I’ve ceased counting the amount of times I’ve ventured out into the countryside, anticipating excellent lighting, only to find it’s another overcast day, shrouding my intended location in a layer of grey dullness. If you encounter this, instead of surrendering in frustration, take your photos anyway with the intention of converting them to monochrome using quality photo editing software when you return home.
In fact, for striking monochrome conversions, substantial cloud cover is generally advantageous, as exemplified in the case below. Here we have a quintessential British red brick cottage, a meandering pathway, and an ancient English church in the distance. However, there was no trace of sunlight and the illumination was utterly flat. Therefore, I utilized my preferred landscape photography techniques to capture the most compelling image I could and initiated Affinity Photo 2 upon returning home.
Here’s how I transformed this flat, lifeless image into a stunning black-and-white photograph.
1. Choose your software
I employed Affinity Photo 2 for this task, but you can execute black-and-white conversions in nearly any photo editing software, including Corel PaintShop Pro and Adobe Photoshop. If you lack any editing software, consider trying out the finest free photo editing tools that are currently available.
2. Simple corrections
To begin, rectify any imperfections. My photo was taken with a wide-angle lens, which caused the side of the cottage to lean in due to barrel distortion. Click on the Develop Persona icon and proceed to the Lens Correction tab on the right. There are options for specific lens profiles, so if you utilized one of those listed, select it. Next, adjust the Vertical slider to the left to correct the tilted wall.
2. Adjust the tones
Next, click on the Tones tab to reveal the six color channels. The red channel typically captures brickwork in landscape images, while the green and yellow represent the grass, and blue and cyan correspond to the blue sections of the sky. To enhance the impact of the lackluster lighting, you’ll want to diminish the Blue and Cyan channels to darken those parts of the sky, without introducing significant noise and pixelation. The red also needed adjustment as it was a tad too bright.
3. Outline the sky
Navigate to the Basic tab and boost the clarity until some definition and drama emerge in the sky. If this adjustment also brightens the flowers on the ground too much, you may have to tweak the yellow or green channels once more. While on the Tones tab, refine the overall contrast using Curves with an “S” shape to amplify it slightly overall.
4. Final adjustments
Click on the Details tab and then on Noise Addition. Elevate the Intensity to 10% to give it a gritty aesthetic. Duplicate the background layer to enable transformations. Choose the Move tool and drag the central handles left and right to fill any gaps. Grab the top center handle and drag upwards to maintain the scale of the structure. There was plenty of sky, so it’s better to sacrifice a bit of that than the scenes in the foreground. Flatten and save to complete the process.
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Ensure you’re utilizing one of the finest cameras for landscape photography, and explore the best tripods available as well. When capturing images on an uninspiring day, I sometimes like to enhance the scene using specialized accessories like the Kenko White Mist No.1 filter.