You may have already realized that Black and White is not as easy as it seems, and that’s probably why you’re taking a look at this article 😉 Well, you’re absolutely right. Black and white seems easy because you don’t have to fight with color, but the truth is that by getting rid of it, you have to fight with many other things (pay attention! We make it easier for you with this mega guide to black and white photography). black, with all the tips and tricks for stunning black and white images, and much more). As always, everything begins and ends with us. We are our main obstacle and at the same time we are the solution. You may be wondering what I’m talking about, well, the first big obstacle we encounter as photographers is that the world is in colorand it’s very difficult to strip away what our eyes see and turn it into something completely different right off the bat.
When we see in color, consciously or unconsciously, the images are based on it. When we think of turning it into black and white, having thought of and visualized it in color, the only thing we achieve is to take away a good part of the image’s soul and end up with a very boring, sad and gray photograph. Surely you have been in this situation more than once. Well, if you have been able to see that something is wrong or that something is missing from that image, you are on the right track, because no one else has the solution but yourself 🙂 We call the solution learn to see in black and white, and it just takes some practice, enthusiasm and perseverance. Well, and some tips that I leave you in the lines that follow, I hope they help you to enter this fascinating world of black and white photography.
how to shoot black and white
Camera settings
- RAW format: I would dare to say that you have a camera that offers the RAW format, right? Then use it without delay. RAW format keep the as much information as possible of the image in terms of tones, lights and shadows. This will give you many more processing options. In case you do not have RAW format, shoot in color. Shooting in color preserves more tonalities than shooting directly in your camera’s monochrome option. I would only recommend using the black and white mode directly on the camera when you need to get an idea of the result before taking the final picture.
- ISO: Noise is more noticeable in black and white images than in color images, so it is recommended, especially in black and white, to try to work with the lowest ISO.
Exposition
The main thing is to expose correctly, both in color and in black and white, you always have to start here. While I’ve heard from everyone about whether to expose for highlights or shadows, it really depends a lot on what processing program we use afterwards. For example, for some Lightroom it recovers the shadows very well so they prefer to expose for the lights. Others believe that black and white produces too much noise when trying to recover the shadows (and it is true, it produces more noise than color, or at least it is more noticeable) and expose for the shadows. I think the main thing is expose as correctly as possible and once we have become familiar with our editor, our camera and ourselves, establish certain routines or processes that simplify our work somewhat 🙂
Contrast
There is no single way to shoot in black and white. There are actually as many modes as there are photographers holding a camera and interpreting a scene. Although, a priori, contrast and black and white is one of those great alliances that are sometimes established in photography ;-). Surely you have already realized that monochrome tolerates much more contrast than color, right? Tweaking colors too radically (too much contrast, too much saturation) often leads to unattractive images or images that are too far removed from reality. On the other hand, black and white, perhaps because it is already based on being somewhat artificial, allows more play with the extremes.
This does not mean that the images should be of extreme contrast (high and low key for example), on the contrary, images with little contrast and rich in intermediate gray tones are also interesting, which does not mean that they do not have contrast or are pasted, which We will see in the processing 😉
It all boils down to the fact that all times of day and settings can be good candidates for black and white photography. In the central hours of the day you will have a lot of contrast. In the first and last hours of the day you will have a less pronounced contrast and more intermediate tones with which to enrich your image, similar to the cloudy days which I strongly recommend you not to miss, for the same reasons.
Polarizing
Another way to add interest to the image before taking it is to have a polarizer, especially if what we want is to photograph landscapes, a polarizer will help you darken the sky and increase contrast, as well as avoid reflections.
gray scale
This is part of the work that you will have to practice, and that is nothing more than learning approximately what shades of gray the colors in front of you will transform into when you modify your image.
How to process black and white
I will start from the basis that you use a program such as Lightroom, Photoshop or Camera RAW. They all look alike and have similar basic settings. And even if you don’t use any of them, any editor has, if not all, most of the basic settings that I will talk about here.
The first step is to convert the image to black and white. To do this, I will base myself on Lightroom, which is the program I use, but you will see that they are all more or less similar. To convert the image you can directly transform it to black and white, remove the saturation, convert it to grayscale mode, and so on. I recommend taking control of the image and making all the decisions ourselves, so I opt to transform it to black and white from the “Develop” module and leave the values at 0, no desaturation or grayscale, nothing more.
The second step is to analyze the result by asking ourselves questions about it. What do you think of the image? Have contrast enough? A rich enough mid-range of grays? Have textures that enrich the image? dopure black and white? Or, simply, was this photograph a good candidate to be converted to monochrome or was I wrong from the beginning?
Once we have analyzed the image, let’s proceed to adjust its basic parameters. Remember that the more correct the image is directly from the camera, the better results you will get in the final quality of the edition.
1. The first logical step according to the Lightroom interface would be adjust exposure and contrast. I leave it for the end but, as always, it is up to taste; everyone must find the workflow that suits their needs. Instead, I start by adjusting the highlights and shadows because, most of the time, the dynamic range of the scene exceeds the sensor’s ability to capture it, that is, if there is too much contrast between lights and shadows, the sensor will only be able to expose one of the parts well. Luckily, this is the time we can try to fix that ;-). You will see that if you have shot in raw and you have exposed correctly, you will get more than acceptable results.
2. The next thing I do is make sure my black and white image contains pure black and white. To do this I use the black and white cursor, which intensifies or reduces the black and white of the scene. How do I know when a black and white is pure in the image? Well there is a trick 😉
Two arrows appear at the top of the Histogram in the editing panel, the one on the right corresponds to the areas of highlights from image. The left to the shadow area. If we click on them, it shows us on top of the same image, all the areas of the image with pure white (in red) and pure black (in blue). In the following image I have overexposed and underexposed so that you can clearly see how it tints the black and white parts of both colors. However, remember that pure black and white are the histogram extremesthere where information is lost. That is, they do not have textures or other tonality, etc. For this reason I recommend that your image has a little (but little) of each of them unless you want to completely lose the textures of the scene.
3. The next step (always in my case 😉 ) would be to adjust what in Lightroom we know as clarity. The clarity increase the contrast of the intermediate tones without modifying the ends.
4. And now is when we can go back to the beginning and think if we really need the exposure and contrast values, which are the ones that head the settings. Most of the time you won’t need them. We have added contrast by widening the tonal range from white to pure black (if we lacked these values in the initial image) and by increasing lightness (midtone contrast).
5. With these simple steps you would have corrected the contrast, the lights and shadows, the mid tones, etc. You could perfectly stay here or retouch the shades of gray in your image. This is done through setting «mix of black and white» which is nothing more than the possibility of increasing or reducing the saturation in each of the colors of the image. That is, what was blue in the original image, here it becomes a gray that you can darken or lighten using the corresponding marker. And the same for all the colors of the image.
There is no recipe for editing of the tones of the image, first because each image is different, second because you would surely never repeat exactly the same edition one day after another, because it depends on the day, the mood, the desire, the knowledge… the trick is to keep trying and learning.
By the way, if you double click on the markers, the values automatically return to zero 😉
experiment
Experiment with what you have. Although Lightroom is a program that greatly facilitates the life of professional and amateur photographers, the truth is that there are many programs, plugins, filters on Instagram, on your Smartphone, Picmonkey, Vsco, most of them free that will allow you to perfectly experiment with these values .
How about? Easy, right? Amazing what can be done with a few simple tweaks, right? Well, thanks for your patience in reading this far ;-). If you have found it useful, we would appreciate it if you share it on your favorite social network to reach as many people as possible. Thank you very much and until next time 🙂