as always. This was late in the afternoon and the sky was not too brightly blue anymore and I used a polarizer to further darken it (I couldn't use full polarization though - at 16mm wide angle on full frame, it would lead to a very uneven darkening of the sky).

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*) Lightroom's Brightness control is a midtone adjustment that has less effect on the highlights and thus is my choice for this type of edits, or brightness adjustments in general. If you need to brighten an image without blowing out the highlights, leave the Exposure setting alone and adjust Brightness instead - it's nicely illustrated in this video on YouTube.

Google+ is not a photo sharing service

With all the frenzy about Google+ and the ton of photographers there, let me remind you that Google+ is not a photo sharing service. It's a social network that does not primarily target photographers. That's a good thing as I mentioned before - because it allows you to reach a broader audience than on dedicated photo sharing sites.

However, it also means that the wishes and needs of photographers are not getting the weight that one who belongs to this user group would hope for, of course.

The latest confirmation for that was the update of Google+'s so called "lightbox", their full-screen photo viewer: on an otherwise black background, the comments bar to the right of the photo has a white background now. There is also no way to get a "clean" view of just the photo: either the "hide comments" button or the caption/comments are shown on top of the photo itself (ironically, that happens when you click the button to hide the disgrace of the white comment box).

I can't help but think that, while excitedly playing with opacity and fade effects, the developers lost track of the original purpose of a photo viewer. :-S The lightbox is now (over) loaded with social networking features - the share button, the face tagger, the +1 button, the white comments box... it is, to say the least, not exactly an aesthetically pleasing presentation method for photos in it's current implementation.

At the same time, Google is also trying to hide Picasa Web Albums (their original and dedicated photo sharing service) more and more: if you follow the link to a Google+ users Picasa Web Albums, you will automatically be redirected to the Google+ album view from now on - which means you can't "follow" Google+ users Picasa Web activity anymore if you're a "normal" Picasa Web Albums user - the Google+ album view doesn't offer the "Follow" feature from Picasa Web Albums. Everyone's supposed to join Google+.

And you know what makes dedicated photo sharing services like 500px and Flickr really shine? The RSS feeds that they offer. I mentioned before that I love feeds - both 500px and Flickr offer dedicated feeds that contain all the photo uploads from your contacts. It's a super convenient way of following the photo activity of your friends and contacts - via Google Reader for example. In stark contrast to that, Google+ doesn't offer any feeds at the moment. You can still use the method I described in my article to subscribe to a users photo stream, but it happened to me already that the original Picasa Web Albums feed of some Google+ users were empty. Whether that's a bug or intentionally remains to be seen.

Stay tuned...

Lightroom Tip: Saturation

Sometimes, I want to add more saturation to my images and neither the Saturation nor the Vibrance control will help - they affect the entire range of colors in an image, which is too much. Tweaking the individual colors in the HSL panel on the other hand is not enough and their effect is too isolated.

Luckily, there's an "in-between" way of altering the saturation: the "Primary" controls in the Camera Calibration panel. It's necessary to play with them to understand how they work, and it's good to remember how each individual pixel and it's color are actually the result of de-mosaicing the Bayer pattern - you wouldn't expect the Blue Primary to have an effect on the green, orange and yellow colors, but that's what happens.

Here's a quick example, a scene from a recent hike to Corte Madera Peak in San Diego's back country. From my point of view, we were extremely lucky with the weather: once we reached the summit, a set of clouds moved in like a gentle veil that muted all colors and took the surrounding hills entirely out of view. That's just the conditions that I'm looking for, because it allows to concentrate on the visible subjects without distraction.

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Above is the "almost final" image - it's nice, but I found something missing for that final "pop". It lacks the extra boost of color which was applied to the "final" version by increasing the Blue Primary saturation to +70, which is shown below. You can switch back and forth between the two images in the Lightbox (just click on the photo). The difference might appear subtle to some, but it's often these subtle differences that really "make" an image, right?



I hope you found this little tip helpful and that it encourages you to really explore all the options that Lightroom has to offer - don't fear to tweak whatever you want. CTRL-Z is your friend! ;)

PS: the image is also part of my "The Veil" set over on my main website. Have a look!