On the shore of Lake Wakatipu

What I love about this image first of all, is that it’s not really a typical beach shot. For me, it’s a lot more dramatic, partly due to the way I’ve processed it in Photoshop, but also I think the hardness of the sticks and debris on the shore add to the drama.

I also really like how the quality of light turned out in the final image. This was taken in pretty harsh daylight and that was partly what inspired me to process it in this way.

The Process

There are many ways to achieve a beautiful black and white look in Photoshop. For this image I used a black and white technique that works great for images with high contrast, and with a good range of colours. What I also like about it is that it’s quite a “quick and dirty” technique that doesn’t take a long time, but it still allows for quite an amount of finesse in getting just the look you’re after.

Start with a black and white adjustment layer, first working through the preset options. This will get you a good way to something that works for the image, then it’s a case of fine tuning with the colour sliders to adjust specific areas of the image.

If you find you want even more control over which parts of the image your adjustment is affecting, you can use multiple black and white adjustment layers and use a mask to affect very specific areas of the image. To make that work though you need to ensure that in the layer style dialogue for subsequent layers, under Advanced Blending you must change the Knockout option to Deep. This will then allow all the black and white adjustments to “see” the original colour layer at the bottom. OTherwise the additional black and white adjustments are looking at the first black and white adjustment so won’t do anything as there is no colour to adjust.

I finished this with a levels adjustment layer with blending mode set to screen which added the dramatic highlights. And finally a relatively subtle vignette just to pull the eye in to the centre of the frame.