What, No Color?

Grand Tetons

I have tried to make black and white images before, always with varying amounts of success. I’ve tried most of the methods that have come along to convert color images to black and white in Photoshop and I even still have some black and white film in my refrigerator. I don’t intrinsically see in black and white like some photographers do so it is hit and miss with me as to which images might make a good black and white, but that is improving. I have been working on the black and whites with a DVD tutorial lately and it has helped, but it has also created more questions as well.

Through working with the DVD I was exposed to Nik softwares Siver Effex Pro Photoshop plug-in. I was amazed at what the program contains. It has previews down the left side of the view window with versions of your image in all different iterations, from infrared to push processed to sepia. AND it also has a pull down that you can use to hover your mouse pointer over just about every type of black and white print paper and see what your image would look like with each of those. The photograph above is an Agfa paper look I liked for this image. I don’t know how those guys ever made black and white prints in the darkroom considering how completely different an image looks on different papers. So many possibilities! Most of the time I just tweak the sliders in SEP that control definition, contrast, and brightness and can find a look I like best. AND there are colored filters buttons you can click on to see how a red or green or blue filter will effect your image (Ansel Adams would have gone completely nuts with this program). What a program! Too bad it crashes my Photoshop on a regular basis. Don’t forget to back up before you launch SEP! I am not sure if my Photoshop version is corrupted or if this is yet another PC Windows Vista problem.

Everybody seems to agree that in this digital age it is best to capture your image in color, even if you intend to make a black and white. Digital black and white capture just basically takes a color image and then throws all of your color information away. If you are computer phobic you can use RAW+jpeg and make the jpeg monochrome so you never have to do the conversion, plus you have the raw color data in the RAW image if you ever decide you want it.

From what I can gather, converting a color image in Photoshop pretty much does the same thing, just desaturates your color image and throws information away, so not sure about the technical difference there, but those who do know agree converting to black and white in Photoshop is better.

What I hadn’t considered before was the tonal range. It is bigger in black and white, which seems counter-intuitive. Anyone who has ever seen one of those color space diagrams knows that you can never represent all of the different shades of every color with our currently available color spaces. Adobe RGB is the standard, though ProPhoto RGB (or something like that) now has a larger color space. Most cameras and most custom print vendors use sRGB as a default. It is a smaller color space (fewer possible colors), but the printers can’t print any more colors than are represented in sRGB anyway. It is the color space of the web. In black and white you are only talking about black, gray, and white, so black and white film actually captured more tones than color film because it can capture every possible shade of gray between black and white. I am still not clear on whether that means we all ought to go back to shooting black and white film and using smelly chemicals.

The image below was converted to black and white the old fashioned way (can’t remember exactly how) in Photoshop a few years back. I tried it again in Silver Effex Pro and couldn’t really improve upon it. I am finding a really wide variation in how these black and whites turn out using different methods. Silver Effex Pro could have made this image, but none of its other options improved upon this particular image. The image above definitely benefited from SEP over how I had done the black and white conversion previously.

Cain Residence, Bodie, CA

If you want to get really out there then you will definitely like SEP. I took this fairly flat image of our hotel in Chipping Campden, England and found an old-timey look seemed to work best. No way I would have done that without Silver Effex Pro.

The Lygon Arms Hotel

Another old-timey look from Silver Effex Pro seemed best for this Civil War Reenactor portrait. It might benefit even more from adding an antique overlay to make it look a bit more scruffed up. I haven’t sprung for the $45 to download them, but I am tempted so stay tuned. I also used Silver Effex Pro to add the vignetting and some film grain on this image, which can be very effective. I also found out that adding an orange filter really makes that face glow, even in the shade of his hat.

Civil War Reenactor

P.S. – I am still waiting to hear how my polar bear photograph in the header of this blog did in the final round of judging in the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition so wish me luck. What you can’t see in this version is that he is glaring at a glaucous gull that is flying away. I made attempts to get the gull and bear in the same plane of focus and succeeded in this one instance. In another photo the gull is not in sharp focus, but the bear is running at it (he hated those gulls), and my thought was – wouldn’t it be great to be able to just fly away from an angry, charging polar bear?