Plain Black and White...

I'm still very very new to photography but I'm very very hooked on it. I've never taken any course or study any history on photography so this question might seem kind of dumb to the pros here. What is it about black and white photos that makes them better then color? I personally think its like watching black and white movies and will make me very sleepy. Maybe I'm just not getting the ehh.. what do you call it.. ahh.. the concept of black and white.

I would think that black and white photos is when the photog wants to show the pic as it is in its classic days of ONLY black and white film. But shooting a modern subject in black and white digitally is kinda weird! The color adds so much to the pic. Like a classic car I can understand why its black and white.. Because in that era there is only black and white so you want to make the shot look like you shot it when the classic was brand new. But dame... shooting modern street corner in color and then converting it to black and white is somewhat backwards. I'm sure I'm wrong to think this way but can someone tell me why?

That makes two of us, so I'm hoping for an answer, too. I simply can't understand how to "see" an image in B&W.

In my book, black and white lets you concentrate on the form and texture of the subject without the colours getting in the way of that.

Sometimes it black and white makes the image a lot stronger, sometimes it doesn't do anything for it at all.

As to "seeing" it, carry about a strong yellow filter. Looking through that makes everything monochrome (but obviously shades of yellow rather than grey). This would give a good idea how a shot would turn out.

Part of my workflow is to quickly produce a black and white image of the colour one I'm working on. i.e. one of my major image processing actions in Photoshop spits out a black and white version of the image I'm working on. 9 times out of 10 I simply close it without saving. But sometimes it is worth spending more time on.

Cheers

Ian

Interesting points Ian. The yellow filter is interesting but I like the idea of the action. Maybe I'll learn how to "see" B&W by doing this. Interesting.

Scottes, you can download the excellent TLR B&W Conversion action for free and try the different B&W conversions on the same image. One of them will work really great for your image, I use it all the time.

About the original question - it's what iwatkins said, sometimes B&W image has stronger effect than color one because it makes you concentrate on different things - textures and light instead of colors.

How do you split out the B&W, Ian? The reason I'm asking is that I usually find B&W images from color channels to have much more potential than B&W from a straight grayscale conversion or from the luminosity layer in LAB.

Hi pacAce,

What I have is an action that uses the 16-bit full size TIFF and applies sharpening to it. Once it's done that it resizes to gallery size, applies the sRGB profile, drops to 8-bit mode then saves to JPEG.

I've tacked on the end of this Action the following:

Make adjustment layer (i.e. does a Layer | New Adjustment Layer | Colour Mixer)
I've set it to Monochromatic, Red 100%, Green 15% and Constant to -15% (blue looks after itself).

This way I've already got my image saved off to JPEG ready to be uploaded to a gallery. But just before I close it as being a "done deal" I get a quick B&W image to look at. If I don't like it, or it doesn't have potential I just close it. If it does have potential, I'll close it, reopen the original RAW and then work on a B&W one from scratch.

If I'm seriosuly not interested in a B&W look for a load of RAWs I'm batching through, I simply uncheck that last step in my action so it doesn't happen.

Another thing I do at the end of each month is produce a contact sheet(s) of all my RAWs for that month. Once I have those saved off, I quite often apply the same adjustment layer (manually) to have a quick scan of all my shots to see if any have potential for a great B&W conversion.

The one I used to do was as soon as the RAW Convertor opened in PS CS, was to simply slide the saturation slider down to 0 to have a quick look, but I don't bother with this these days.

Cheers

Ian

It seems like you have a good workflow going there, Ian, especially for the B&W. i don't do a lot of B&W stuff but when requested to do so, especially by my wife, I end up doing basically the same thing you're doing except that I copy the color channels as layers and just vary the opacity of any or all of them to get a good mix.

I still don't understand.. Why not just say that any two color combo will make a picture better or stronger then it is..? For example blue and white or green and white or red and white.

Mixing colors with white is not the same as black and white which is neutral in color, if that's what you're asking. If not, then I'm not sure I understand your question.

Ahh.. yes.. so black and white is neutral. As they say its not a color. Just contrasts? So in a black and white photos, we are just to enjoy the contrast of black and white.