Fine Art Black and White Infrared Processing: Revisiting Chimney Rock at Ghost Ranch

This photo from Ghost Ranch was one of the first I captured with my infrared-converted camera; I remember being so excited looking at the preview on the back of the camera, followed by disappointment when I realized that I had no idea how to process it. At that time I was just beginning the exploration of black and white photography, and this image was the catalyst that started my search for a fine art black and white workflow.

It took me six months to develop the skills to process this image, yet even then I knew I wasn’t happy with the final result but could not improve upon it. The workflow I had adopted at the time was based around Silver Efex Pro in combination with Photoshop. Although I continued working with Silver Efex for a while afterwards, I never really felt comfortable using the software and eventually just defaulted to Lightroom for processing my images until I hit another brick wall with this photo and then discovered Joel Tjintjelaar and his B&W Artisan Pro panel for fine art black and white processing.

Last weekend I attended one of Joel Tjintjelaar’s training webinars for black and white photo processing and decided to re-process this photo as practice. I think Joel’s fine art processing workflow can produce better results than any other software or technique for black and white photography, but it requires dedication and commitment for success. I figured this image which had been so difficult for me previously would be a good test of my current skillset.

Although the original published photo was processed from a single exposure, the revised version is a blend of two images, one captured at 76 mm and the second at 81 mm. Although both were exposed at 1/160 sec, the 81 mm image is slightly sharper (or maybe just slightly more detailed because of the longer focal length) but is missing some foreground elements that add tremendously to the overall composition. I made some preliminary adjustments in Lightroom (lens correction, sharpening, basic exposure adjustments, and denoise) then manually blended the two exposures in Photoshop.

Before I could start processing this image, I had to create the critical mask to separate the foreground and sky. Although it seems as though there is a lot of contrast between the ground and sky, in several areas the two are almost indistinguishable, so the creation of this mask was difficult and time-consuming. I started with an auto-generated sky mask and used a combination of luminosity masking, color range selections, and manual brushing to refine the edge. It was work the effort because in later processing I didn’t find that any corrections to the edge were needed.

As I described previously in 2019 when first working on this image, one of the great challenges with infrared photography is dealing too much contrast. With strong lighting, the contrast in an infrared image can be overpowering. For this image, the direct sunlight reflecting off the rocks was incredibly strong whereas the shadows reflect very little light. It is not a problem of dynamic range-the raw image has detail in both highlights and shadows. Processing this image was all about controlling the contrast already present rather than building up contrast in a flatter image.

For the processing, I started with the Absolute Neutral conversion to monochrome, darkened the image and removed contrast through a global Low Key adjustment, then worked primarily through the use of luminosity masks to restore details and contrast in the sky and foreground areas separately. This procedure allowed me to make subtle targeted adjustments to specific areas with tight control of the contrast being applied. Throughout this process I kept a close eye on the darkest and lightest values in the image trying to keep the black level above 10 and the white level below 245.

Once the overall adjustments had been completed, I applied some dodging and burning to the foreground areas using the B&W Artisan Pro Smart Linear Advanced Adjustments. In my original edited image and this one, the sky had become uniformly very dark whereas the original camera preview shows a light-to-dark gradient, so I decided to restore some lightness in the sky just above the horizon using the Creating Depth adjustments in the panel. Finally, I applied the “A Love Supreme” split-tone color grade which added some very subtle warmth to the midtones and highlights while keeping the shadows neutral.

At this point, the work in Photoshop was done and I compared the revised image to my original edit in Lightroom. I was much happier with the look of the revised photo but I noticed it was missing detail in the rocks, so I applied Clarity, Texture, and additional sharpening to the foreground areas to bring out those details. The final step was to crop the image to a 5×7 aspect ratio which seemed to work better than the 4×5 I had used originally. The wider aspect and inclusion of the formations in the foreground provide some balance around Chimney Rock opposite the sky.

One last note: I no longer consider a fine art image to be final until it has been printed, so I soft-proofed the image and made some additional adjustments for print, and printed the photo on Canson Platine Fibre Rag. It looks fantastic!