Crushed Blacks vs Milky Blacks. Photography Jargon Explained!

Crushed Blacks and Milky Blacks Lightroom Tutorial

The terms Crushed Blacks and Milky Blacks often get confused. In this Lightroom tutorial, I explain the differences between the two, and how to use correctly them in your photography.

Highlights

– What are crushed blacks?
– When to use crushed blacks?
– How to get the look in Lightroom.
– What are lifted blacks?
– When to use crushed blacks?
– How to get the look in Lightroom.

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Crushed Blacks vs Milky Blacks Lightroom Tutorial Transcript

I’ve been noticing people misusing the terms crushed blacks and milky blacks a lot recently. The two terms involve changes on the shadow side of your photo’s histogram. But they are not the same!

So, I thought I’d carry out my civic duty and make a quick video to clear things up. Because there is nothing worse than dropping some industry jargon into a conversation with a client. And then have them correct you.

Right, what are Crushed Blacks?

The crushed black, or sometimes it’s called the clipped black, look is achieved by taking the shadow areas of your image and making them black.
Basically you’re ‘crushing’ multiple shades of dark grey into just pure black.

When should you use this look?

It’s a stylistic choice. You can use this whenever you want. But before you go and crush the blacks in all your photos, it helps if you understand the psychology behind this look. In other words, how will it affect people looking at your photos?

When you crush the blacks in a photo you’re removing detail from the image – the shadow detail. That means that technically you’re making the photo worse. So why do it?

A few reasons. When you crush the blacks, you increase the contrast in your image. And because your brain is designed to focus on high contrast areas (it’s an evolutionary thing to stop you getting attacked by dinosaurs or something).

Either way higher contrast images are easier to process – and so more appealing to our brains. There are other reasons when this look can be beneficial.
Crushed blacks can remove clutter from a dark background, making the subject stand out more.

It can also make a photo more dramatic, because it recreates some of the properties of a single hard light source.

How do you get the crushed black look?

Just open up the curve panel in Photoshop, Lightroom or whatever editor you use. I’ll use Lightroom.

You can see my image histogram is displayed under the curve. The left side of the graph is the shadows side, the right side is the highlight side.
To crush the blacks we drag the bottom left point to the right. Compressing the shadow information into fewer shades. There is no fixed rule for this. So adjust to your taste and to what fits your image.

Next, what are Milky Blacks?

This look is achieved by lifting the black point in your image. This means that any pixels in your image that were black are now a shade of dark grey. It’s as if you added a few drops of milk to a black coffee. Kind of.

When should you use this look?

I had to research this bit, but it looks like the milky black look has its roots in old films. Cameras at the time did not have the dynamic range of today’s gear. To correctly expose images, they had to make concessions and this was one of them. The look became emblematic of a golden age in cinema and then people started emulating in a digital age. Which is why people often call it cinematic.

It’s become popular in the last few years because many photo apps incorporated it into their ‘vintage’ filters. As with all things that trend, many people love it, but some really really hate it. As with any stylistic choice, only use it when it fits the mood of your image or video. The key to any stylistic decision is that it needs to fit your story. Don’t just use this new trick because you’ve just learned it on YouTube. Understand what it does, how it makes people feel, and then see how you can use it correctly.

In fact, I’d say the reason so many people dislike this look is not that it has been overused, but because it has been badly used.

How do I get the look?

Go back into your curve panel Grab that same point on the left side of your graph. But instead of dragging it right along the x-axis – you’re going to lift it up. This is why it’s called ‘lifting the blacks’. Unlike crushing the blacks, lifting them reduces the contrast in your image. If you overuse it you can get this muddy incoherent mess. So you might not want to overdo it.

The last thing I want to say is that you can actually use these two looks together! In fact, that is probably why so many people get confused. In this image, I’m crushing the blacks AND lifting them. It is a nice way to get that cinematic look AND some nice contrast.