I think of myself as primarily a colour photographer… I admire well conceived and executed B&W images, but have to admit that I just don’t see the world that way. From time to time though an opportunity presents itself where colour doesn’t really seem to convey the message, and perhaps even gets in the way of message.
Whenever I head to Paris, I always seem to end up shooting the Eiffel Tower at some point. I know it’s easily the most photographed travel icon the world… but I somehow I just can’t help myself. So, one evening we headed up to the Trocadero with its elevated plaza providing great views of the Tower to the south-east. Intrigued by the combination of the Tower and the statues surrounding the plaza, I balanced on top of a low wall and fired of a few frames. Later once in Lightroom I chose a more “square-ish” aspect for cropping the image than the than the more rectangular format native to a dSLR — it just seemed to work better.
The image was just “OK”. After thinking about what drew me to the image in the first place, I realized that colour, rather than strengthening the image was detracting from it. For me, this image was about the arrangement of shape, form, and the visual texture created by the lattice work of the tower. While the contrast of warmly lit tower against the cool blue of the early evening sky was interesting, again, the image was more about shape and texture, to which in this case, colour contributed nothing.
In Lightroom, I had already adjusted the Basic Tonal sliders, so nothing more was needed there. Moving down to the HSL/Color/B&W pane, I selected “B&W”,
If you are using Adobe Camera Raw (“ACR”) and Photoshop, select the “HSL/Grayscale” tab in ACR, and check “Convert to Grayscale”
…either approach will create this image:
This is a straight conversion of the colour image to B&W, created by mapping the underlying colour information to a B&W tone, based on its brightness value (remember this is still a colour image). The result ends up being pretty flat; lacking in the tonal contrast I had envisioned. To fix this we can utilize differences in the underlying colour information to adjust the brightness of some areas differently than others. For example, the sky is made up of mostly blue. If we darken the blue values in the image, we will darken the tone of the sky in our B&W image, in the same way, lightening the blue tones in the image we will lighten the tone of the sky in our B&W image. The structures in the image (the tower and the statues) are warm toned to begin with, but are also illuminated by the dying glow of the setting sun. They are therefore made up of mostly warm tones like reds, oranges and yellows. We can raise or lower the tones in the structures by raising or lowering the values of the warmer colours in the underlying image. We do this by adjusting the sliders in the HSL/Color/B&W pane. It takes a bit of experimenting, but it isn’t hard. Just keep in mind the basic rule: lighten the underlying colour of the area if you want to lighten the tone, darken the underlying colour if want to darken a tone. The idea is to achieve a good separation of tones, rather than having important areas merge together. after a bit of experimentation, I settled on this:
the adjustments in ACR are identical:
Here is the result, so far:
The image now has a much better distribution of tones… better contrast and more “snap”.
At this point, while I thought the image was shaping up nicely, I thought it would look better with really rich warm tone. This is where split toning comes in.
Split toning is simply a process of applying one tone to the shadow areas of an image, and a different tone to the highlights. Lightroom and ACR both provide us with the ability to apply the toning in the RAW conversion stage rather later in Photoshop. It’s also incredibly easy.
Moving down to the “Split Toning” pane in Lightroom, we have two pairs of sliders marked “Hue” and “Saturation”. One adjusts the colour to be applied to the highlight values, the other adjusts the colour to be applied to the shadows. In between there is one more slider marked “Balance”. As its name suggests, this slider controls the balance between the highlight colour and the shadow colours you have chosen. Moving the slider to the left applies more of the shadow colour to the tones in the image (ie., more of the mid and lighter tones are coloured with your “shadow” choice as you move the slider to the left. Moving it to the right will apply progressively more of the Highlight colour you have chosen to the darker tones in the image in addition to the highlights.
Adjusting the hue and saturation can seem frustrating, since we are in the end, looking for a fairly subtle toning. Assessing the particular Hue is easier, if you first move the saturation slider to the right a fair bit. This will produce somewhat garish tones, but it will make it easier to choose the colour you want to base your toning efforts on. Once you settle on a hue, move the saturation slider to the left until you see the effect you’re looking for. Repeat the process with the other hue-saturation pair of sliders and fine tune the balance with the balance slider.
After a bit of experimenting, I settled on this:
Similarly in ACR:
Which produced this result:
All that was left, was to take the image into Photoshop to clone out some of the distracting bright bits under the arch of the tower (which has been done in this final version).
Overall, the split-toned version more closely matches my vision for the image which I had in my head at the time. It’s always important to ask your self. “What is it the drew me to this image in the first place?” Sometimes, it takes a bit of thought to recognize what it was that drew your eye. Once you uncover those elements, play them up, and work to minimizes elements that don’t form part of that original attraction you felt — the “thing” made you stop and raise your camera to your eye. In this image, the attraction for me was all about shape, form and texture. Eliminating colour while retaining a feeling of warmth created an image that more closely matched what drew me to it in the first place.