195/365: Just Dessert

With my hubby's encouragement, I snuck off today for a little time by myself (with the camera, of course)! Not pictured: the iced mocha coffee. What can I say--a girl needs her chocolate!

What I Learned:  

Thanks to Click it Up a Notch for inspiring me to put this together. I'm always learning to improve on black and white conversions in Lightroom. I got a tip about making the skin a little creamier so I'm passing it on here. Here's my photo with the steps I followed below.

There are quite a few ways to achieve a B&W in LR; and you can follow the steps in almost any order you want. These are just my usual steps. I recommend starting off with a well exposed photo. First, I correct the WB. Second, I go to the Basic panel and select Black & White in "Treatment" (above the dropper). Then I raise the contrast just a bit, and if needed I up the Blacks up to 12. Then I go to the Tone Curve and pull the curve up on the right side, bring down the middle just a tad--I'm making an ever so slight S curve here. If the face needs a little more brightening, I may go back up and up the standard LR RAW preset from 50 to 60 (I didn't need to do this to today's photo).

Now, here's the tip I learned and where the magic AHA moment occurred for me: Go to the HSL / Color / B&W color sliders. If your subject's skin needs to be lighter/creamier and less muddy, then go to the Orange slider and move it to the right (it's probably a negative number; you're going to slide it to the positives). This is to taste! If your subject needs a little deeper tone in the lips (or in the case of my daughter's dress, the hot pink bows, too), I took the Magenta slider to the left just a tad!

The following is also a matter of taste: I go down to the Split Toning section, move the Highlights Saturation to somewhere between 5 and 8; then I take the Highlights Hue and move it to around 52 (sometimes a little higher). This makes the B&W even creamier--but less of a true B&W.

And, if the photo calls for it I add a very subtle vignette by using the LR preset that came with the program called "Edge Effects - PC Vignette 1."

Hope this is helpful to my fellow photogs. Please feel free to leave me any comments or questions!

(Photo settings: 50mm lens, 1/500, f/2, ISO 400)