The popularity of black and white photography is increasing. Black and white suits some subjects extremely well, drawing more attention to shapes, lighting and composition than is generally possible with colour photography.
That’s a good question. I had a friend at school who couldn’t see the point in watching a black and white movie because the world was in color. I tried to explain that black and white made things look different, it changed the mood, it brought lighting and drama to the fore… and so on. He wouldn’t have it. To his mind, black and white contains less information than color and that made it, by definition, inferior.
Josef Sudek was a photographer from what is now the Czech Republic who had a characteristic style, particularly later in his life, when he drew inspiration from the objects that surrounded him and the effects of light. His images were deep, soft and mysterious. But is it possible to achieve some of that look digitally without producing just a cheap, fake effect?
I’m in the middle of writing a book about black and white photography, and one of the topics I wanted to cover was why black and white still exists in a world of color, and whether black and white images can sometimes work better. It’s a difficult argument to make, but I think I’ve found a good example.
Editing processes are very selective, and different photographers will have different approaches. Even the same photographer can have different approaches at different times. Just as it’s not always easy to cull your images, it’s not always easy to decide on the best way to edit them.
It’s easy to convert a color image to black and white in any photo editor, Lightroom included, but to get a strong black and white look you often have to do a little more besides. Here’s a look at the B&W mode, B&W panel and the Tone Curve.
What’s especially clever about Lightroom presets is that they don’t just include global adjustments. You can also create presets with masks. These can be either manual masks which you can move around manually, AI masks which adapt to the contents of images they’re applied to, or combinations of both.
I like to using toning effects in black and white photography because they can often give images more depth and mood. So to speed this up, not just for me but for anyone else who works in black and white in Lightroom, I’ve created this set of 16 free Lightroom presets you can download via the link.
I’ve been trying out the new PhotoLab channel mixer and black and white mode in DxO PhotoLab 7 and I have to say I’m somewhat underwhelmed. First, it’s a feature that really it should have had before. Second, it’s not very strong in its effect.
DxO has launched a major new version of its flagship DxO PhotoLab raw processing, correction, enhancement and editing tool. DxO PhotoLab 7 brings new color calibration tools, support for LUTs, the ability to use HSL tools for local adjustments and a new black and white workflow.
For many the answer will be obvious. If you want to do any serious editing later, then shooting RAW is a must, right? Normally I’d say yes, but here’s an instance where I decided to work from the JPEG rather than a RAW file, and I’ll explain why.