Awesome Black and White Images in Lightroom in Just a Few Clicks

Now if you, like me, came from the dark room age and grew up with black and white film, then today’s top tip is going to be right up your street. Today I’m going to be talking about how to create great black and white images in Lightroom with just a few clicks. And stay to the end, because I’m going to be giving away my black & white film simulation presets for free. 

So let’s dive straight in. Go to Lightroom’s develop module and of course, we’re going to be talking about presets. But the first thing to do with any photo is balance your lighting, do your usual exposure, highlights, shadows, etc, and sharpen your image down in the sharpening panel.

So you’ve got your image as you would like it in colour. Now what I’ve done is I’ve created some film type presets in the develop module and saved these with my Lightroom settings. So there are a number of old favourites. We’ve got Ilford, Kodak, FP4, HP5s and so forth and Tri x. With Lightroom these days you can just hover over a preset and you can immediately see a preview of what it’s going to look like. In most of these presets you’ve got two or three different presets for the same ISO.

I find for street photography, I like Kodak TMAX. You just get a little bit finer grained image with the Kodak TMAX. So just click that and then we have a black and white image. Now if you zoom right in, you can just see a bit of the black and white grain. If you want a more grainy image to simulate that, you’ll see, I’ve just created some presets down here for the different grain sizes. And again you can see just hover over these to see the effect. There have it.

Another street photography scene here, this guy playing a saxophone. Again, I’ve already done my exposure compensations, got the image as much as I would like it in black and white, dealt with any highlights,etc. And now let’s have a look here, let’s go over something a bit more grainy. Kodak Tri-X, I quite like that. Click and there we have it, great black and white images. 

Here’s a pub scene that I shot recently. This duo was singing in a local pub in Birmingham. And for this indoors you’d typically be thinking a very high ISO film in your black and white days. So again, we might be looking at Tri-X or even Fuji which is quite dark and moody.  I think I prefer the Delta Pro on that one. But now if we just have a look of that and zoom in, we’ve got a very grainy image. So I’m just going to dial that back about to say 400 ISO, zoom back out, job done.

And it doesn’t just work for street photography or gig photography. Here’s a landscape shot, this was shot up in the Lake District. That’s The Old Man of Coniston in the background, nice reflections in the tarn, nice sky. I tend to use one of the lower ISO ones which you would typically have used for landscape photography. So you could use Kodak Panchromatic, which is a 32 ISO film, but it’s a little bit dark in the foreground, so we’ve got Ilford Pan F, that’s quite nice. I like Agfa pro. We’ve probably still got a bit of grain in the sky on that one.  We’ve got a grain removal preset so we can take that out completely. There we have a great black and white image.

So there’s 20 presets in the pack. Click the link below and you can download those for free. 

Download Your Free Lightroom Black & White Presets

Included in the download pack is instructions on how to import those into Lightroom, whether you’re using the latest CC version or if you’re using one of the old Lightroom versions. Do let me know how you get on with them, post your comments below. Look forward to seeing your images, have fun with them.