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Skin Tones in Black and White

Lesson 4 from: Create Better Black and White Photographs

Chris Orwig

Skin Tones in Black and White

Lesson 4 from: Create Better Black and White Photographs

Chris Orwig

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Lesson Info

4. Skin Tones in Black and White

Lesson Info

Skin Tones in Black and White

Talk about skin tones this is where things get interesting and I will talk about photo shop here in a minute um this dickie develop module this is this kai he's this fascinating famous surfer rob machado and this photograph we're gonna do a little bit but what I want to highlight was a quick photography thing to think through what it is when I walked up to the scene here is rob talking to the surfboard shame pay shaper both famous guys this is the best kind of light for me it's a garage door it's a warehouse and all I had to have him do was stand in front of the surf boards just a little bit in the shade lights bouncing off the concrete back into him it's a balloon of beautiful luminous light and so that's how you get that kind of look and then knowing that it's really even to know and I want to go black and white I say wiki for victory command one go back over there and with that I hit my black and white panels and we've already seen this with my daughter but I think it's really impor...

tant to illustrate what are sliders dio they can ruin people's texture on their skin this is an exaggeration it's silly which is good you guys left but you can also sort of get rid of freckles even and you see what my zoom rate is here um well, it's kind of look at going to see the little teeny texture on his skin. How I can bring that up and down that zoom right isn't good. Let me do it so you can see no, um right there. Um, so what we can do is we can find those two in these two sliders tend to travel together a little bit meaning I can't really have a low orange gonna go low orange and then in my red goes up because that creates a strange pattern. And as does you know, my red goes down a little bit too much you can see unless I want freckles. You know, freckles are amazing. I like, um especially people who are out in the sun a lot and surf and all those things, but other situations you maybe want to drop so point mean, skin tone ones with these sliders to get them to glow because in black and white, what you want with skin often is that teo have a brightness to it have this kind of this. I don't know this just this drawing people into that part of the image we can do. Our other things here in this image, I'll go through my work flow, and at that point, I think I might want to try something else reiterating the old shortcut command apostrophe on a mat control impossibly on windows and on this when I say well what if I just deep in those blacks up and what I really want to do is just you know I kind of have something with mme or even mohr variety command three go and bring up my reds and it's not even bright enough yet for me I'll use a radio tour some kind of selective adjustment will talk more about this later but hotpoint mean I did something else to it backslash gives me the before and after of those steps again I'm just trying to give you that again so we remember it right all right let's look at a couple other examples to more this is a good friend bruce and I was photographing him in his office and was like bruce do something crazy he always draws and creates and so he shoot on a cran it's not great so anyway v for black and white um again a lot of times we start here we're doing kind of that work flow with getting what we have here in this image is one where I think it can really benefit you know, my mother looks a little strange because it's projecting but I'm my own machine having that high clarity really helps a photograph like this I'm paying attention to my my color temperature to just see if that's affecting the image in a good way or bad command three I go into no, I can control my skin tones and just thinking about those because they're primarily reds and oranges all right, one mohr, this is linda she's, the founder of linda dot com a good friend as well with something like this, what I'm trying to do is simplify the picture I go v for the black and white I want contracts, I want deep blacks, and again, you're kind of getting where I'm going with this, right isn't funny. Now that you've seen this, you're like, ok, I'm getting a workflow wiki work through the basic panel, double check a few things, you know, make sure if you're swinging stuff hard, you know you might want to check out, you know, make sure you double check for noise and different things like that all rights, skin tones and the power of the red and the orange sliders and black and white if you remember nothing else that skies it's the blue slider, right? But that can really help out let's do another portrait, and in this image, I want to go through this one a little bit more and decent work on it andi also talk about working and photoshopped, so this is patricia good friend she's, an amazing printer and great photographer, so in this case, before I do all my black and white stuff, I'm kind of now getting into more typical work flow, which is if black and whites about contrasts and retouching becomes really important class yesterday, because little skin variations become more noticeable when you add more contrast. So what I need to do is get rid of those things. The shortcut for the spot healing tool. What is that one? Q. How can you remember that? I don't know there's some quickly remove spots that looks like a cue? Yeah, on dh then we have the ability to click through and click on our problem areas. Sometimes we want always identify or see those problem areas so there's a great shortcut, which or great tool, which is the visual eye spots the way I remember that is a for awesome, because that can really reveal things or reveal issues you weren't aware of and okay, so anyway, we know how this works, but it's really important. So again, just getting into workflow, spending some time getting up close the circles, which are little overly graphics here, showing us the areas that we worked on, and also giving us ability to go back to those areas meaning we can click on this one and delete it or change it or whatever with that little thing. Get rid of that is those overlay graphics are distracting someone's going to remember for me the shortcut to hide those which is the if you had to guess hp hp toggles is visibility goes on and off on and then if you have it on auto overlay which I recommend when your cursor goes away that's a quick way to hide and showing hide those as well all right, so this damage let's say I'm fired up about the color which I think is kind of fun and I like her expression all that I'm ready to hit to photo shop so to get to photo shop its command deanna matt control leon windows or photo edit in edit in adobe photoshopped this sends the image over to photo shop on dh what we want to do is continue to work on it there here in photo shop I'm gonna press shift f actually yeah right they're shipped off a couple time just go full screen mode so I have a little bit better view of this and with this image we have some options with our black and white conversions and I won't talk about those one is the black and whites adjustment way and with the black and white adjustment later we have sliders which we're already friends with we know if there's skin in this image that we're thinking reds right, we can that's going to bring out text me, which I don't want we want to take that away we have yellow is, you know, there's a lot of yellow on the skin that's kind of getting into the deeper some of those deeper color is so very similar work flow to what we have before so we can bring out some of those those brighton some of those tones we can also go into blues, you know, if some blues in the shirt down here but you can't really see what I could customize can have that shirt if I want that darker which would actually work well, draw more attention to the face and photographs are I goes to areas of sharpness and brightness and color the color is gone so it's about brightness and contrast and sharpest those things or where the eyes going all right, so that's maybe step one step two might meet a use curves and when we click on the curves adjustment layer icon and it gives us a dialogue where we can click and drag you know, we imagine we all know this kind of stuff but weaken dark in our bright in different parts of the image and maybe we just want to throw a little contrast back into the image so we have sort of are before and after with the work flow so that's one option when I'm working with layers I like to group into group a couple airs click on one hold on the shift key click on another command g for group commands a big shortcut do something big and bold that command this to happen you know options like anyone do something different you know and I think the option key kind has tattoos and hearing you know command is like the you know where I don't know it's like oh what is it? Yeah it's like the crossfit like yeah so anyway or control to very controlling only commander control g groups it up and we'll just double click that to give it a name of black and white all right, well let's say that we wanted to just compare that to camera rock and say like ok yeah that's a that's one way let's do the camera inside of photo shop in with this image oh, go to my background and duplicate that copy and drag it up top will not drag it into the folder here's a nice shortcut that I like to use you guys like when I threw out shortcuts or is it confusing? Yes ok commands the big one right command like do some big so if I press command right bracket on that control left right bracket on windows that's going to reorder a layer so if I have a ton of layers on by press command right brackett I can go up and down you know I had to reorder those just a nice kind of geeky trick if you want to throw something on top by way of your keyboard. Okay, so there it is. Let's go ahead names one b w for black and white we go to a filter and with two options with her filtering we could just run a filter straight as is or we can turn into smart filter smart filters whatever advantage there you guys probably know flexibility you could always undo what you've done right disadvantage of smart filters this file size so it's saving a lot more information in there and so I'm gonna go convert for smart filters in case I don't like what's happening here layer will change graphic of the layer we'll see we'll have a little different icon associated with it and photo shop is trying its trying there it is then I'm going to go to my filter and run camera as a smart filter. The reason why smart filters are great if you aren't familiar with them is if I decide to de saturate and well cameras the filter is crashing s o this may I may need to change my demo here, but look at that this is a new kind of camera it's one where you have to work blindly and but anyway I click ok let's just see if it runs um and the long story short is with that on there, I have the ability to turn it on and off. Hopefully, obviously it looks like my something needs to be restarted that solves all problems, right? It's re start, I'm not gonna do that, but if it crashes, I will. But there go great thank you I have found when you get mad at software, it gets mad back at you, so I find that be nice to it helps out if I find that contrast was I didn't like that or I'd rather have gone to my sliders. We'll just pretend I went there, I'm going to cancel out of that if I went there, I flexibility with that and what I was going to show his camera, which I won't, is that what you might have been able to do is the adjustment. Russia's? Well, so sometimes, you know you can do that versus with my adjustment layers. I didn't have the adjustment russian there, I didn't have noise reduction to deal with that stuff in my sky, so accessing what we learned in camera here can really help us out, right?

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Chris Orwig - Create Better BW Photos - Reference Guide.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

user-11539f
 

I LOVED this and loved Chris as a teacher! I get frustrated when the teachers jump around and don't explain things thoroughly. But Chris is great! Lots of new helpful ways to do things. Very informative and very helpful. I have purchased countless Creative Live classes and he is a new favorite! Thank you Chris!!

Rebecca George
 

one of my very favorite teachers -- love this class and found it SO helpful. Chris is so great about repeating the important stuff in a way that makes it stick. This class gave me the tools to be able to edit more quickly and efficiently. Totally worth the money.

Student Work

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