A fairly recent technique in portraiture, the BW Blowout features most skintones extremely close to white, with some parts completely blown out. The intent is to present an image that is mostly without detail except for major facial features and outlines. Siggy can do that!

Starter Image

Here's what we're starting with. I chose this image because the face has strong contrast with the rest of the image, but has fairly neutral lighting of its own. This lets us play with contrast without having areas fall into shadow that we don't want shadowed. In general, this type of portrait would be shot in a studio under carefully controlled lighting to create the same effect. I'm lazy -- I just picked a picture of my wife lying on the grass under an overcast sky. The white shirt she's wearing will be a benchmark point, as well. If we can maintain a tiny amount of detail in the shirt, then we know the image isn't totally blown away. (Note: click the image to see it full-size.)

Step 1 -- Desaturate and Channel Adjustment

We're not using Siggy just yet. I desaturated the image completely with the "sat" slider, then tinkered with the Red, Green and Blue sliders to get a channel mix I liked. In this case, I dropped Blue down to zero, which brought the extreme white of the shirt down to near the tones of the face, and dropped Green down to zero as well, to take the background grass down to very dark tones. I like this result as a simple portrait shot although it could use a bit more contrast if we were going to stop here.

Step 2 -- Siggy: Extreme Brightness

Siggy Bright: 0.79. I chose this value fairly carefully, because it forms the basis of the rest of the image. I moved the Bright slider until the majority (but not all) of the skin tones were hammered to 255. Check this by hovering the mouse pointer over the brighter portions of the face. Her cheek is completely blown out, as is part of her forehead. The shirt still has some detail in the 240s, so that's fine. (If I wanted the shirt to be blown out, I'd add some Blue channel back in until it did so.) I used the mouse wheel to tweak the brightness slider one notch at a time until I was happy with the 0.79 value. Every image will require a different brightness, so don't just use this one and assume it will work.

Step 3a -- Siggy: Extreme Contrast

Siggy Contrast: 1.0. We're going to use extreme Contrast to help find the proper Midpoint (this is a technique you use frequently with Siggy -- high contrast, find midpoint, adjust contrast). All I've done here is moved the contrast slider to 1.0 so in the next step I can see where the Midpoint will have the most effect.

Step 3b -- Siggy: Find the Midpoint

Siggy Midpoint: 0.86. There are two possibilities here -- do you want parts of the face totally blown out or not? I prefer having just a tiny bit of detail everywhere in this sort of portrait, so I chose my midpoint accordingly: I moved the midpoint slider closer and closer to 1.0 until just the tiniest bit of facial tone had dropped into extreme darkness. If you want more blowouts, see the end of the tutorial for the related sample images and Siggy settings.

Step 4 -- Siggy: Medium Contrast

Siggy Contrast: 0.36. Here's the funny thing -- with the brightness and midpoint pushed up so high, you'll find that decreasing contrast makes facial tones lighter. That's how this tweak works. I adjusted the contrast downwards until the facial tones came up to meet the blowout region without becoming totally compressed. You'll need more contrast than "none" because we need to take the tones compressed by high Bright settings and decompress them somewhat. Remember: contrast happens after brightness.

Step 5 -- Siggy: Drop the Shadows

Siggy Shadows: -1. Because so much of the image has been brought up to near white, we need to bring the details that define the face down a little darker. Taking the shadow slider down to -1 accomplishes this easily. This image is almost done. I don't like some of the contouring in the cheek; I think the contrast is a little high, and the brightness probably needs to be adjusted too.

Step 6 -- Siggy: Tweak

Here's the final image -- I'm happy with it. I have adjusted brightness to 0.84, contrast to 0.33 and midpoint to 0.91. There are no blowouts in the face at all, but the brightest areas are sitting right below absolute white. I have plenty of skin texture detail, which I like, and the facial features are well defined so the person is recognizable. There's even detail in the white shirt! I like this "blowout" portrait, even though it isn't blown out at all. Maybe you would have a different approach to this portrait... but that's fine. The purpose of this tutorial really isn't to show you how to achieve a particular effect, it's to help you understand what Siggy does.

Analysis -- What are we doing here?

Here's how the process works, analytically. If you can understand how Siggy is modifying the image, then you'll know which way to move the sliders to get the effect you want. Otherwise... you'll just go crazy!

Process

1. Desaturate and adjust channels to get a pleasing B&W starter image.
2. Push all image tones up very high so most things are blown out
3. Very high contrast and adjust midpoint just above the skin tones
4. Moderate the contrast to bring skin tones back to near-blowout levels
5. Take the shadows down as low as you can to add emphasis to facial features
6. Tweak brightness, contrast, and midpoint 0.01 at a time to adjust where the blowout starts and how much contrast you really want.

Slider Effects

Once you've got Brightness, Midpoint and Contrast raised so high, the sliders take on different personalities. Here's what they do:

• Bightness Decrease makes everything darker, and moves more tones below the midpoint.
• Bightness Increase makes everything lighter, and moves more tones above the midpoint. Moving the brightness slider does NOT show dramatic contrast change, becaues the contrast curve itself hasn't moved.
• Contrast Decrease makes the facial tones lighter, because less contrast moves all image tones closer to the midpoint.
• Contrast Increase makes the facial tones darker, because more contrast moves all image tones farther from the midpoint. Changing the contrast slider changes the contrast curve, so adjust this if there's too much contouring or harshness.
• Midpoint Decrease adds more blowout, because it moves the contrast curve downwards.
• Midpoint Increase gives facial tones more detail. Remember: at high contrast, things above the midpoint are pushed towards white.

I hope this helps you understand Siggy's capabilities and allows you to get effects you want without going mad!

Final Notes

You'll notice I didn't touch the Highlight slider! I left that one alone intentionally, because you may want to use it to adjust the image even further. Tweak it to give a little more blowout, or to bring things down a little further away from white.

Also, when you're doing this sort of extreme tonal manipulation, don't use Auto Levelling, either with PC (Perfectly Clear) or Bibble's built in version. With auto levels on, most of the adjustments above look completely different during initial settings and tweaking -- although the final image wind up almost identical. Make sure these options are off or you will go insane trying to figure out the next step.

More Blowout

Here's the sample images and Siggy settings for the "more blowout" version of this portrait. You'll note that I've adjusted the Brightness slider -- that's to be expected during the final image tweaking. Just a little nudge up or down to control which parts of the image fall on the midpoint.

Blowout Portrait Midpoint 0.77 Info

About half of the face is totally blown out with a Midpoint setting of 0.77.

Blowout Portrait Blown Final Info

Final "max blown" Portrait. Bright 0.83, Contrast 0.28, Midpoint 0.77, Shadows -1.