Digital black and white photography?

Question:people say the black and white tells more. how do you make a black and white picture tell more. and what is a good black and white picture. and where can i find info about improving my skills in editing black and white photos. thx alot

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: people say the black and white tells more. how do you make a black and white picture tell more. and what is a good black and white picture. and where can i find info about improving my skills in editing black and white photos. thx alot

Our eyes naturally see color first. In a photo, this can be a distraction to the subject of the photo. Without color, the subject, feel, mood, and emotion are much more freely able to be perceived by the viewer.

Color DOES have it's place though. It kills me to see someone take a beautiful photo of a flower and make it black and white just because they think it makes it "arty" or "important looking" or some such nonsense.

When you are taking a photo of a scene, really look at it and think to yourself, ... "is COLOR an important part of this scene or subject". If it is not, then in most cases, black and white will be the best to use.

Examples where you DO want color could be shots of Autumn trees, flowers, fireworks, car shows, photos of paintings. See what I mean? The COLOR is an important, critical even, part of these photos. Just making them black and white would degrade their effect.

Photos of street scenes, or a homeless person, or kids playing, are usually not dependant on color to deliver their meaning. You will "see" the scene better if there is no distraction of color.

So as far as editing b/w photos, there are many plug ins and actions for Photoshop for various b/w looks, but personally I use none of them. I like to use channel mixer and make one copy each of the photo in each of the red, green, and blue channels, (with Monochrome selected). I then compare the looks of all three photos and mix the channels to get the best look. I sometimes will place layers of different mixes on each other and keep parts of one channel and erase parts of another channel.

Do not just desaturate or do a greyscale conversion though. It will leave you with a flat, low contrast black and white photo.

Here are some b/w photos if you just want to browse;
http://www.pbase.com/s_parrott/image/900...
http://www.pbase.com/s_parrott/image/900...
http://www.pbase.com/s_parrott/image/900...
http://www.pbase.com/s_parrott/image/900...

steve

Well, a good black and white picture, in my opinion, is one that creates not just one, but numerous stories behind it. And to improve your skills editing them, you just need some experience.

I answered this question yesterday, here is a copy. The question was about using Elements, but also works with Photoshop or even Gimp.

First of all shoot in colour, you have far more control in Elements to convert to B&W.

Shoot in Raw and in the Raw Converter open as a 16bit image, this will help with the 'grainy' look.

To convert to B&W try this, open your image and open 2 Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layers, on the top layer just turn the Saturation slider all the way to the left (desaturate to B&W) on the next Layer down change the blend mode to Color, then by altering the Hue slider you can mimic the effects of a Red filter, Blue filter and green filter, and anything in between. Choose the setting that gives you the tones you want. Then Flatten the image, that's the B&W conversion done.

Now for the fun part, using the Lasso Tool do a rough selection of the say the sky, feather lots (the amount you feather depends on the picture resolution try 50 to 150), then with the marching ants still showing the selection open a new Levels Adjustment Layer, the selection will have been masked out so you are working on just the sky. Then by moving the little triangles below the Histogram you can make the sky darker, lighter, soft and wispy or truly 'Gothic' it's up to you.

Do the same with any other part of the image, you can control the brightness/ contrast of any part of the image this way, you are in full control.

For this technique to work you need to be in 16bit mode from a Raw file, an 8bit Jpeg will just be torn to pieces and you don't want the Jpeg artifacts that are created by the compression (the 'graininess you refer to).

Another tip is that B&W pictures should have no Black and no White in them, by which I mean no part of a B&W image should be 'pushed' to total Black or a total White, if they are you are loosing detail, and detail is the name of the game with B&W, they should be composed of shades of grey (they also print better), unless it's a deliberately High Key or Low key image. Look at any Gallery pictures to see what I mean.

Chris

1. A GOOD black and white photo can tell more, since much of a human's visual acuity is dependent on the CONTRAST between one object or surface, and another.

2. It is not so much in the photograph's "editing" or manipulation that you want skills developed, but, rather, in training the eye to recognize the importance of contrast in an image's compositon. In other words, in how you can situate the camera and it's capabilities to capture the proper contrast for it to be able to tell it's story. (to "say more.)

So, the info you need on "improving" your black and white images will be where you learn to make full use of your camera. When you learn to train your eye and hands to take better black and white images, you will, also find that your color photographs will improve.

Comment - nice tutorial Chris!