Digital cameras typically offer a range of ‘picture styles’ to suit different subjects or different tastes in color rendition. Canon calls these Picture Styles, Nikon calls them Picture Controls and other camera makers have their own names.
Black and white photography
Technically, black and white photography should be ‘less’ than colour, but its popularity is, if anything increasing. Black and white suits some subjects extremely well, drawing more attention to shapes, lighting and composition than is generally possible with colour photography. Most cameras have black and white picture modes, which is very useful when you’re composing images, but you get more control over the results by converting colour images to black and white on a computer later, so it’s a bit of a dilemma which route to take.
Black and white photography is as popular as ever, though now it's seen as a means of artistic expression rather than just a way of capturing images. Its continued popularity might be hard to explain logically since it offers 'less' than colour, but that may be part of its appeal – black and white offers fewer distractions, it's less 'literal' and it's easier to control the graphic and compositional elements that go to make up a picture without them fighting or undermining each other.
You can shoot black and white JPEGs in camera or do what most black and white fans do, which is to shoot RAW files and then process them into black and white later. This offers a 'digital negative' with a much wider brightness range and more scope for manipulation without image degradation.
Programs like Lightroom and Capture One are really good at producing strong, technically excellent black and white images, or you can use 'analog film simulation' tools like Analog Efex Pro, Alien Skin Exposure X or ON1 Photo RAW to create a film-like look.
In the days of film, taking the picture was only the start of the black and white image making process and the real work was done in the darkroom. It's the same now, and the most striking black and white images are created with careful enhancement and manipulation in software.
Dawlish Beach in black and white, with Exposure X5 adjustment layers
This project turns a regular color RAW file into a strong black and white image in Exposure X5. It uses a number of different tools so it’s a good chance to see how these work and how they can be used together. It’s also a good example the kind of image which works well in […]
An Icelandic church edited in Exposure X
This shot of an Icelandic church looked nice enough in color but I thought it had a bit more potential as a black and white image – though there were a few issues I wanted to sort out first. For this project I used Exposure X. The same tools exist in other programs, but I […]
Moody mono with a Leica M10 Monochrom and Capture One
I met my donkey friend while I was out testing a Leica M10 Monochrom and 28mm f/2 Summicron lens. For those who don’t know, this is a rangefinder camera with manual focusing, so getting my friend’s eye sharp was a special challenge as he was getting restless because I didn’t have any carrots. The Leica […]
Montacute House in moody monochrome with split toning
What is the mood you’re trying to capture? For his image of an Elizabethan country house, I wanted and sombre and forbidding look, and this required black and white, some dodging and burning and subtle toning.
Preset picks: Alien Skin Border – Negative (Kodalith)
Preset Picks: This time, Alien Skin’s Border – Negative (Kodalith) preset goes under the microscope. Using just three tools it transforms regular images into super-strong graphic black and white.
Can you really take proper pictures with a smartphone?
I can understand there’s a certain amount of smartphone snobbery, but I think that’s because we associate smartphones with a certain sort of selfie-loving snapshot mentality. Smartphone cameras are actually pretty good, provided youunderstand their limitations and work within them
and put the same thought into each picture that you would with a ‘proper’ camera
How to get great black and white in DxO PhotoLab… but you’ll need FilmPack 5
DxO PhotoLab can create superb black and white imagery, both in terms of image quality and in creative control, but you need to get the DxO FilmPack 5 Elite add-on to do it. This does make things more expensive, and it does feel a bit like you’re paying for some things that other programs offer […]
5 ways to convert colour images to black and white
With just a couple of exceptions, all digital cameras capture in colour, so if you want black and white you can either use the camera’s monochrome mode, which will simply convert the image in-camera, or you can carry out the conversion on a computer. But which conversion method works best?
Try a black and white high contrast Lith effect
One of the reasons I rate image effects programs so highly compared to traditional image editors is the way they open your eyes to effects you wouldn’t have thought of. Like applying the Lith Border effect in Alien Skin Exposure X3 to this early morning shot of a country church. There’s already a lot of […]