Snapseed Black & White Photo Editing Tutorial.

  A color photo into a black and white masterpiece using Snapseed from Google. I am going to launch the Tools and Filters menu by tapping on the little pencil icon down there in the bottom right-hand corner of Snapseed home screen. Next, I am going to launch the Tune Imagetoolset that I covered way back in some of my very first tutorials on this amazing mobileimage editing App. As soon as the Tune Image toolset appears,I am going to tap down here on the Adjust button to bring out our menu and then I amgoing to swipe down to the Saturation control.

 Do you remember that Saturation in this Appmeans the strength of color? Most of the time we use this controlto punch up the vibrancy in our color images, to make things more saturated, but if youslide your finger to the Left you can pull down the intensity of your colors. As I swipe left the colors in this image willgrow more and more pastel until finally at -100 we are left with a black and white. Completely desaturating a color image is aquick and easy way to convert any color photo into a monochrome. But pulling all of the color out is notenough. Now we need to adjust our tones. The word “tones” here means all of thedifferent shades of gray that we now have in this image. When I go this route, my next move is usuallyto swipe Down to bring out the tools menu again and then to switch over to the Ambiancecontrol. In a color image, when you increase the Ambiancesetting your photo gets more saturated and Snapseed starts to even out the contrast byadding light into the dark areas of your image while simultaneously darkening down the brighterparts. When you set a negative Ambiance theopposite happens. 

 Now that we have removed all the color,a positive Ambiance value will reduce the overall contrast here which is going to helpme bring out some of the details in the shadows in this photo. A negative Ambiance would add contrast. I am going to swipe over to about +60 to add some brightness into my shadows and to simultaneously darken down the highlightslike that window frame a little bit. To be clear, the Ambiance, Brightness,and Contrast controls in this tool are great, and I generally use them first to setmy image’s overall mood, but we can get even more control over our tones when we messwith the Highlights and Shadows sliders. In this case, it’s more details in my shadowsthat I really want to see in this image so I am going to push the shadows up to about +50. to bring outsome of the details inside of the barn that might otherwise have been lost when they were too dark. Now, in all honesty, I often have to go back and play with each slider again and again as I work on my photos but you get the idea. The message that I want you to learn fromthis example is that after you drop the Saturation down to -100 that you then need to push andpull, to play and experiment a lot, to turn a monochrome into something with eye-catchingtones. If anything, I find that the horse’sears and the look on its face are even more noticeable once the red barn color disappears. I’m happy now so I will tap on the Check markto commit these changes and return to the home screen.

 If I wasn’t in such a hurry to demonstrateanother method for black and white conversion then this would be a great time to Save mywork. Desaturating all of the colors is justone option in here. It’s a method that works well sometimesbut there are at least two other alternatives. Let me open up another image and I will showyou a different method using the Noir Filter. This time, I have a photo of this amazingranch that I saw once just outside of Zion National Park down in Utah. I like this photo in color but all color photosfeel modern. This one looks like it could only have beentaken in the past forty years or so since the invention of color film, or colordigital cameras, and now smartphones. One of the cool things about black and whitephotography is that a black and white image can have a much more historic feel. When I drop the color away this time I wantto create an image that looks old and historic. I want to create something that looks likeit might have been shot fifty or even a hundred years ago. So this time I am going to bring up the Tools and Filters menu again and then I am goingto slide down to the Noir filter. Noir is designed to create moody, cinematicblack and white images with darkroom-inspired toning and color wash effects. When the Noir filter launches we see a stripeacross the bottom with different styles. Think of the choices in here like some ofthe chemical processes that the old darkroom masters used to use to add a wash of colorover top of their final black and white print. I am not going to claim to know what the lettersS, or C, or F mean in this context. That part is a mystery to me but what Iknow is that you can tap on each of these presets to get a sense of what kind of blackand white plus color toning this particular formula might make. Let’s try the C01 setting. That’s cool.

 This Style gives my image a cyan wash anda very high contrast black and white mood. H01 has a more neutral feel and the darkerparts of this image are getting crushed down to almost inky black. Let’s try something like S02 whichwill gives this more of a yellow wash. Now this image has a real old yellowed historicfeel which seems like a perfect starting point for this scene. So now I can refine things even further bytapping on the Adjust menu. As you can see, there are four controls inhere. Hopefully, if you have been watching my videosthen you already have a pretty good idea about what the Brightness control will do. The Grain slider is fairly self-explanatorytoo. As you can see, the Noir filter is addinga simulated film grain into this image which I think helps with that old faded mood. If you don’t want any grain at all, then, of course, you can slide this one all the way to the left. If you want it more, all the way to the right. The Filter Strength control in here is theone that adjusts the strength of the toning, or the color cast, that is getting paintedinto our image. If I drop this one all the way down to 0 then youcan see what this image would look like as a straight black and white. It looks ok as a neutral black and white butI think that the additional yellow cast helped make this feel older and I liked it so I am going to slide this control back up to about +60.

 Now the last control, and probably the hardestto understand, in here is the Wash slider. The Wash here is actually a type of Contrastadjustment. Let me set this one down to 0 so that youcan see what I mean. As I Swipe my finger to the Right now watchthose dark plants in the bottom left corner Watch the light gray sky up there in the right as I drag this one up The darks will get darkerand the lights will get lighter. If I crank this one all the way up to +100then we are left with a very stark high contrast image with almost inky black blobs in theforeground and an almost paper white, or in this case paper yellow, sky. I think that this is way too much contrastfor this image so I am going to set this one back down almost to 0. Again the point is not to memorize my settings. The point of this lesson is to show you whatthese controls do and to make you familiar with all of your options. Let me show you the Before and after herereal quick.

 I like the Before photo but it feels so modernand loud compared to the After which has a quiet faded elegance of a black and white plus that yellow color cast and the old school grainy film look. I am going to Commit these changes and thenI will show you one more way to turn color into black and white. Now, for the most sophisticated method in Snapseed to make sense I have my animal friendsand a photographer’s color wheel. In photography, we use an additive light modelof color. In our color model, every color has an oppositethat’s 180 degrees away on the wheel. The science and the physics are not that important right now. What I want you to notice though is that ifI completely desaturate this image, like we did in the very first exampledo you see how the red cat and the blue bird become identical dark tones? Do you see how the green dog and that cyan bunny become light shades of gray? My animals are being mapped to a particularbrightness value, a particular shade of gray, when we drop all the saturation away. Now, this would be fine if I wanted an imagewhere we start out with a dark cat or a bright gray bunny.

 But what if I wanted to start with the opposite? See the problem with desaturating is thatwe don’t get to tell Snapseed exactly which colors it should turn into light or dark shadesof gray when it takes the color away. Let me Cancel out of here and then I willshow you a different way. This time I am going to launch the Black andWhite Filter instead. Now I am going to switch from the preset Stylesover to the really sophisticated Color Filter option. With things at the Neutral setting you areseeing the same image that we had just a second ago but check this out. When I tap on the Red Filter the cat becomesa very light, almost paper white, shade of gray. If I tap on the Green filter then the samething happens to the dog and so on. So how does this help us? Well, the point is that when I pick one ofthese colored filters that I am telling Snapseed to make things with that color become light gray in the color to black and white conversion process. It might be less obvious but I am also tellingSnapseed to map things that contain the opposite of the filter’s color into much darker tone let’s put with a real image.

 Alright, so here is this old truck that Istopped to photograph one day out in a cherry orchard with my big camera. That old classic truck is the subject forme in this photo. It’s the thing that caught my eye and it’swhere I want your eyes to go even if I turn this image into a black and white. So just to demo I am going to go into the Tools and Filters menu and then to Tune Image again like we did at the beginning Once again I am going to run the Saturationslider all the way to -100. Now, blink a few times. What happened to my truck? See this is a case where just desaturatingdoes not help make my subject pop. Now that truck practically disappears intoits surroundings. So let me Cancel this experiment and insteadI am going to launch the Black and White filter. Again, I am going to switch over to the ColorFilter choice in here and now I am going to tap my way through the various filters.

 If I tell Snapseed to use this blue filter thenI am telling it to map the Blue parts of my original image, which would be things like the sky, into very light tones. I am also telling the App to make things thatare the opposite of blue, think warm yellows and oranges, into very dark almost inky blacktones. And in this case, the results are awful. With the Orange or the Red filter thoughthe opposite happens and now that old truck really stands out! It stands out because the human eye is alwaysattracted to the brightest highest contrast areas in a black and white image first. To finish things off now, I can tap on the Adjust button and quickly add some additional refinements. I think that I will nudge the Brightness upto about +15. I think I’ll set the Contrast to about +15 tooand finally, I will add a little Grain to make this feel more like an image thatI shot with film. Now we have a strong eye-catching black andwhite where the truck dominates your attention. I could keep refining these settings and evenadd additional edits in here using other tools but I think that you get the idea. These colored filters in the Black and Whitetool are powerful stuff. I’ll Commit these changes and once again I should immediately Save my work.

• Share
• Share
• Share

Related Post