done this episode I’ll be showing you my
abbreviated version of the zone system for shooting black and white photos.
Adorama TV presents Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace.
Hi everybody welcome to another episode of Exploring Photography right here on Adorama TV. I’m Mark Wallace in the city of Puno Peru
and my altimeter says that I’m just shy of 13,000 feet and so I’m having
a tough time breathing on this very busy street. Well I was out shooting today with my 5D
Mark III, my 24-70 millimeter lens and there is not a cloud in the sky
there is just a lot of shadows and contrast and that means it’s a perfect
setup for shooting black and white photos and
that’s what we’re gonna be talking about in this episode. Shooting black and white photos using
the zone system that was originally created by Ansel Adams. I’m going to be showing you my
abbreviated version, my interpretation of his own system, specifically on how to do
post-production and get really contrasty, dark, moody images. But before we do that I wanna
talk to you about the contests that Adorama’s hosting right now. They have
awesome contests and you can win some great prizes. So click the link can you might win
today. Now when we’re shooting black and white
photos were not actually just shooting black-and-white, we’re shooting black a bunch of shades of grey, all the way to light grey to white. Now back in the past we only shot film,
there was a system called the zone system that Ansel Adams created and system was used for seeing light for
processing negatives and going into the dark room to process
your prints so you’d get these really high contrast, beautiful prints. We don’t talk much about this zone system
these days because well film and digital photography are a little
bit different. But in this episode i wanna talk to you about my abbreviated version
of the zone system. Instead of using 12 stops of light like
Ansel Adams did, we’re gonna use 5 zones. Now don’t send me an email saying this isn’t the zone system. I know it’s not the zone system, but it’s rooted in the zone system. Well let’s talk about those five zones of light. Those zones are black, shadows, mid tones, highlights and whites. Now to understand all of this
stuff better we really need to dive into Lightroom
and take a closer look. So let’s do that right now. To get started let’s take a look at
those zones again we have black, our shadows, mid tones’s, highlights and whites. Now they are not distributed like this in this top bar. If we looked at in evenly distributed from
black all the way to white. A gradient. The black’s really take up just a
small portion or the very darkest the greys. Our shadow’s take up a lot
larger portion. The mid tones are right in the middle.Our highlights take up another large portion, and our whites really are the
very very edge, the absolute whites. Now we can
actually see these in our develop module on the histogram. So take a look here you can see it says blacks, shadows, exposure, now that’s mid tones and we’ll explain that later why thats called exposure in the
histogram, and then we have our highlights and our whites. We can see on the histogram we actually have spikes here that shows us that this lines up to what our zones are. We have two spikes over here in the
highlights because we have a highlight here and then I made this little background it’s a little bit lighter and so that shows up as the second spike. We can also see that these show up here. We’ve got exposure or our mid tone’s. We’ve got highlights, shadows, whites and
blacks. We’re gonna be using need to adjust our images. Now what we want to do, we
have a goal, and our goal is to create high contrast
black and white images using these zones to manipulate
the total values in our images. We want blacks that are
absolutely black, and we what whites that are absolutely
white and we want to adjust everything else according to our
artistic vision. The process works like this. First we adjust our mid tone’s. Then we set our black and white points. Next we adjust the
shadows and highlights according to our artistic vision. Then we make color
conversion adjustments if we need to and then last, we do some fine-tuning. Well
now that we know the basic steps to our process let’s put those steps into action by editing 3 images. The first
image we’re going to edit is this color image. We’re going to learn how to identify
where the different zones are and then convert this to a high contrast
black and white image. This will give us the basics of our editing process. The second image is this image of this lock. We’re going to do
something I like to call zone shifting, where we set our black and
whites and our mid’s. Then we’re gonna shift some of those shadows and highlights zones into other
zones to create a really high contrast sharp image. Then
lastly we’re going to take a look at this image,
where we shift some the color conversions to see how color impacts our black and white conversions. it’s really important. Let’s get started by editing this
wall. So I will go over into the developed module. Now before we get started on this I wanna
show you a little trick that Lightroom has for us. So I’m gonna open up our chart that we
started with. We need a visual cue to show us where the absolute whites and the absolute blacks are when we begin to edit our images. Now to
do that what we can do is there are these little triangles up here in the histogram and
this will show us our clipping. So highlight clipping and our shadow
clippings just click on that. Anything that absolutely white will show
up as red. Anything that’s is absolutely black will show up as blue. I can turn it on and off by hitting
the ‘J’ key. Or by clicking these little triangles in
histogram. I prefer the ‘J’ key and so that will really
help us out. Alright so let’s get started on this
wall here. The very first thing I want to do is
set my mid tones, and do that, actually very that first
thing I want to do is convert this from a color treatment to a
black-and-white treatment. So let’s do that right now. Now the first thing I want to do is to
set my mid tones. Now I do that by using the exposures
slider. What I can do is if I slide this to the
right my mid tone values will increase and if I slide this to
the left they will decrease. In other words in luminosity they’ll get brighter or
darker. That way I can say, you know what do I want this to be my mid tone or this to be my mid tone? If I want this to be my mid tone well, I need
to sort of slide that to the right. If I want this to be by mid tone I need to
slide that to the left to bring that into my mid tone values. That’s the very first thing you want to do
is, say where your midterms are and you get to choose. This is something Ansel
Adams was a big about saying you choose where the middle gray
is and then work your way out from there. So
I want my middle grey to sort of be this bottom area and this door, this
bottom door. I don’t wanna lose a lot of details in the blacks up here where the shadows are in the door. So I’m gonna bring that back pretty close to
where it was because I thought we had a pretty good starting point. So right back to 0. This image we have a
good starting point. Right next let’s set the black-and-white
points. To do that I’m going to press ‘J’ on my keyboard so I can start bringing
the blacks down to see where that is showing up.
See I’m getting a lot of blacks here. I’m gonna bring this down so I start seeing
blacks not bleeding into the details in the
shadow areas, because I wanna still see that. So I’ll bring that down. Think that’s about as much as I want to
do there because it’s starting to impact the door. I wanna see those details. Next I’m gonna bring my whites up. You can see on the histogram we don’t have any whites. So I will bring those over to the right.
Keep going, keep going, keep going. Now we start to see some white showing
up in our image and that is really giving us a lot more contrast then we
started with. Right now that I have my black and white point set, I will turn off
those warning labels. Now I’m gonna start working with my shadows. Up here in this
corner we don’t really see much in the door and so what I’ll do here is I’m going to take the shadows and shift them to the
right to bring the more into the mid tone area. Now we’re seeing some of those values show up here. We can actually see the details in the door and up here on the wall and then I’m
going to play with the highlights just a bit. Bring those down just a hair, maybe a
bit more. So I’m gonna see a little bit more of the
detail in this wall. That looks pretty good. Now im I need to
do some fine-tuning here. One of the things you can do as you can do is you can just go into the contrast slider and just slide that back and forth or do some sharpening and
some things like that. I think this is a pretty good basic
conversion from our color to our black and white image. Right now
that we have some of the basics down let’s get an image that is more
appealing to us. When I was shooting this wall I notice that there is this lock on
the door that had some really interesting light and so
that’s where we’re going to go next. So here is our lock. Now this lock we’re
really gonna get into the nitty-gritty of converting to black and
white. Notice that we can see details across the board here. So we’ve
got shadows here we can see detail in the upper right-hand side. I want
this to be a super contrasty image. So the very first thing I’ll do is
convert this again of the treatment to black and
white. Alright this is sorta contrasty it but is not where I
want it to be. The mid tones are exactly where I want
them to be I like where the mid tone values are. So I’m not gonna
change the exposure slider at all it. It’s in a good place. But I really want this to be
more contrasty, so I’m gonna turn on my clipping warnings here. I’m gonna
start by taking my blacks way down. So we’re gonna go all the way down into the eighties maybe about right there. So 88, 89 in that area. So you can see that I’ve really taken the blacks down. So we’ve
got a much more contrasty image but you can see we don’t have any
whites in this image really. So let’s do that next. So I’m gonna take my
whites and I will keep those going higher and higher and
higher. Until I’m about well, about right there. I’m judging
this based on these red clipping highlights showing up. These little
the warnings. So I want this to be really contrasty and you can see immediately that we have a high contrast image. But we lost a lotta detail up here. Our shadows have gone away. Our detail on our lock is gone away and
so we need to bring that in. So now let’s play with the shadows and the highlights. So the shadows what I
want to do to bring some detail back in So I’m gonna say you know what, shift those to the right
about like that so we’re in the forties the upper forties. So you can see that we are just now are starting to get a little bit more detail up here that was completely black. So
we’ve shifted the shadows from black back into the shadow area. So
we’ve shifted that zone back. The next thing I do is play with
the highlights here. Now the highlights what I want to do is I want to take them and i wanna go the
opposite way. So I checked the highlights from the highlight area and shift them
down into the mid tone area. So I’m gonna go left and shift those
down. Down, down, down. So we’re gonna take those down into the 50’s. About like that, and that is affecting this area right
here making it much, much more contrasty. I really like this. Now one of the issues though I’m having
is I really wanted to see the detail on that lock. Well guess what we can go
up here and we can use an adjustment brush in
Lightroom. I’m gonna tell it to take my shadows all the way up to almost 100
and then I’m going to paint on top of this lock here and that’s
shifting those really dark shadows up into almost
the mid tone range. Not quite but we’re getting
some of that detail back. So I’ll close that. You can see we
have a really dramatic image. So we went from
something that wasn’t very contrasty to do something that’s
extremely contrasty. Take a look at that. Let’s see if we can look, I saved a little a snapshot here and you can see where we
went from the color image back to where we were. There. That is a huge, huge difference. Okay last but not least we’ve gotta
figure out how color impacts our black and white images. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go
into this portrait that I made of this gentlemen here in Puno. A really
great guy. Now one of the things that happens
when you go in and you create a black-and-white image from a
color image, is the colors are converted to different luminosities and by default Lightroom determines what
those color mixes are. You can see this down
here in the black and white mix. So theres sort of this auto setting that
happens automatically. Now we can’t go into great detail into
that in this episode but I didn’t an episode on it. Its digital photography 1 on 1 : episode 232 :
how color influences black and white photography. I
really suggest that you watch that. Let’s take a look here. If we go over
here there’s this little dot. I can click on that. When I do I get the
special icon and then I can click on area in an image and I
can make it darker or brighter. What I’m doing is I’m
adjusting the luminosity of the orange in my conversion and by doing that I am making this guy’s
face darker or brighter. So maybe sometimes I’ll
go in here and I’ll click this auto conversion. You can see that this is
sort of a dull image, but I can click on his face I can
bring that up. I can click on the background I can
bring that down. Uou can do all kinds of things, you can make his coat a little bit darker. I can get a much
much better conversion by playing with this mis of colours in my black and white mix. Again make sure you look at Episode 232: how color influences black and white
photography for more information on this but don’t forget that that is available
cuz you can really make a big difference to your black and white images. Right
there you go all the different steps for converting images from color to black and white
using the zone, the abbreviated zone system and some color conversion. Well I hope this
will you help you with your post processing a black-and-white images. I just want to mention that this
video doesn’t include everything that we could possibly talk about about black
and white photography but I have some more videos at the Adorama
Learning Center that will help you with this topic. Specifically fifty shades of
black about processing the different mid tone’s and shadows and
blacks in an image. Understanding stops if that’s new to you
and a bunch of other videos so make sure you check out the Adorama Learning Center for more
information and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of Exploring Photography or any
Adorama TV video. Thanks again for joining me and I’ll see you again next
time. Do you want great-looking print’s at low-cost? Be sure
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