Black and white

I’ve been doing a lot of dig­i­tal dark­room work lately, partly due to my cur­rent fas­ci­na­tion with Adobe Cam­era Raw. I’ve always been par­tial to black and white pho­tog­ra­phy. With dig­i­tal, you don’t have to choose whether to use B&W when shoot­ing a photo.

What I tend to do when work­ing with a photo is ask if the color serves some func­tional pur­pose for that image. If not, I usu­ally con­vert it to black & white. (If the photo stays in color, I’ll often push the sat­u­ra­tion to make it quite vivid—if the com­po­si­tion is about color, I usu­ally like there to be a lot of it.)

Of course, the right way to do black & white dig­i­tal con­ver­sion is not to desat­u­rate the image—the result is usu­ally pretty unin­ter­est­ing. There are a num­ber of options, includ­ing (in Pho­to­shop CS3) a black and white con­ver­sion option. Lately I’ve been work­ing with the con­ver­sion tools in Cam­era Raw, which allow value adjust­ments based on spe­cific col­ors in the image. That means, for exam­ple, that you can make the greens darker or lighter. I always exper­i­ment with a range of set­tings for each color. I also usu­ally apply a color split in Cam­era Raw with B&W images. That means you can select a color for the lights and another for the darks (and you can adjust exactly where the split between light and dark lies). The image is not strictly B&W, but if you don’t go over­board you can achieve some sub­tle effects. I usu­ally make the lights a warm color and the darks a cool color, but not always.