I edited this black and white image three different ways and I still can’t decide which is best

Editing processes are very selective, and different photographers will have different approaches. Even the same photographer can have different approaches at different times. Just as it’s not always easy to cull your images, it’s not always easy to decide on the best way to edit them.

Here’s my starting image. It’s a RAW file, so I’ve got plenty of scope for black and white manipulation. The question is, what kind of look do I want to go for? In fact there’s another question – what’s the best software to do it with?

Now there’s a part of me that thinks that once you know what you want to do with an image, you can use pretty much any photo editor to do it with. But while that sounds like a perfectly reasonable assumption, I’m not sure it’s true. I do wonder if different programs lead you in different directions – just as using different cameras can make you see and respond to scenes differently.

Version 1: ON1 Effects

ON1 Effects is a standalone tool but also integrated into ON1 Photo RAW, so this applies to both of them. ON1 does supply an excellent library of preset effects, including many good black and white presets. I like preset effects because they give you ideas for image ‘looks’ that you might not have thought of.

This rendering is pretty ‘straight’. ON1 offers some very good border effects and I think this sets off the dark and brooding tones in this scene pretty well, which I left pretty much unaltered. This is probably the closest to a classic black and white treatment. ON1 does offer some more extreme black and white alternatives, but I like this one.

Version 2: Lightroom

Lightroom is very strong on AI masking tools, so it was really easy to add an AI sky mask and intersect it with a gradient mask to darken and add drama to the sky and establish a strong gradation towards the horizon. I also added a radial mask with an exposure increase to ‘relight’ the foreground.

Is this better than the first version? I’m not sure. I always find Lightroom tempts me into somewhat dramatic lighting effects. It’s really very easy to pull back dark tones and bring out shadows and produce images that have a good tonal range pretty much everywhere, but maybe you can have too much of a good thing.

Version 3: Silver Efex

For this last version I used Silver Efex from the DxO Nik Collection. I chose a preset I made myself that combines strong grain, strong contrast and a simple black border. In this image, the sky is much brighter than in the others with little detail, but once I saw it I liked it much more. This is the great thing about presets – they stop you going down your usual path and show you something else instead. I did ‘relight’ the foreground again using a Control Point adjustment.

What I like about this version is exactly what I thought I wouldn’t like – the sky is bright and washed out with just has a hint of tone and texture, whereas my normal instinct is to try to enhance both of those things in a sky. But here, now that I see it, I think this bright ‘wash’ of light is so much better. Photographs do need light and shade, not just in small details but in large areas too.

There’s no ‘perfect’ edit or ‘best’ image treatment

You can interpret the same scene in many different ways with your camera, but you can also edit it in many different ways without any of them being necessarily the ‘best’.

Here, I’m still not sure. I think I like the Silver Efex version the most and the Lightroom version the least. All three programs could reproduce all three effects perfectly well in principle (though Lightroom doesn’t do borders), but what I find interesting is the direction in which different software leads you.

Or maybe I’m just easily led.

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