I got a bunch of emails on the Black & White Jackie Greene image from the last post and since it only took about a minute to do, I thought i would write up a quick post showing the steps using Nik software Silver Efex Pro right from Lightroom. I have shown this before but since it is so damn easy to do I am going to do it again.

The first thing to do is find an image that you think will make a good black and white image. For Jackie I wanted to reproduce the look of an old photograph becasue even though he is a new young musician, there is just something about his look and sound that makes me think old photo.

I selected this image and adjusted the blacks a little. just as if I were editing for a color image then I opened Silver Efex Pro directly from inside Lightroom.

Now that I had the image open in Silver Efex Pro, I started with the “Antique Plate 1” preset.

This was good starting point, but I wanted the Jackie and especially his vest to be closer to black without the background to be any darker, so I added a control point to the image and adjusted the vest and Jakie independently of the background.

After adjusting the image to where it looked good to me, I clicked save and the right back into Lightroom I went with the new image selected.

At this point I made a few final adjustments to the color, mainly I just pushed the black a little further to black and I was done.

Exported the image and ran it through iWatermark.

It took a lot longer to write this up than it did to actually create the image.