High Contrast Black & White Effect - Affinity Photo Tutorial

Key Takeaways

hello my friends how are you doing today on our artistic journey we are going to look into how to create these famous high contrast black and white portraits my name is Olivia I am a professional designer and I want to thank of my patrons who support me and make these videos possible thank you for that let's get started so we only use these kind of high contrast black and white pictures they are always in trend they are always cool to look at how do you create it you will be excited how simple that is so we're starting out with a color picture and one of the important parts is that the picture should be as sharp as possible so that is kind of a good thing to have as you can see here this is kind of sharp not super sharp so we will improve it a little bit let's zoom out here so the first thing we want to create is a live filter so go to live filters and then to unsharp mask and here we have our settings I will set the radius to 1 for 1 pixel and then the factor to 1.5 don't go too crazy with these values because the picture will start to look strange if you go too high on these values the threshold is on what part of the picture is the sharpness actually being used on so we keep this on 0% so it's used on all of the picture and you will see here on the beard for example that it's just a small change but it's an important change you can see this really clears up gives it more contrast also up here when you look at that part of the skin gives it a little bit more contrast exactly what we need for this picture good so now we have the portrait how do we do the high contrast black and white effect first of all of course we want to turn it into black and white this we can do with our adjustment down here adjustment black and white super sample and most of the time skin is has the colors red and yellow in them so these levers here they will probably have the most effect don't go too extreme you can don't go like this you don't want to do that um so what is thus obviously is to decide this color in the picture how bright how dark should it be so you can decide here and you can already see that this can have a really nice impact gives you a lot of control over how your black and white picture is going to turn out use all of the levers because you never know what other values are in here so for example you can see here the shirt has some blue values we can make the shirt a little bit darker so it's not distracting from the face too much the pink or magenta does a little bit down here you can see on the neck down here right there we have magenta interestingly so you can make this a little bit darker as you want this is up to your taste so where is the high contrast coming in this is the trick it's super easy to do you create a live filter again down here live filter high pass like this and doesn't do anything at the moment the reason for that is and you should really look out for that this snapped to the other adjustment layer if that happens you see here a little triangle click on that so this pops out and then click and drag this on top of the other layer now everything is gray we don't see anything anymore because this is a high pass filter so move up the radius you will see the face is coming back but only the edges of the face are going through the high pass filter and this is really good for us because we only want to have the edges we want to make it high contrast so set the blend mode to the vivid light you can experiment with the other blend modes and see maybe there is some cool artistic thing in there you want to use but I found that vivid light works really good especially for this if so you can see here can set it very light and set it very high I think it can go even higher than this setting let's go to 200 and you can see yes this is applied even though the lever only goes to 100 pixel you can enter numbers instead it as high as you want so this is basically the effect but of course we have some secret sauce in my videos so you if you look at the other picture I've shown you before you might realize a lot of them have dark backgrounds why is that well the reason for that is if you have a dark background the highlight areas stand out a lot more the contrast looks a lot sharper just because of the big contrast between the dark background and the bright foreground on the face and in this case we don't really have that but we can fake that and there are some easy ways to do that I'm going to show you two that give you a lot of control so I know you might think you go to live filters and then vignette and create a very dark vignette around the face but you can do that it doesn't give you enough control I want to show you two other ways how to do that that are easy and fun so what we're gonna do is we're gonna use the doughnut tool the doughnut tool is over here on the left side you click here and click and hold you have all these kind of shapes usually it shows a rectangle or the ellipse tool it's also a doughnut tool in here which has the benefit that it has a hole in the middle so we're gonna create a big donut and this should be filled with black colors so go to fill select black as the color and you don't want to have a stroke here so don't make a stroke zoom out and make the donut big enough so it covers all of the picture like this for example and then you can separately define the hole of the donut here it says hole radius so you can make this smaller unless it only covers a part of the or until it only covers part of the face good so after we've done this we're gonna go here to Eve thanks for the lair and push up the Gaussian blur so this makes it softer hundred pixels not enough because I have a high resolution for the picture let's go with 200 that looks ok I would say good so of course this is much too much we don't need that dark a background so what we gonna do is go back to our layers and simply reduce the opacity of our effect here let's go for example 85 let's say yeah whoops this switched over again there we go 85 the donut hole is a little bit too small let's make that a bit bigger like that for example and because the face is a little bit to the side we can even rotate the donut a little bit there we go like this and you can see so we have kind of a handmade effect oh we up here you can see a little bit of the side of the doughnut is coming through this is not what we want let's push this up a little bit bring this down make the donut hole a little bit smaller so you can see you can adapt this pretty easily to your choice to your taste still a little bit man okay let's go like this there we go so we have a nice light effect just on the face and the rest is darker let's reduce that so that's is one way there's another way which gives you even more control than that so let's hide this real quick and the way to do that is you create a fill layer so click up here on layer and create a fill layer again with black hole you can select the color up here and you want to right click on the fill layer and rasterize it so it's a pixel layer afterwards and then set it to multiply and then again you can reduce it so you can set up the background the brightness you want it to be let's go to 85 again and now this time what we are going to do is we're going to use a brush that is set to the color white and I have made mine pretty big and also hardness zero so it's very soft and now you can go in the face and you can click at the areas where you think there should be more light in here you can see this gives us a lot more control on any kind of shape I want to have and create some beautiful light that highlights the center of the face and makes the background darker of course you can play around with that make it a lot more details and see what kind of artistic impression and style you can work out from these kind of tools but as you can see they are super simple to use thank you very much for watching I hope you enjoyed this tutorial if you did maybe like and share it see you in the next episode of our artistic journey I wish you a nice day and a lot of artistic fun bye