Ansel Adams-like Photos

If you're like me, you love black and white photography. And nothing beats the dramatic, starkly beautiful black and white of Ansel Adams. In this tutorial, we'll use a technique that enables you to approximate the same sort of dramatic effect, starting from a color photo.

  1. Start with a landscape image that has plenty of sky. Be sure that it is free of JPEG artifacts. And the sharper the image, the better. If you don't have a photo like that on hand, you can use my example:

  2. Choose Image > Split Channel > Split to RGB. Keep the Red channel (the newly created grayscale image marked Redn* in its title bar, where n is a number). Close the other two greyscale images and your original image.

  3. Choose Adjust > Brightness and Contrast > Clarify. Set Strength of effect anywhere between 3 and 5, and click OK. Apply Clarify again using the same setting. (Or just press Ctrl+Y to repeat.) The results should look something like this:

  4. Choose Adjust > Brightness and Contrast > Histogram Adjustment. Set the Low and High clip limits to no more than 0.01%. Set Gamma so that the detail in your image's shadows is just barely visible, but not so high that the image is lightened too much overall. (Start by trying a value of 1.20.)


    After clicking OK, your image should look something like this:

  5. Increase the color depth of the image with Image > Increase Color Depth > 16 Million Colors (24 bit).

  6. Now adjust the color of the image with Adjust > Hue and Saturation > Colorize. Set Hue to 160 and Saturation to somewhere between 15 and 20.

    Here's the final result for my example:

    Optional: You might find that your image needs a little sharpening. If this is the case, finish up with Adjust > Sharpness > Sharpen or (preferably) Effects > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask.

Thanks to Kris Zaklika, who was inspired by a special on Ansel Adams, came up with this technique, and then passed it on so it could be shared!

How To