Black and White Photography Techniques

Some people want grain-less, sharp black and white photography with long tonal range. I love all!! HDR images look great when they're converted to black and white. From black & white photos I can get more when converting it into HDR.

The most important thing to know about converting your color digital files to black and white photos is you must adjust the contrast and exposure settings until you have a true black and a bright white. If there are vibrant colors to be reveals, it's best left in color! the best is black & white food photography on film!

Black and White Conversions:

1. Convert to Grey scale
2. Use the Hue/Saturation Tool
3. Gradient Map
4. Channel Mixer

Or make a duplicate layer, convert that layer to mono in which ever way you prefer, probably best to use Channel Mixer as you can't change the mode of the image to gray scale (that would turn the other layer to mono too), and then to erase through to the colored areas you want to keep. You can of course do the same thing by selecting the area you want colored and then hitting backspace to remove the selected area.

I found it useful to create one new layer per color as this gives you the ability to fine tune with layer opacity, different blending modes and masking out areas of over-spill, part masking areas where two colors blend etc. Examples of landscape photography. The other way is shoot in black and white in your camera.

Black and white photography techniques can produce some really nice results. There are several different ways of producing a black & white conversion, some better than others obviously, and some that require a little bit more effort. For the record I usually use the channel mixer as it allows you to tweak the conversion but it's not as complicated as LAB mode!