High-Key Black & White

There is a small meadow near where I live that I frequently pass when I go for a short walk.  The meadow has a red sandstone formation and three trees within it.  From the path that winds its way through the open space, there is another, much larger rock formation behind the smaller one.  For the past number of years I have been passing those elements and thought that there is a picture there.  I've taken photos at every time of the day, at every season, and from many different points of view.  Recently I was reviewing some older photos with the idea of making a holiday card when I came across a photo of this meadow that I had taken during a snow storm earlier in the year.  I thought to myself, I wonder if this would look good as a high-key black and white image.

Typically, when one goes out to make a high-key image, one intentionally overexposes.  In fact, I am usually surprised by how many stops is needed to make something a good high-key photo.  For the image in this case, I let the camera choose the exposure.  However, the snow on the ground, rocks, trees, and overcast sky helped turn it into a fairly low contrast picture.  The picture above is nearly straight out of the camera, a Canon S90, shooting in RAW format.  (Only the lens distortion has been corrected.)  I started this adventure by doing some minor adjustments in Lightroom 3.  I wasn't planning on doing much, since my plan was to use Photoshop CS5 and Nik Software's Silver Efex Pro 2 to produce the high-key effect.

As I mentioned before, I made some corrections for lens distortion and I think I tweaked the clarity.  (Some of what I did in PS could have easily been done in LR.)  I began by touching up some of the things I didn't want in the final print.  For example, I used the cool content-aware feature of the spot healing brush to remove the invasive mallow plants.  (Wouldn't it be very cool if you could do that in real life?)  I also got rid of some of the darker clumps of grass.  (It's also cool that you can do this non-destructively.)

Then I added a levels adjustment layer and shifted the white point to the left to lighten the whole image.  I wanted white skies and snow instead of gray.  I also shifted the midpoint slider to the left to lighten the mid-tones.  This further reduced the contrast of the image.  Merging the layers I then opened Silver Efex Pro 2.  There are so many cool presets that you can use as a starting point for your work.  Two high key effect presets come with the application and I used one of them to work from as a starting point.

Once you've selected a preset, you can tweak the control sliders in order to help define the high key effect.  I wanted the trees to be slightly darker than the background.  I was able to use the control point technology on each of the trees to create a little separation from the sandstone rock formation behind it. This also had the side-effect of darkening the grasses under the trees, which further added to the appearance of depth.  The final effect that I applied was a white vignette which helped to direct the eye (and the added benefit to remove a distracting house).  Once that was completed I added another cleanup layer and removed some of the darker discolorations (and holes) in the sandstone.

Just as a side note, I always forget that I can utilize the Nik products as a smart filter.  This allows you to go back and tweak your settings.  Or, note them so that you can go back a step, and recreate a particular setup.  You could also use a preset.

Although I was happy with the result, I wanted to try out a high-key tool that I read about in Harold Davis' book, "Creative Black & White."  He adds a new, empty layer onto the top of the layer stack and fills it with white.  Then, add a black layer mask, remember black conceals, white reveals.  Using a brush with a very low opacity, paint over the areas that you wanted to add white to.  Here I used this layer to ensure that my skies were white and that most of the grass poking out of the snow in the foreground could be removed.  And there you have it.

I've created a couple of versions trying out some different ideas, but this one is growing on me.  Recently, I was watching a Kelby Training video called, "Crush the Composition," and one of the many things that were talked about, was the idea that sometimes a scene just catches your photographic eye.  In his video he had several instances where he said to himself that there was a picture at this particular location.  He would wander around looking at the scene from different directions and points of view.  I find that sometimes my photographic eye will see a picture.  Many times I will come back to that photo, like in this case, several months (years?) later, and see the picture that my eye had seen then.  Weird huh?