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.

Despite all of its benefits, black and white photography became less popular in the 70’s and 80’s because of the popularity of color. It soon became increasingly more challenging to find places that sold and processed black and white film. Now thanks to digital cameras and photo editing software, black and white photography is back!

How to Recognize Stunning Black and White Photographs

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 lacking a full spectrum of colors; for example, a city scape or 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 studying black and white photos! Just look online for “Ansel Adams.”. Or search for “famous black and photos.”
• Look at B&W photography books at the library. There are lots of places to appreciate and learn this unique art form!

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 added benefit to this method is that you’ll never accidentally take a day’s worth of pictures in black and white because you forgot to reset the camera!

Check Your Camera’s White Balance

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 a lot like the way color lenses work on a 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 last but not least, don’t forget to share your favorite black and white photographs. Beautiful black and white photos deserve to be framed for all to see. Choose frames that showcase rather than distract from your black and whites with simple clean lines. 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!

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