I signed up for a Creative Black and White Photography course that lasts for 4 weeks, starting tomorrow NZ time. As part of the Introduction we got some pointers on using just Lightroom to process a BW image. Much of this was new to me and I have been experimenting with it to see the scope of what it offers.
Cognac, my seal point birman boy happened to be sitting in a nicely lit spot with a reasonably dark background, and he was in a fairly calm settled mood. So I took the opportunity to get out with my macro lens and take some portraits and closeups of him. Turns out I am horrible at handholding the macro lens, it is a heavy piece of glass and I really need to use a tripod, but as I was sprawled on the floor on my stomach, that wasn’t practical.
This was my best image of the shoot, I love how it captures his calm demeanour and lovely blue eyes. I processed this as I would a normal colour image in LR which came out like this
Its been cropped, and the background tidied up but other than that, its a pretty good representation of him in colour. Yes his eyes really ARE that blue!
This time I wanted to try out some creative preset options and found one in Kim Klassens Dark Still Life bundle that gave a bleached bypass effect and I really liked it. However it desaturated his eyes so I tweaked that in the HSL panel until it looked better and left it at that.
Comparing the two, I can see that the final image has more brightness in the highlights and lost some fur detail, especially at the top of his head, which I didn’t pay enough attention to when I was editing it. I really like the slightly gritty crunchy feel of the edited version and how it brings out the subtle detail in his eyes.
Like it? Don’t like it? Love to hear your thoughts on this!
Learning to See Light 
The edited photo kind of reminds me of the difference the hairdresser made in my hair yesterday, from how I entered the salon, to how he smoothed me out and sent me home again. 🙂
But you can never reproduce the effect at home yourself? I never can 🙂
No, I can never style my hair the way he does!
Beautiful work 🙂
The selective colouring looks really interesting 🙂
Thanks, its not normally something I would use but just seemed to fit really well here, it gave life and personality back into the image
I love the colours in the second image. The editing has really made his fur look so soft and fluffy.
He has a very soft coat actually, even when he was a kitten it was super soft and has stayed like that.
I still love this image and those blue eyes
Thanks, I was really happy with how it turned for a bit of an experiment in processing 🙂
Beautiful kitty! 😀 I like how the B/W edit really brings out the whiskers! 🙂
And he has such splendid whiskers 🙂