When I posted my recommended reading article about Ming Thein’s review of the Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera, I got a comment from Bill Beebe about those super black colours in Ming’s photographs. I replied to Bill, but I thought that is worth an extra article maybe.
So, yes, I also am amazed each time I see some of Ming’s photos, and ‘favourited’ several of them on Flickr, like this one, or that one. I even asked him how he does get those blacks, and he kindly answered directly in his own Flickr stream, right on that first photo where I linked to above. He got me curious of course, so I wanted to try his recommendations.
I had taken a test shot of Zuleikha lately, where she holds my gray card in a way that you see all three of these cards – the white, the gray, and also the black one. So this time during my usual work flow, I tried Ming’s recommendation and set the white balance in post onto that black instead of the gray card. The result: a bit less red, a bit more yellow – these were my first impressions. But I wanted to get close to his blacks, so I didn’t care about that for the moment.
I knew that to get close to Ming’s results, I had to increase contrast, saturation, and the blacks, so this is what I did in RawTherapee:
For some photos, I have to increase both contrast and saturation even a bit more (like +15 and +10), and the blacks are three clicks higher than what “Auto Levels” would give me, with each click resulting in an increase of +50. The over- and underexposure warnings, should you have them turned on, should now show an almost completely “underexposed” (= black) black card. But that is what we wanted here, right? We wanted those blacks to be real black.
A quick check on the left side of the normal RawTherapee screen confirms that. If you “mouse over” that black card, this is what the levels are on it:
Luminance, and both a and b curves are a solid zero (and please don’t ask me about those RGB +3 values or the value (in the middle) of 3 – I have no idea. Maybe you can tell me that?)
If you hold the mouse over the gray card instead, you see that it’s gray (both a and b curves are zero), while the luminance is exactly in the middle (50). Again, RGB shows both a slight underexposure, and some differences in the colours. These values change a lot when moving the mouse over different spots of that gray card, must be the results of a different reflection on a not really flat surface (because in real life, that probably doesn’t exist).
So that way of working gives me an image like this:
Or, when converted to black & white in a quick & dirty way with just moving the saturation slider (the one in LAB mode) all the way left to -100, it gives me this:
Not perfect, but closer. It’s always a question with which images you can do that – the picture above was a bad example, because you normally don’t do this to young and pretty females. I think this one was actually quite good in black & white as it is:
Ming is a nice guy who answers questions fast if you should have some. And he even wrote an article about black & white conversion not so long ago. If you go there, you’ll see at once what Bill and I mean: his blacks are vastly superior to anything I could produce, and so I consider him a real master (an artist anyway; his photographic work is fantastic).
Maybe I should save some money, and next time I’m in Malaysia, I should go and visit one of his classes. At least I would learn from one of the best.
That makes sense, but the problem with increasing saturation is you loose the mid-tones. I’ve been working hard to increase the dynamic range in my black and whites, and thus I need the mid-tones to stay distinct. What I want, and what Ming’s images seem to show, are true rich blacks where the blacks are supposed to be. I used to get that kind of look with certain Ilford papers Back In The Day. A rich, inky black.
Ming’s not the only one who gets such blacks. Kirk Tuck does as well, especially around the eyes of his black and white portraits. But a lot of that is due to his having shot film and then scanned them in.
Oh well. Looks like I’ll need to work a bit more with Lightroom and Silver Efex Pro. And maybe I’ll need to dig deeper into PS5. I’m trying to avoid PS5 PP because that’s too much like work.
I think I know what you mean about those blacks, and no, of course Ming isn’t the only one. I’ve seen the same great blacks from others, like Mike Kobal, or Patrick Braun for instance. The latter is from Frankfurt, and I wanted to meet him anyway, so I could ask how he does it.
What I just tried was originally a tip from a friend called Thorsten Wieszniewski from Bonn, Germany. He said he’s using AdobeRGB in the camera instead of sRGB, because that way he’d get better and truer colors, and the reds weren’t so over-saturated. When I saw that second photo in the Ming Thein E-M5 review, where on its rear LC display you see that he had set it to also use Adobe, I decided to give that another try. Of course I couldn’t use my usual two-step work flow in this case, since I don’t know what the Olympus Viewer 2 would make out of that AdobeRGB when converting the image to a *.tif file.
So I tried to make a conversion using RawTherapee only (still the 3.x version on my Debian stable; 4.x would probably have been better). I used one of Colin’s ‘Huelight’ profiles which he claims is still an early experimental one, but since I worked on white balance and the HSV curves anyway, I didn’t care. I came up with this:
I think I didn’t lose too many mid-tones in here, tho I used the E-PL1 with the Zuiko Macro, and I think that E-PL1 has a somewhat ‘steeper’ curve than my E-520 (or the E-3, for that matter). Would be interesting to make an own profile for my own flashes, cameras, and such, but I still don’t own a Gretag MacBeth Colorchecker.
And as far as I understood Ming, he doesn’t use any presets like those from Silver Efex or other third party – he said it’s mostly luck, work, and experience. Well isn’t everything?
Don’t know for sure of course, but I think I’m on the way to somewhere – and the best is that even that way is fun.
Thanks, as always, for your visit and comment Bill!
Hi Wolfgang,
nice to be mentioned! And that bottom picture seems to have something new, I think!
Let us see a comparison with your standard workflow!
… and perhaps a normal lighting outdoor sciene with a comparison: a) your normal workflow
b) the new thing with adobe RGB and some aditional saturation and other playing around in the settings!
And don´t work to much for your Blog! But it´s all so exciting…. coming closer and closer to Ming Theins Colours. What I want to say is: Work hard for your Blog (at least tomorrow)!
Thanks Thorsten! And yes, of course I will do such a comparison – as soon as I have the time to do that. I’m not a professional photographer as you might know…