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RIGHT: Ansel Adams—Dogwood Blossoms,
Yosemite National Park, 1938. These shaded
white flowers were lit only by the open sky. The
soft light eliminated harsh contrast problems,
but would have resulted in a flat image with
normal exposure and development. Adams
exposed to place the flower on Zone VI + ½ (by
increasing exposure 1½ stops from a reflected
light meter reading from the flower; see Adams’
book The Negative for complete details on the
Zone System). He then increased development
to increase contrast, rendering the scene’s
tones beautifully. Photoshop’s Channel Mixer,
Levels and Curves controls allow digital
photographers to perform similar feats.
Photograph by Ansel Adams. Used by
permission of the Trustees of The Ansel Adams
Publishing Rights Trust. All Rights Reserved.
FAR RIGHT: Ansel Adams—Tetons and Snake
River. Black-and-white landscapes can be
gorgeous, as the work of Ansel Adams and
many others demonstrates. To truly appreciate
the beauty of black-and-white, try to view
original prints at a gallery or museum. Adams’
masterpieces were the result of a superb eye
combined with complete control over
technique. Today, digital photography offers
tremendous control right at your desktop.
Photograph by Ansel Adams. Used by
permission of the Trustees of The Ansel Adams
Publishing Rights Trust. All Rights Reserved.
54 Outdoor Photographer
&
White In The
Black
Talented artists are always
eager to embrace new
technology if it has the potential
to enrich their art and bring
forth their vision. If he had
access to today’s tools, what
would Ansel Adams do?
By Mike Stensvold

Digital Age
More than 20 years since his passing, Ansel Adams is probably still the most widely known
black-and-white outdoor photographer. He didn’t shoot digitally because digital imaging as
we know it didn’t exist in those days. But I think the legendary black-and-white master would
be quite interested in digital imaging were he in his shooting prime today. Adams was all for any
technology that could increase his control over the image-making process, and digital imaging
certainly does that. With film, Adams could adjust the exposure in camera to control the dark areas of the image,
adjust development to control the light areas, and then control the lightness or darkness of the overall print via the
enlarger exposure, control overall contrast by choosing the printing paper grade, and dodge and burn to make local
areas of the print brighter or darker. He couldn’t watch the film develop, he had to watch the print develop by the
light of a dim safelight, and he had to wait for the print to wash and dry before he could see what he had.
With digital imaging, you can adjust brightness and darkness, overall contrast and local contrast, in precise and
repeatable increments, and even apply colored-filter effects and see the results on screen in real time—no waiting,
no wasted paper, no smelly chemicals (Adams, the environmentalist, would appreciate that) and no dark required.
March 2007 55

Here’s the original color shot of a
great blue heron ordering breakfast.
Photo by Mike Stensvold.
The final black-and-white image is much stronger than a straight desaturated image.
Visualization
Along with his celebrated technical expertise, Adams was
renowned for his creative eye. No matter what camera or
medium you use, you need good subjects in good light, interestingly
composed.
Adams imagined what each print would look like before
he exposed his film. He exposed, processed and printed his
negatives to present to the viewer what he saw and felt that
made him take the shot in the first place. This is one key to
understanding Adams’ work: visualization—seeing the image
in his mind’s eye before he made the shot.
Okay, you saw something that moved you to make a photograph.
How do you turn the image on your memory card
into what Adams termed an expressive print that shows the
viewer what you saw and felt when you shot it? Let’s look at
how you can apply a little Ansel to your digital photography.
Adams shot mainly in black-and-white because that’s how
he “saw” images and because black-and-white offered him
56 Outdoor Photographer
Clicking on the Red
channel gives a result
similar to shooting the
original image through
a red filter—still not
quite right.
more control over his images than color. Today, digital imaging
offers the advantage of tremendous control over both
black-and-white and color images.
Getting Black-And-White
You can get black-and-white digital images by shooting
them that way in-camera or by converting color images to
monochrome in the computer via your image-editing software.
Shooting in monochrome mode, you’re working in blackand-white
from the start, and the images you see on the camera’s
LCD monitor will be in black-and-white, making it easier
to think in black-and-white. This can be a useful way of learning
to see black-and-white images.
If you shoot RAW images rather than JPEGs, you’ll have
more and better material to work with in the computer, including
richer tonality in highlights and dark tones. You can doubleprocess
a RAW image, once for the highlights and once for
the dark areas, then combine the two perfectly registered images

Using the Channel Mixer, you can adjust the lightness and darkness of
the red, green and blue tones individually. Here, moving the Red slider to
+66%, the Green slider to +20% and the Blue slider to +28% resulted in
a better black-and-white image.
Moving the middle of the curve up slightly brightened the midtones and
moving the bottom portion down slightly produced richer dark tones.
in Photoshop to get a greater range of detail. And RAW images
can be processed to color or black-and-white—you’re not locked
in to one or the other. Adams would have shot RAW.
If you choose to shoot your black-and-white digital images
in color, there are some advantages. You can use different colorto-monochrome
conversion techniques to achieve different
results and even do multiple conversions. You also can apply
infinite color filtration after the fact (see the Filters sidebar).
If you’re shooting in the RAW format and using the camera
manufacturer’s RAW converter, simply select Monochrome
in the conversion software. Doing so is effectively the same
as shooting images in monochrome mode in-camera. If you’re
using a third-party RAW converter, the color-to-monochrome
conversion process is more complicated, but often gives you
more control. I prefer to do the color-to-monochrome conversion
in Photoshop, after converting the RAW image to
TIFF format in the RAW converter.
In Photoshop, the simplest conversion methods are changing
the mode to Grayscale (Image > Mode > Grayscale) or moving
the saturation slider all the way to the left (Image > Adjustments
> Hue/Saturation). These methods offer very little flexibility
and are rarely the best ways to convert color images.
A better method is to use the Channels palette. Click on
the Red, Green and Blue channels individually to see which
Calibrating Your System
If you want your prints to look like what you see on your screen,
make sure your monitor and printer are properly calibrated in terms
of color rendition and contrast. This is easily done with a colorcalibrating
device such as Datacolor ColorVision Spyder2 Suite,
Pantone Huey or X-Rite Eye-One. Follow the easy instructions that
accompany the device and calibrate regularly every few months.
Moving the top-left Levels slider to the right produced a better black
tone. The top-right slider was left where it was to avoid blowing out
the highlights.
Black-and-White Inkjet Printing
Not long ago, you pretty much had to use special black-andwhite
inks to make excellent black-and-white prints with an
inkjet printer, and this is still the way to go with older printers. In
fact, a number of photographers have a second printer dedicated
to black-and-white printing.
With more and better inks, smaller ink droplets and better drivers,
today’s inkjet photo printers from Canon, Epson and HP—especially
the larger-format models—do an excellent job with black-and-white.
These devices can turn out full-tonal-range prints with no colorcasts
(unless you deliberately create a toned print).
While any self-respecting aspiring Ansel Adams will do his or her
own printing, there are some excellent digital labs out there for those
who choose to have someone else make their prints. Check out
“Working With A Lab” (Jan./Feb. 2007) on the OP Website, www.
outdoorphotographer.com.
looks best. If one looks the way you want, go to Image >
Mode > Grayscale. This method mimics the effects of shooting
a black-and-white image through a red, green or blue filter
(see the Filters sidebar).
Probably the most versatile way to convert color images to
black-and-white is by using the Channel Mixer (Image > Adjustments
> Channel Mixer, then click the Monochrome box). This
provides lots of control over the resulting tones, but requires a
lot of playing. Remember that the Red channel makes red
tones lighter as the slider is moved to the right and darker as
it’s moved to the left; likewise for the Green and Blue channels.
A good rule of thumb is to make sure the percentages of
red, green and blue combined equal 100 percent, although some
images might work better with a higher combined percentage
(for a brighter image) or a lower combined percentage (for a
darker image). The new Photoshop CS3’s Channel Mixer even
includes black-and-white presets to get you started.
Handy Digital Darkroom Tools
Photoshop contains lots of tools, but you only need a few
of them to optimize a black-and-white photograph. Here are
the best ones to use.
Levels. Generally, it’s best to begin work on a digital image
by setting its black and white points using the Levels control.
This is especially important for black-and-white. Adams said in
his book The Print that “…a note of pure white or solid black
can serve as a ‘key’ to other values…but there is no reason why
they must be included in all images, any more than a composition
for the piano must include the full range of the eightyeight
notes of the keyboard.” In short, set the black and white
points to suit the image you visualized when you shot the photo.
A good starting point for Levels (Image > Adjustments >
Levels) is to move the upper left and right sliders in to the
March 2007 57

edges of the histogram to turn the brightest and darkest pixels
in the image pure white and pure black. Press the Alt/Option
key as you do this to see where the blacks and whites actually
are in the image. The Levels histogram is a good reference,
but your eye should remain the ultimate arbiter: Do what
looks right. Most images work best if they include a pure black
tone and a pure white tone, but some don’t.
Curves. Adams used different developers and development
techniques to adjust the midtones and contrast of his
images. In Photoshop, this is best done with the Curves control
(Image >Adjustments > Curves). Moving the middle of
the curve up makes the midtones lighter, while moving it
down makes the middle tones darker.
If you click on the lower portion of the curve, you can adjust
that separately: Moving it down makes the dark tones darker,
moving it up makes the dark tones lighter. Likewise, click on
the upper portion of the curve, and you can move that portion
Filters
When you shoot a scene in color, the colors make or break the shot. When you shoot
in black-and-white, the black, white and gray tones make or break the shot. In
black-and-white, those lovely red roses that stood out so dramatically from those green
leaves in real life will blend together as middle gray tones in the photo. As a digital blackand-white
photographer, you can examine the monochrome image on your camera’s
LCD monitor right after you shoot it and see if the tones of different-colored objects merge.
Ansel Adams, like most black-and-white landscape photographers, used colored filters
to separate tones in his images. Digital photographers can do the same—in fact, a
number of digital cameras have built-in digital colored filters.
The basic concept behind using colored filters for black-and-white photography is that
a filter will lighten tones of its own and similar colors and darken tones of its complementary
color in the resulting photograph. The most popular colored filters used by blackand-white
outdoor photographers include yellow, red and green.
Yellow and red filters render a blue sky darker than it would appear in an unfiltered
shot, which is useful when you want white cloud buildups to stand out strongly against
a dark sky. A red filter renders red flowers lighter and green leaves darker, which is handy
for shots of foliage, where the red flowers and green leaves, both reflecting about the
same amount of light, would appear about the same shade of gray in an unfiltered photo
(you also could use a green filter to get darker flowers against lighter leaves).
58 Outdoor Photographer
Black-and-white
conversion via Photoshop’s
Channel Mixer.
Original color landscape.
Photo by Rob Sheppard.
up to make the light tones lighter or down to make them darker.
You can click multiple times on the curve itself to add anchor
points, but one in the middle of the curve and one at the middle
of the lower section and the upper section usually will suffice.
A tip: A little movement of the curve goes a long way.
Shadow/Highlight. This control (Image > Adjustments >
Shadow/Highlight) can bring out amazing amounts of detail in
underexposed dark areas and overexposed bright ones. It can
help open dark midtones if used carefully. The default Shadow
setting of 50 percent is usually too strong; try 30 percent as a
starting point.
Layers. Photoshop’s layers and layer masks are features
Adams would have loved. Layers allow you to make each
change to your image independent of other changes and make
it easy to keep track of them. Even more important, layers let
you make changes nondestructively, without affecting the
image’s pixels. None of the changes you make is applied to
the image pixels until you flatten the image
(Layer > Flatten Image) when you’re done;
thus, there’s only one change applied to the
pixels instead of lots of changes individually.
Adjustment layers (Layer > New Adjustment
Layer) let you do Levels, Curves and
other corrections. Duplicate Layers (Layer >
Duplicate Layer) allow you to do just about
anything without affecting the original pixels.
A good layer workflow might be:
� Open the original image and save it as
a TIFF or PSD working copy.
� Create a Levels adjustment layer (Layer
> New Adjustment Layer > Levels) and set
the black and white points.
� Create a Curves adjustment layer and
adjust the middle tones.
� Use Photoshop’s Dodge and Burn tools
to adjust local contrast or do it via additional
layers and layer masks, as described below.

Original photograph of
paintbrush scene. Photo by
Rob Sheppard.
Using Photoshop’s Channel
Mixer to do the conversion
allows the photographer to
adjust each primary color’s
gray rendition individually,
resulting in a black-and-white
image with more impact.
Software For B&W
The camera manufacturers’ RAW-conversion software provides
basic conversion capabilities and sometimes more—Nikon’s Capture
NX is a good example. Current versions of Photoshop and Photoshop
Elements come with Adobe’s versatile Camera Raw RAW-image
converter, and it also can be purchased as a stand-alone. Other good
RAW converters can be found in Apple’s Aperture, Phase One’s Capture
One, DxO’s Optics Pro, Digital Light & Color’s Picture Window
and the B/W Conversion Filters in Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro 2.0.
There’s also a number of plug-ins for Photoshop (and applications
that use Photoshop-compatible plug-ins) that provide blackand-white
photographers with useful tools. Among them are Alien
Skin’s Exposure, B/W Styler for Windows from The Plug-In Site and
Black & White Studio from Power Retouche.
Layer Masks. Layer masks let you apply changes to selected
portions of an image rather than the entire image. When you
create an adjustment layer, Photoshop automatically creates
a corresponding layer mask. Layer masks make it easy to
do what Adams did by dodging and burning. For example,
to darken a specific area of the image, create a Brightness/
Contrast adjustment layer (Layer > New Adjust-
ment Layer > Brightness/Contrast) and move
the brightness layer to the left to a setting of
-20 or -25. This turns the whole image darker.
Painting black on a layer mask conceals or
hides the layer’s effect, so the adjustment isn’t
applied to those areas. Painting white on the
layer mask reveals the effect below, so the
layer’s adjustment is applied to those areas of
the image. In our example, you can fill the
darkening layer with black to hide its effect
(Edit > Fill, choose Black) and then use a white
Brush tool to paint over (reveal) the areas where
you want the effect (darkening) to be applied.
We don’t have room to go deeply into layer
masks, but you can learn all about them at the
OP Website (www.outdoorphotographer.com).
Resources
Adobe
(800) 833-6687
www.adobe.com
Alien Skin Software
(888) 921-SKIN
www.alienskin.com
Apple Computer
(800) MY-APPLE
www.apple.com
Canon
(800) OK-CANON
www.usa.canon.com
Datacolor ColorVision
(800) 554-8688
www.colorvision.com
Finishing Touches
Once you have the tones of the image as you want them,
there’s one more step Adams considered important. You want
to keep the viewer’s eye in the frame, and bright areas near
the edges draw the eye out of the frame. So Adams burned in
the edges of his prints, darkening them.
You can do this in Photoshop. An easy way is to create a
Brightness/Contrast Adjustment layer, darken the entire layer
by moving the Brightness slider to a minus number (again,
-20 or -25 is a good starting point) and fill the layer with
black to hide the darkening. Then, using a large, soft brush,
paint white over the edges of the image, revealing the layer’s
darkening effect. OP
For more details on producing digital images, check out
OP Editor Rob Sheppard’s book Outdoor Photographer
Landscape and Nature Photography with Photoshop CS2,
which provides information for the digital nature photographer,
including a whole chapter entitled “What Would
Ansel Do?”
Digital Light & Color
(617) 489-8858
www.dl-c.com
DxO
www.dxo.com
Epson
(800) GO-EPSON
www.epson.com
Hewlett-Packard (HP)
(800) 752-0900
www.hp.com
Nikon
(800) NIKON-UX
www.nikonusa.com
Nik Software
(619) 725-3150
www.niksoftware.com
Pantone
(201) 935-5500
www.pantone.com
Phase One
www.phaseone.com/photo
The PlugIn Site
www.thepluginsite.com
Power Retouche
www.powerretouche.com
X-Rite
(914) 347-3300
www.xritephoto.com
OP ON THE WEB
WWW.OUTDOORPHOTOGRAPHER.COM
See: “Shooting Digital For B&W” (Sept. ’06)
March 2007 59