Quickly Converting a RAW Photo File into to a decent Black and White Photograph

  • Open a photo in Lightroom Classic. 
  • Click on the Develop Tab.
  • Crop to your liking.
  • Click on B&W button.
  • Then click the Auto Button.
  • Now, Adjust the Exposure Slider to your liking.
  • While Holding Down the ALT Key adjust Whites, there should always be some pure white (Only white show up in this step).
  • Do the Same for the Black Slider. There should always be some pure blacks (Only black shows up in this step).
  • Highlights and Shadows Sliders Next. Adjust to your liking.
  • You now you have a reasonable BnW photo and you can adjust the finer points to your liking.
  • I stay away from Texture, Clarity and Dehaze unless necessary, I find them too fake (That's from my 20-years working in a Darkroom, we never had those).
  • Sometimes I use Tone Curve, Temp and Tint.


Why do I love Lightroom Classic

This article is about Lightroom Classic (not the lite program called Lightroom).

Between my wife (a photographer too) and me we have over 400,000 in our Lightroom Catalogue and the catalogue works flawlessly and has never failed to open or given us errors. The secret to that is Non-Destructive Photo Editing -  Lightroom never alters your original photos, they will always be on your photo hard drive completely unedited like the day you shot them. As you edit photos Lightroom stores the edit instructions in a text file and then runs the changes and displays your edits - all without altering your original file, and it's fast!

The Catalogue is great and fast too, we have over 150 Categories and Sub-Categories and we use dozens of the available Attributes to help us find and store photos. 

All in all, for us Lightroom Classic is the perfect app for our large catalogue of photos. We've been using it for 7 years and have put a lot of work into organizing the catalogue structure, it would be hard to change to other software. I tried 5 other vendors and found none better.



Printing with Lightroom Classic and Photoshop

Lightroom Classic is a great image editor but it handles printing very badly. If you want small white borders they will seldom be the same size on each side and it will often be difficult to print full bleed. 

How to Print using Lightroom and PhotoShop (example: a 16" x 20" with a 1/2" white border).

  • Edit your photo in Lightroom Classic and Crop to Custom Size 15" x 19"
  • Right Click the photo and Click Edit In: PhotoShop.
  • When it opens, Click Top Menu Image then Image Size, Enter 15" x 19"
  • Next click Top Menu, Image then Canvas Size, Enter 16" x 20"
  • If you're working with a Landscape photo, Step One in PhotoShop is Image > Image Rotation, rotate 90 degrees.
  • You will have a perfectly aligned half inch border to print.
  • The Lesson: PhotoShop handles printing much better than Lightroom Classic.





Lightroom Classic's Add To Quick Collection is Awesome!

When you're going through a new import of photos and you want to  Add to Folders later (it's way too time consuming to do that in the beginning) use the Add to Quick Collection.

As you're scrolling your recent new imports and you come to a photo you want to edit and file in a Category, simply Right Click the photo and select Add To Quick Collection.

Then see Top Left of the Category List, Quick Collection is there (it will not be cleared until you choose to clear it). Now you have quick access to the photos I call "Keepers" and I can Edit and File in  a Category later.

When you're done, Right Click on Quick Collection and Select Clear.



Using Format