Black & White Adjustment Layer Effects in Photoshop

Ashley Sisk is blowing me out of the water with her weekly Photoshop Shoot and Edit tutorials. I may not participate in the link-up every week, but I make sure to carve out time to read her shoot and edit updates. It’s like a free Photoshop workshop every week! I’ve already learned so much that I’ve temporarily abandoned using actions. I’m editing manually and making my own actions to speed up my workflow. This is fun!

Every week they post a theme and challenge their readers to post their straight-out-of-the-camera shot using Jill’s weekly tutorial then edit their shot later in the week using Ashley’s weekly tutorial.

I can never get my act together enough to follow the challenge or shooting tutorial, so here’s my completely unrelated-to-the-theme SOOC (RAW defaults):

The shot is rather underexposed, but I kind of like the dark look. I made some pretty dramatic changes in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). I corrected the exposure a tad on the dark side and punched the blacks way up to give a real shadowy, dark look to the background. Here’s the histograms and changes side-by-side followed by the ACR Edit.

After I brought it into Photoshop, the first thing I did was apply the rule of thirds to align the leaf most in focus in the center of the shot to the lower right sweet spot. Ashley covered cropping in the rule of thirds with last week’s tutorial, however I really don’t like creating a new document as the accompanying video tutorial suggests, so I wrote about the method I use to do a rule-of-thirds crop within the document using the same principles.

After cropping, I ran and customized the results of my Clean Edit Action, which is just a levels, curves, clarity and optional noise adjustment.

I applied clarity (high pass filter) just to the sharp parts of the shot. I also customized the S-curve and used a layer mask to remove it from the photo’s highlights since the adjustment looked great in the darker parts of the image but blew out the highlights.

Black & White Adjustment Layer Effects!

I’ve been trying out a new technique lately which doesn’t work great for all shots, but yields interesting results. It’s easy to fiddle around with to see what works best. I’m still trying to determine which shots benefit the most from this effect, but I think it’s one with stronger shadows or grainy (high ISO) shots. It kind of reproduces a film-like quality.

Here’s my technique:

1. Select Black & White from the Adjustments menu (half black/half white circle) on the layers palette.
2. Customize the results or select one of the presets (Maximum Black frequently works well!) to choose a Black & White application.
3. Change the Black & White layer blending mode, then adjust the opacity! I usually start out with Overlay at 20% to see what I get.
4. Alternatively, uniquely desaturate the image by leaving the blending mode Normal and lowering the opacity. I really like the punch of a low opacity Overlay or Soft Light layer mode though!

Below is my final edit with the Black & White adjustment layer set to Maximum Black, Soft Light blending mode at 30% opacity. It is also sharpened for the web. Hover over it to see the comparison to the Clean Edit.

More Examples

Here are some other recent shots with this effect applied. The closest description I can give is that it looks a little more “newspaper-like”, however using different black & white presets yields varying results.

If you’ve used this effect or have any tips for when to apply this effect, please let me know in the comments!