Pretend Play Toys

Black And White Photography Tips – Getting Good Black And White Photos

These tips will help you be able to recognize good black and white photo opportunities and to be able to photograph and edit them for the best results.

Black and white photography is an excellent way to train the eye to recognize remarkable photo composition which is why so many photography courses and schools teach black and white early on.

As vibrant and colorful as a sky at sunset may be, it is often the lines, shapes and curves that move the eye through the picture. With color, the vibrant tones are beautiful but with black and white the contrasting tones are more dynamic.

In spite of its attributes, after the media went full color in the 70′s and 80′s black and white photography faded. It soon became increasingly more challenging to find places that sold and processed black and white film. Now thanks to digital cameras and editing, black and white is back!

How to Recognize Great Black and White Pictures

Although choosing the best subjects for black and white is very subjective, many professional photographers will agree that the following types of compositions beg for black and white:

• Photos that convey strong emotion. Often times, color can be a distraction whereas black and white makes the emotion or feeling seem more strong.
• Images that don’t have a full spectrum of colors like Ansel Adam’s Yosemite “Moon and Half Dome.”
• Low contrast images such as photographs shot on dark overcast days.
• Any subject with the lines, contours, shadows and curves that you just know will look great in black and white. How can you tell? By getting familiar with a variety of black and white images! Just look online for “Ansel Adams.”. Or you can just search for “famous black and white photos.”
• Look at B&W photography books at the library. There are many places to appreciate and learn this artful form of photography!

Create Black & White Photography with a Photo Editor

Once you see a subject and know it would like best in black and white, then you can always set your camera to B&W and take it. However, if you gain experience with your photo editor, you will find you can create even better B&W images by shooting in color first and then desaturating in the editor. Another benefit to this method is that you’ll never end up with a day’s worth of pictures all in black and white because you forgot to reset the camera!

Check the White Balance on Your Camera

While the easiest way to change a color to black and white is to desaturate it with your photo editor, this technique doesn’t let you control how the primary colors work together to produce a grayscale brightness. If you have good white balance in your picture, then simple desaturation may be all you need to do in the software editor.

Make Sure to Use Your Photo Editing Software’s Color Swatches

One of the many methods for creating black and white images in a photo editor allows you to apply color swatches for your tones. Even though we don’t see the colors in black and white, there are tones, and these are created by colors. Color swatches work much the same way as color lenses do on an SLR camera. For instance, camera filters in the yellow to orange range look great with skin tones while green adds wonderful natural tones to outdoors pictures.

And finally, don’t forget to show off your black and white photographs. Beautiful black and white photos deserve to be framed for all to see. You should select picture frames that showcase your image with simple clean lines rather than distract from it. Black and white pictures look especially good framed in silver picture frames, gold picture frames and even black picture frames depending upon the style of the image. Hope you enjoyed these four black and white photography tips and have fun taking your next black and white photo!