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.
Silver Efex Pro is one of the best-known plug ins in the Nik Collection and widely regarded as the premier tools for fans of black and white photography. There are lots of really good ways to create black and white images in all sorts of software, but even now Silver Efex Pro has a magic…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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: 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.
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
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…
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?