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I can take photos of the Butler Wash Utah landscape.

I can edit these photos in black and white using more photo adjustments then just the black and white option to make them stronger.

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I love this photograph, its defiantly better then my 1st one and I'm very proud. I chose a good paper to print it on and I think the photo is beautiful. I think black and white photos are elegant and I want to work with black and white more throughout this semester, I'll defiantly have at least one more assignment that involves black and white as one of my objectives.

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I've been camping in Butler Wash at least twice a year since I was born and because of that I have many fond memories with friends and family that took place there. I wanted to photograph Butler Wash because it's one of Utah's hidden wonders that deserves to be appreciated more.

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The element of art thats most prominent in this photo is line because of the ridge that separates the desert landscape from the sky and it separates the ridges from each other. Though the lines are very prominent and separate everything nicely its also the spect of this photo that I dislike the most because they aren't particularly straight.

The principle of design that is most prominent in this photo is the unity between the sky and the landscape. I know that I've been talking about the sky allot but thats because its so important to this photo. I could have easily not had the sky in this photo but that would make the photo allot weaker. The landscape is equally important in this photo because nobody wants to look at a black and white photo of the sky. The ground brings in something more complex and interesting which also makes the photo strong. If I had taken either aspect out of this photo it wouldn't be as beautiful as it turned out being.

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My photo was taken in Butler Wash Utah during a sunset. The photo is in black and white so you cant necessarily see the colors of the sunset but they give the sky more dimension where if it had been the middle of the day it would just be a grey sky and white clouds. But the sky is only about a fourth of the photo, the rest is just the classic Utah landscape. Theres a mesalike rock formation rising over an arid valley thats full of scattered desert plants.

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What Are Curves and How Can I Take Advantage of Them?

Curves are possibly the most underused tool in the Photoshop arsenal, and they're the heart of our tutorial today. Many people are put off of using them because they are not particularly intuitive and there are so many other tools available which are a bit easier to grasp out of the gate.

Unlike Levels, where the adjustments you make are applied uniformly across the image, the Curves are applied more granularly, which makes it much easier for you, the editor, to make very subtle changes to the image. If you want deeper shadows, brighter whites, or to isolate a particular shade of blue (now gray) in the sky framed in your photo, for example, you can do so with the Curves tool.

In the image above, you can see both the base photo and the unadjusted Curves readout of the image. Notice how the line from the lower left to the upper right is a nice clean, straight, diagonal line; our Curves, in other words, are pretty flat. The curves can seem a bit abstract, so let's pick a spot on our photo and see where it falls on the curve. We're going to click on the white side of the cup to sample that spot. Note: If you just click a spot and hold it, it will show you the spot on the curve, but if you hold CTRL and click it then there will be a permanent mark on the curve line:

Now, let's look at that little black dot on that curve. Follow it with your eyes to the left gradient bar, and then follow it with your eyes down to the bottom gradient bar. That dot represents the slightly gray, almost white, value of the cup in the photo.

Because the curve is unadjusted, the input (the lower gradient bar) matches the output (the left-hand gradient bar). If we were to grab that little marker on the curve and pull it down it would darken the value, and if were to raise it then it would lighten the value. Let's take a look at what happens when we do that in the next section of the tutorial.

Adjusting Your Image via Manual Curve Manipulation

The values for that particular tone as well as the entire curve have been changed. The previously slightly gray cup is now shockingly white and the highlights on the chrome of the espresso machine are much brighter (as is the rest of the image). There are some nice subtle changes to the image, such as in the reflections, and the shape of the Bakelite handle of the espresso portafilter is significantly better defined against the background now. It's not a bad looking little image, and it's a lot more visually interesting now than it was before.

What if we went the opposite route, though? What if we dropped the value way down instead of spiking it way up?

We couldn't drop it all the way down because that would turn the picture almost completely black. Instead, we dropped it significantly below the starting line (the light gray line indicating the original baseline curve). You can see how it significantly darkens the photo and turns what was a bright coffee shop photo into something moodier. Clearly, the end result is a bit on the underexposed side, but we wanted you to see how dramatically a fairly small adjustment in the curve could change things.

Now that we've played with a single point on the curve and seen how it affects everything, let's reset the curve. Hold down the ALT key and the "Cancel" button in the Curves box will turn into "Reset". Click to reset the curve back to the state it was in when you opened the menu.

Let's see what happens when we add more points to the curve. Go ahead and repeat the process we performed above to select one the lightest points in your photo (like our espresso cup) and then pick darkest point using the same technique. You'll end up with a dot for the light and a dot for the dark on your curve.

This is where things get fun. We've just made an anchor point for the darkest and lightest parts of our image, Let's get a little crazy with everything in between. Use the dropper tool to pick any portion of the image you'd like to adjust (or, since we're being playful, just grab any point on the line) and make an adjustment. If you like it, leave it. If you don't like it, slide it back into place. Feel free to tug and pull the curve as you see fit to create the image you're looking for. After a moment or two of playing this is what we came up with:

You can see how, in playing with the curves, it's possible to capture elements of our earlier two example images. We liked the brightness of the cup but we also liked rich moody shadows. A little fiddling with the curves let us bottom out some of the shadows, spike the intensity of the highlights, and enjoy the best of both.

Now that we've looked at manual curve adjustments, let's look at the Curve presets.

Quick Manipulations with Preset Curves

We recommend manually playing with the Curves tool for a while until you get a real sense of how changing the curve changes your images. Once you've done that, however, you'll likely find it invaluable to call on the Curve tool presets.

For example, in the last image of the previous section of the tutorial, we arrived at a pretty high-contrast image. The whites and highlights were fairly bright and the shadows were quite rich. Since we've established that we like high contrast images, the next time we go to use the Curves tool, we can pre-seed our image curve by selecting "Strong Contrast". Let's look at the curve it gives us for that preset:

The preset is essentially the curve we had in our prior image (except a bit smoother as it doesn't have the extra pull on the highlights and lowlights that we put in). You can see how using the presents to jump in the direction you want to go and then finishing the job by making subtle changes to the existing curve is a much faster way to achieve the results you want than reinventing the wheel.

Playing with Black, Gray, and White Points

If you were worried that we had run out of fun tricks in the Curves menu, well, worry no more. We have another handy little trick to help you manipulate the curves and further enhance your black and white images. There's a big part of the Curves menu pane we haven't even talked about yet, and that's the black, gray, and white adjustment droppers at the bottom of the pane.

Our work with black and white images makes these tools even more relevant. When we want to create high contrast images and really capture the crispness common in old black and white photos, it's so easy to do so with a quick manipulation of the black, gray, and white points. Click on each one and select the darkest point in the image, a mid-tone gray point, and the whitest point in the image:

From here you can manipulate the curve and apply presets just like you did in the previous two steps of the tutorial.

Although many people are put off by the complexity of the Curves tool, we hope after a little tinkering you have seen how the extra effort is worth the time and yields really fantastic images.

Have a tip or trick to make convert photos to black and white and make them pop? Join in the conversation below.

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How to Enhance Your Black and White Photos with Adjustment Curves

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Last week we showed you how to convert your color photos to black and white photos. While the tips and tricks we shared with you yield awesome results, we're back this week to highlight some powerful techniques to take your image to the next level.

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Black and white was once the only means we had to communicate, photographically. That was long before most of us got involved with it. But for some of us, B&W is how we started off in photography, and how we saw our images in print. But since the beginning of photography, black and white has been a very romantic medium. That romance continues to this day, with black and white easier and simpler to do than ever. And yet, for some, it's just as complicated and difficult as ever. Perhaps this will give you some ideas to advance your black and white photography.
Editor's Note: This is a guest blogpost by Moose Peterson
Watch B&W Movies like Casa Blanca

I'm a huge fan of B&W movies from the 40s and 50s! I watch the plot, but even more so, I watch the lighting! They couldn't use color to pull our attention around; they had to light to do that, using shades to tell their story. Mystery, death, love, hate, jealousy-they said them all with light! You can watch and learn a lot about B&W photography from these old movies. Keep in mind that everyone watches them. The public has certain preconceived visual concepts because of them. Learn them, explore them, and exploit them, and you can vastly improve your B&W photography!

Contrast is Your Friend!

Traditionally, black and white photography has been a contrasty medium. In color photography, big contrast is often discouraged. In the days of film, we often would attach a red filter when shooting black and white, just to increase the contrast. In this example, because of the large boulder, the bald skies of Alabama Hills go very dark, thus making the boulder visibly pop. Looking under the boulder, you can see the heavy shadow, telling you it's a contrasty condition.

Flat Light has Lots to Offer

And the exact opposite is true as well! Flat light, or light which has no giant range of exposure, can make for dramatic B&W images. Typically, though, this requires that you look at the elements, and find one or more deep blacks that grab the eye. In this case, the falling snow is flattening out the light, though the snow on the ground sets the stage. The wet, black road in the center of the frame takes the eye through the image, and then the speckles of black bring the eye back down. Standing there, you wouldn't have thought there was a photo, and that's because of the flat light.

Black Makes White Brighter

This is a favorite trick of mine: making the darks darker so the lights appear brighter. By association-and nothing else-when we make darks go darker, the mind just assumes the other elements have to be brighter, even though in reality they are not. This downpour over Bridgeport Reservoir is an example of that. In this case, I knew what was possible in the darkroom that would pull that black down, making that small microburst really pop. This is not what I saw standing there. It was a pretty even gray sky. The only difference is that the microburst was reflecting light, and the background was not. That's all that was required to make it pop in post.

Graphics Make for Bigger Drama

I just love vanishing lines! When you can include those in any B&W photo, you have a visually powerful image. In this case, with this little rail station in Upper NY, the architecture lends itself perfectly to the drama of B&W. The long, narrow construction, the gingerbread pattern, and the bright rails leading off into the distance take the eye to the stormy skies, which bring you right back to the front of the station. Because it's by the roof line, the bright spot in the sky helps with the competing pattern of the gingerbread.

Gotta Have a Clean White and a Clean Black

If there is one thing you need in a B&W photo, if nothing else, it is a clean white and a clean black. Is this a rule? No, it is merely a starting point in your thinking, capturing and finishing a photo. Without a clean black and a clean white, you have what is called a "muddy" image. This means you simply have a bunch of shades of gray. In this photo of the Bodie Lighthouse, the only clean white is the post of light (and that was created in post), and the only clean black is the roof. But that's enough for you to notice all of the texture in the image. If your B&W images just don't seem to have real zing, it could simply be a case of no clean blacks and no clean whites.

Exposure is Your Friend

"Seeing" (thinking) in B&W is a very common difficulty for photographers. This stands to reason, since we live in a color world. Many B&W images are around you if you just think underexposure. This shot, taken at Cliff House in San Francisco, was an off-the-hip shot as we were walking in to breakfast. It was basically a bright morning, with the storm quickly heading east. I saw that great cloud shape in the sky, and knew I wanted the shot. If I exposed normally, the sky would have been blown out and the sand a medium gray. But by underexposing 2.5 stops, I pulled the sky to gray, the beach went black, and the surf stayed white, leading the eye through the frame.

Filters Make it Easier

In the game of black and white photography, filters still make a world of difference! The polarizer can be used, unconventionally, to darken the sky, which in B&W creates big-time black drama. The split grad can be used for the same purpose, as you see in this photo of Ausable Chasm in NY. The mist from the falls was the photo, but to bring this out, its brightness needed to be set against something dark. By using a .9 (3 stop) split grad turned severely to the left, darkening the left corner, the mist could visually pop. There is no doubt that you have to think B&W when you do this, because you wouldn't have taken the photo if the end results were to be in color. How do you develop an eye to see this? You do it a lot, and learn from you successes as well as your failures. If you don't have failures, you know you're not trying!

Silver Efex Pro

Polycontrast in a slider-that's how I think of Nik's Silver Efex Pro 2! This is the ONLY software I use to create my B&W images. Why? It's so bloody simple, effective and beautiful. And here's the secret: the Structure! It's a slider in the program, and when taken to the range of the 80s, it works magic like nothing else! There isn't a photo here that hasn't been kissed by the beauty of Structure to make the B&W magic happen. And here's the thing-until you own Silver Efex Pro 2 and you use Structure, you have no way of knowing when you're shooting what will or won't make a great photo. If there is ONE trick, technique, tool-anything I can recommend to you to improve your black and white photography, this is it!

Levels & Curves!

Small subtleties add up to big drama! Every one of these photos has seen Photoshop CS6, and that was to add small subtleties you can't do otherwise. It could be the slight darkening of a cloud to make the cloud next to it brighter, using Curves and the Brush. It could be a slight move in Levels to push some blacks to deep black. You might need to lighten a God beam, or darken the side of a rock. These small, fine tunings that we can't do any other way, are a must in making the gorgeous black and white photo!

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10 Tips on How to Create Better Black & White Images

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Black and white was once the only means we had to communicate, photographically. That was long before most of us got involved with it. But for some of us, B&W is how we started off in photography, and how we saw our images in print.