Black and White

Dark Canvas First: What Urban Dodge and Burn Taught Me About My Portrait Work
Video Tutorials

Dark Canvas First: What Urban Dodge and Burn Taught Me About My Portrait Work

I came up through wedding photography, which means I learned to retouch under pressure and mostly by instinct. Skin, hair, the soft glow of a ceremony room — that was my world for years. So when I started freelancing for beauty brands and teaching retouching workshops, I had to deliberately go looking for techniques outside my comfort zone. That’s what led me to Watch the full tutorial on YouTube — a Kelvin Designs episode on dodge and burn for urban landscapes.

Converting Portraits to Black and White: A Retoucher's Guide
Techniques

Converting Portraits to Black and White: A Retoucher's Guide

A great black and white portrait isn’t a color portrait with the saturation removed. It’s a fundamentally different interpretation of the image, and the conversion process gives you enormous creative control if you know how to use it. Here’s why “just desaturate” is the worst way to convert, and what to do instead. Why Desaturation Fails When you desaturate an image (Image > Adjustments > Desaturate), Photoshop converts each pixel to a gray value based on a fixed luminosity formula.