Practical Artistry: Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers

172 Digital Darkroom

Black and White

Black and White

The history of photography is largely the history of

black and white. Color came into the picture only rela-

t

ively recently. There are still those who feel that the

only truly artistic photo is a black and white photo.

If you fancy your photos as black and white imagery,

it’s good news that thanks to the digital darkroom col-

o

r photos can easily be transformed. I’ve written trans-

formed ra

ther than converted because you don’t want

to do just a conversion that simply drops the color data

from the digital file.

It’s easy to convert the mode of any color image to

grayscale in Photoshop, and this does have the effect of

simply dropping the data about color to produce a ba-

sic

black and white version. Unfortunately, at the same

time you lose exposure subtleties and the full range of

contrast. This information is only included in the com

-

p

lete set of data that includes all the color channels.

Fortunately, there are a number of effective ways of

going about converting from color to black and white

that do retain the color information necessary for a

rich translation (see the example on pages 174–175 for

some specifics). Once an image has been converted to

monochrome, it’s possible to add many interesting ef

-

f

ects, such as selective softening, simulated film grain,

and simulated palladium or platinum ...