How to Convert All of Your Color Edits to Black and White in Less Than a Minute | March Educational Blog Post with Kayla Kohn
We are proud to welcome Kayla Kohn to the blog today. Kayla has a Lessons titled, “The Newborn Experience: In-home Lifestyle Newborns + Fresh 48s “ which lives inside the Academy. She is also an important member of the community, as an Unraveled Expert Artist (read her interview HERE). Today she will be sharing some incredible tips to help streamline your black and white editing for client sessions. Join Kayla and our beautiful community TODAY and gain access to hundreds of courses, lessons and videos within the Academy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hey! I’m Kayla Kohn, a momma to two wonderful girls and married to my highschool sweetheart. I photograph newborns and families here in the heart of the country - Kansas. I never thought I would be a photographer but sometimes your gifts find you. I served in the Air Force for 9 years where I finished my second enlistment as an Air Force Photojournalist (yup, it’s an awesome job in the military.) That’s how I learned to use the camera on manual mode. It gave me my first experiences with camera gear, lighting knowledge and craft experience. My comfort level in being able to grab my camera and go out and get the photo is all because of the way I learned to shoot the camera -- in random situations and locations covering stories and shooting from the hip.
How to Convert All of Your Color Edits to Black and White in Less Than a Minute
This blog post is for anyone who wants to convert all their hand edited color images to black and white in just a few clicks - and know confidently that they look just as good as their color edits.
When I figured out this hack I think I stood up for joy, my heart fluttered a little bit and I felt pretty proud of myself to be honest. Being able to double the amount of images I give my clients in less than two minutes makes me feel like I’m adding a lot of value with a little effort.
I’m going to teach you how to easily convert your color edits to black and white, and at the end you’re gonna be like, ‘jeez that’s so easy I can’t believe I was hand editing (some or) each of these images to black and white.’
The good news is this process makes your images look awesome and just like your color edits, but in black and white, with just a few clicks, but the bad news is if you’re super super hyper obsessed with hand editing each image in black and white individually, then this probably isn’t the method for you or you’re going to have to adjust your process a little bit. But even better news for you if you are obsessed with uniquely hand editing each image - you can still hand edit them if you would like after the black and white conversion, you’re just not going to be working with a RAW file anymore, but a JPG.
If you have ever been sitting there editing your RAW images in Lightroom and you sync a black and white preset over them, and you come up with some images in different lighting or angles that end up with mushy contrast and bland areas and/or some things that look great edited in color but look really bad when converted to black and white (like sun haze) — then keep reading.
I knew how to sync image edits in Lightroom and I love using that as part of my workflow because it’s so handy for consistency which is so important in client work. When first editing a session, I sync as much as I can and then hand edit and adjust things on each image.
After I edited all my images in color, I tried over and over to find the perfect black and white syncing method that would make my conversions look good with no adjustments but iI kept failing. I tried syncing only a certain things in the syncing panel at a time, but it never translated well from image to image and to every image at once. I was still left with having to adjust things in the basic panel for each image. I did not want to do that again after I just did it with my color editing. I wanted to just hit a button and have a beautiful black and white version of my fully edited color image.
Finally, I figured out that working from the RAW file and edits wasn’t working. I needed the final, edited and exported images (JPGs) as a base to apply a black and white preset and get a consistent look. When I am working from an imported JPG, everything in the editing panel is back to zero. I don’t need to hand adjust anything. It’s already applied into the image. Now I can throw a “black and white filter,” —we’ll call it — on top of the processed image, and get the look I want.
The Process
First, before you can use this in your workflow, you have to create a unique black and white conversion preset to be used just on JPGs. I imported some fully edited JPGs from an outdoor family session and then used a black and white preset I already had. I adjusted it and then saved that as a new preset in my preset panel as “Black and White JPG Conversion Preset.”
Once you have created this unique black and white preset to be applied solely to JPGs, test it out by importing other fully edited JPGs from sessions you have completed and apply the preset straight across the entire session. See what happens. You should not have to do any adjustments in the basic panel if it is working right on every image and every image should look consistently the same. What I do is import the JPGs from a session, apply the black and white preset to the first image, make any minor adjustments necessary, and then sync in on the entire session. It works great on every image.
Here’s the steps to take to create a preset just for your JPGs and use this black and white conversion process in your work flow.
Just like after photographing any session, import your RAWs, cull and color-edit them, and export them with your full resolution exporting settings as you normally do.
Now import those JPGs you just exported back into the catalog.
Create a black and white preset by editing the first fully edited JPG in the set of images. Next, test it out by syncing it over a few more JPG images. You should find the the synced images look nearly, if not 100%, perfect. They will be exactly like your color images, just black and white. Now confidently sync that preset over the rest of the images in the set.
Export your black and white edited JPGs. When you do this, you will want to reset all of your exporting settings. The JPGs are already your desired size, they are already your desired sharpness, they are already your desired file size. If anything, I reduce the image quality size a bit more. They will still look great if your first exporting settings were correct. But you don’t want to resharpen again.
Now here’s how to make this process take less than a minute in the future. When you import the color edited JPGs in step 2, on the right-hand side in Lightroom, you will see the box ‘Apply During Import’ panel - there you can select your JPG black and white preset that you created. When the images import, they will have the black and white preset applied on top and the only thing to do next is export your black and white images.
Once you master this process, you can literally import the images with the JPG conversion preset applied and then immediately re-export the images without ever even touching the Develop module in Lightroom.
