Why Bother Shooting Black and White?
While there’s an art to shooting black and white photos, you may have shot some already and didn’t realize it. Let’s find the gems!
Once you know what to look for in a great black and white photo, you may feel compelled to seek out subject matter to snap. But more likely than not, you’ve already got some great ones in your library disguised as color photos just waiting to be teased out. All you need to do is find them and process away.
The 10,000 Foot View
Take a step back without moving an inch. Load up a screenful of thumbnails in Lightroom or Bridge, set the zoom level to a comfortable size and see what catches your eye. If you’ve shot in Raw, you can convert one of the images to monochrome and copy those Raw settings to the remaining images to view them all as monochrome images. If they’re abstract images, try rotating them as well. Look for geometric shapes, interesting compositions, sinuous lines, textures and patterns.
There’s something mysterious and compelling in discovering how a color image translates to grayscale, and then how one can use its color information to create a black and white masterpiece. With the advent of the B&W mixer, it’s simple and intuitive to adjust local contrast by adjusting the luminosity of individual color hues.
As you gain experience converting images, you’ll start to see how colors translate to grayscale. You’ll know intuitively that the more color in a blue sky, the more potential for controlling its brightness, creating stark contrast with clouds. Sometimes the way to the best black and white is through color. And sometimes you need to think out of the box.
As many of you know, I’m a big proponent of using LAB color to get rich color images that don’t compromise shape and contrast. But when I had a problem recently converting a color image to monochrome, I turned to LAB to use its power in color manipulation to get the effect I needed in a black and white conversion.
The problem was, the sliders in CR/LR’s B&W mixer just didn’t go far enough in darkening the red and yellows in the image. So, I reverted to color and opened the image as 16-bit LAB color in Photoshop. Then, I added a Hue/Saturation layer and used the scrubby tool to find the exact hues I wanted to darken. Once I found them, I didn’t use the saturation slider but the brightness slider to darken the color by dragging to the left. Adjacent to it was the other hue, so I repeated the action to darken it as well. Then I selected the Master channel from the dropdown menu and dragged its slider all the way to the left to fully desaturate the image and complete the monochrome conversation. And as it turns out, LAB Color is just as powerful for Black and White images as it is for color. Who knew?
Discovering these sorts of things is part of the joy of using color images as a starting point for monochrome. So, go find the gems, experiment and enjoy!
