Make Your Blacks Black and Your Whites White

The goal in photography is to have your blacks black and your whites white.

This is what most photography courses, books and workshops will tell you.  It leaves your images looking more life like.  It gives your images more ‘punch’.

No the reality is that most of the time your camera will not be able to capture the full range of tones from black to white you you might have to fix this during post processing.  Not as difficult as it sounds and Lightroom makes it very easy to fix up your digital negatives and bring back the blacks and whites.

To get things started let’s look at my zeroed RAW file.  (For more on starting from zero and digital negatives click here.)

Not a bad portrait of a male lion but a little flat.  I photographed this big guy on a heavily overcast but bright morning so my goal is to recreate that mood.  To be clear, I am not aiming to change the image or create something unrealistic but rather finalize the digital photographic process by showing my viewer the subject as I saw it.

Even by just looking at the image you can tell that there are no pure blacks or pure whites and this is confirmed by the histogram.  Our histogram’s mountain sits almost in the middle but it does not touch the extreme left or right. As a refresher:

- The far left of the histogram represents pure black.
- The far right of the histogram represetns pure white.
- The middle of the histogram represents the mid-tone in the image.

Using Lightroom’s Basic panel I am now going to work through a few sliders in order to bring back the whites and darks to my image.

I personally always start with the whites and to do this I use a combination of the Exposure and Brightness sliders.  As you move the Exposure slider to the right, increasing exposure, you will see your histogram move to the right.  Exposure will increase the lightness of your entire image while brightness increases the lightness of the mid-tones in your image.

Before we carry on it is worth mentioning that Lightroom has a very handy feature which shows you any clipped highlights or shadows in your image.

In English – when your whites are too white you will loose details in those areas and the same goes for areas where your blacks are too black.  By using the keyboard shortcut J in Lightroom’s develop module you will be able to see when this happens.  The two little triangles at the top of your histogram will be highlighted when this feature is activated.

As you know make any changes to your image you can see which areas might be loosing detail.  Whites that are too white will be shown in red while blacks that are too black will show up in blue.  Check out the example below.

In this example I increased the exposure way too much as can be seen by the red areas on my image and the histogram bunching up to the right.  No good.  In order to fix this I would pull the exposure back down until the histogram moves away from the right and the red highlights on my image start disappearing.  Useful feature – use it!

So back to my lion image.

After looking at my zeroed RAW file I decide3d to start with the whites.  The first thing I did was to push the Exposure slider up to +0.80 and the Brightness to +20.

Why these numbers?  Well, they just look and feel right.  There is unfortunately no one formula for all images so you have to decide what you want to do with your image and take it from there.

Right.  When comparing this image to my original RAW file you can see that is quite a bit lighter.  The histogram also shows this and you can see that it has moved a bit more to the centre while also being a bit fatter. The movement of the histogram to the right was accomplished by moving the exposure slider while the width of the histogram was influenced by moving the Brightness slider.

Better?  Perhaps but remember we are not finished yet.

By looking at the above histogram you can see that the whites are a bit closer to white but the pure blacks are still missing.  You saw that by looking at the histogram right and noticing that it is not close to or touching the left?  Good.

To bring some of the blacks back I used three sliders.  I moved the Blacks slider to +4 (pushing the blacks in the image), the Contrast slider to +40 (increasing the blacks in relation to whites in the image) and the Clarity slider to +14 which increases the contrast of the mid-tones in the image).

This was again done by watching my histogram and the image.  Sorry, still no magical recipe!

Looking a bit better but something does not feel quite right.

By looking at the histogram, which touches both sides, we can see that there are some pure blacks, a decent amount of mid-tones and some pure whites in the image.  So why is it nor perfect?

The histogram is just a representation of the tones in your image and does not know what you photographed or what you wanted to show in your image.  That is why you have to look at both the histogram and the image when you are making adjustments.

So, after looking at the above image I decide that the mid-tones are to bright so the answer is simple.  Drop my Brightness slider back down to +5.

Much better.  A more realistic image which still has pure blacks and pure whites in the image.

Notice how dropping my Brightness slider did not remove the pure whites, as my histogram is still touching the right side, but the mid-tones are less bright shown by the decrease in the width of the histogram.

So far I am quite happy with the look and feel of my image but take a moment and have a good look at it.

The nose draws my attention too much as it is a little too dark.  Easy fix.

By selecting the special adjustment brush I simply paint over the nose area and then adjust the exposure for just that area.  By using the keyboard shortcut O I can see where I am painting.  Once I am happy with my selection I click O again and then make my adjustments using the slides.  In this instance I increased the Exposure of the nose are by +0.61 using a brush size of 5.0.  I selected to Feather the brush which will help me to blend the exposed area in a bit and not make it too harsh a change.

Small change but as in life, the devil is in the details.

And that just about does it.

One last change was to darken the bright green bushes just a little bit.  I chose to do this not only because it took a bit of attention away from my subject, but to get it closer to what I saw.  The overcast conditions made the scene a little more dark and contrast-y and I my goal is to show that in my image.

I could have used another adjustment brush to selectively dodge (make darker) the background but decided to just use a very subtle vignette since all the areas I wanted to darken are around the outside of the frame.  What the slightly darker areas around my frame will also do is stop my viewer’s gaze from escaping out of the frame and keeps the focus on the centre of the frame.  As I said before PLEASE be subtle when using vignettes in your images.

Keeping in mind that the goal of this exercise was to to make my blacks black and my whites white so after all of that, here is the final result.

The difference is quite obvious but let’s focus on the two histograms.

In my zeroed RAW file, on top, you can see that the histogram does not touch either left or right.  After all my adjustments the histogram shows that here are both black and whites, by touching both sides, and  ther mid-tones have also been maximized as can be seen the wider ‘mountain’ in the histogram.

Once you start working through your images like this you will see that it is a very quick process.  This blog post took me much longer than processing a single image.

The best part about doing all of this in Lightroom is that every single change is non-destructive which simply means that you cannot hurt your original file.  You can play with every single slider, see what they do and learn while working through your images.  Go ahead give it a bash!

One more look at my final image.  Blacks are black and whites are white.

Nezt Thursday I will be showcasing some more wildlife photographer and their websites so if you have any suggestions let me know!

See ya tomorrow!

Gerry