Michael Freeman: Low Key

A short while ago we looked at high-key imagery – bright and white. At the opposite end of the scale, naturally, there is another style, low key. And in the same way that creating a high-key photograph calls for a combination of the right kind of subject or scene, and the way of processing the image or handling it later in post-production, so low key means first choosing a subject that lends itself to a dark treatment, followed by processing the file to favor the shadows and darker tones.

First, a look at the legacy of low-key photography, which turns out to belong mainly to the world of black-and-white printing. This is a very different aesthetic of printing from the essentially ‘straight’ and ‘pure’ style promoted by such well-known photographers as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. This is the sombre treatment of heavily inked images, with mid-tones pushed down so that most of the detail has to be read in low values. The reasons for photographers wanting to do this vary. One is a love of the richness of heavy blacks, another is trying to match the mood of serious, even threatening subject matter, or even reflecting the mood of the photographer. Two photographers in particular stand out: Bill Brandt, who photographed Britain from the 1930s through the 1960s, creating a number of iconic images, and Don McCullin, best known for his war photographs from Cyprus to Beirut, but who then turned his attention to landscape.

In both cases, there seems to have been a progression over time towards printing darker. In the case of Brandt, his wife said of his pictures of buildings in Newcastle that they “looked to him as if they might have been built of coal.”  It also tended to fit quite well with his obvious liking for strongly geometrical compositions — these normally lend themselves to high-contrast treatment.

Don McCullin recognizes in his dark, heavy printing a reflection of his childhood and career, writing, “[M]y eyes had grown accustomed to the dark. All I saw seemed to echo my childhood and the scenes of deprivation, dereliction, death and disaster, smashed minds and broken bodies, that I had witnessed in other countries.” This preference has been transferred to his current landscape photography of his home in Somerset. In an interview with broadcaster John Tulsa, he said, “ I look forward to the evening light, and the naked trees when I go out; and I live in this Arthurian world of Somerset.” In many ways, McCullin’s later work captures the idea of the expressive print, full of personal feeling.

 

You will need

• Subject matter that is dark to begin with, and if in color, without much saturation.
• Processing software that allows you to close in the black point and to lower the mid-tones; and also the ability to convert to black and white using color sliders selectively.

What’s good about it? Low-key is distinctive and deep in character, and so is a useful technique to have in your armory of creative skills and processing techniques.

The idea While a darker key can be applied to any image, according to the mood of the photographer, certain kinds of lighting and scene lend themselves more readily to this treatment than others. Ideal conditions are when a large area of the frame, even most of it, is in shadow, when most of these shadow areas carry no essential detail, and when there is a structure of lighter tones to make a contrast. Indeed, contrast, if only on a finely detailed scale, contributes greatly to the success of many low-key images. But, as with all special treatments, from infra-red to high-key, simply following a formula of ‘this is a low-key kind of image’ misses the point. What matters is how you as an individual, unique photographer see the scene and its potential.

This example below is reasonably conventional for low key — the setting is a dark interior, with weak sidelighting that reveals enough of the subject to make it obvious, and a background that can easily go to black. And probably should go to black in order to keep attention on the texture of skin and beard. The histogram that you can see if you go to the Levels adjustment in Photoshop is typical of a mainly-dark image with low-key potential, and we’ll see at the end of this article one way of treating it to enhance the low-key effect.

Tech check The technical issues of low key revolve around first framing the image so that the basic surrounds or background are all dark, and then processing the file top favor the shadow tones. Processing is dealt with in more detail below, but the classic techniques are to allow some shadow clipping and to lower mid-tones. The question of whether to close up the white point for a full range, or to allow the highlights to remain less than white is down to personal taste. Quite often, the dark mood of low key is easier to achieve if you convert a digital color image into black and white — monochrome images usually withstand extreme processing or post-production more successfully than does color.

Processing tips Let’s return to the image second from the top, of a bearded man against a dark interior. The first step with this image in order to strengthen the low-key effect is to make the background as black as possible, though without losing important shadow detail on the man and his hat. In Photoshop Levels, for example, drag the black point slider at the left edge of the scale below the histogram inwards to the right, while checking the amount of clipping (holding down Alt (Option) key while dragging reveals the amount of clipping. Normally with an image we would pull back from this to avoid clipping, but in this case some solid black is exactly what is wanted. In order to keep the mid-tones more or less as they were, it helps in this case to raise the mid-point slider by approximately the same amount as the black point has been closed in — from 1.00 to 1.12.

This is as far as we need to go, but there is still plenty of room for adjusting the white point or the mid-point to taste. And, of course, if we decide to make a black-and-white version of the image, there is always the option of using the hue sliders to alter tonal relationships and contrast. Here there are two alternative versions, one to maximize the contrast between beard and skin, the other to minimize it. The procedure is fairly predictable and straightforward. For the former, lowering red and yellow darkens the skin, raising cyan and blue whitens the beard. For the opposite effect, doing the reverse makes it possible to blend the beard in with the skin until it is almost unnoticeable — if that were wanted.

Pitfalls

• Misjudging the right balance between dark and too dark. This hinges on taste.

 

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www.michaelfreemanphoto.com