Photography

Learning Center:

Photography Lessons & Tips
Digital Photography Tips

Stock Up:

Photography Equipment
Photography Books

Photography Articles & Tips

Transforming Colored Pictures to Black and White

By Anna Lim

In the old days, pictures came in just two colors--black and white. Indeed, it has been only in the last few decades that the door of photography and entertainment has exploded into multicolored chambers with affordable color television and color photographs and movies. And while color is pleasant, there's a certain elegance to black and white that keeps artists coming back to it. Armed with your digital camera, you can make your own black-and-white masterpiece.

Taken literally, the notion of "black-and-white", which is used to depict this type of pictures, is actually erroneous. The photographs not only show the two "colors" black and white, but also lots of gray tones, where the different lighter areas are shown in the finest probable detail. However, we basically speak of black-and-white pictures in order to avoid confusion.

The fascination of black-and-white photos can be deduced at least in part by the excess of color in our everyday lives. Independently of whether we see printed information, moving pictures at the movie house or videos on television or on computer monitors, they are almost all colored, so that a photo in shades of gray is actually striking.

Another thing is that they only illustrate the image in terms of different degrees of lightness, which contradicts most people's everyday experience. The color information detected by our eyes no longer exists in the case of black-and-white pictures, but we can still distinguish the content of the pictures without any trouble. Black-and-white pictures show a different view of things, as they are made quite abstract by the fact that they are reduced to shades of light and dark and are therefore very different from the realistic reproduction of a motif.
And one more thing speaks in favor of black-and-white photos: they continued to be used when it was technically possible to use color in printing processes, in newspapers, cinema and TV, but when color was still much more complicated than black-and-white. As the black-and-white pictures were therefore used for reports and news, they carry a signal effect: such pictures are linked with accuracy, realism and precision - independently of how "true" the news or the photos really are.

The first thing that they do when transforming a colored picture to black and white is to convert it through computer to grayscale mode. The best items for the old black-and-white treatment are portraits, though you might find any number of scenes that look good with their color removed: landscapes, seascapes, antique machinery, and so on. The picture is loaded into an image editor like Paint Shop Pro. The gray-scale conversion is usually a one-step process. They just choose Colors, Gray Scale from the menu and it's done.

Often the "amount" of color cast you see, depends on what light you see the print in. This phenomena might be related to what is known as "metamerism" - the effect that a print shows diverse colors in different lighting situations. The color emitted in black & white photos might be more visible in some situations than in others.

Change is constant but there are still some things that we like in connection to the past. Things that never go out of trend but continue to smash in the present time' like pictures in black and white. And it is nice to see them well-preserved up to this day.