These black and white photography tips will help you to recognize good black and white photo subjects and to be able to photograph and edit these for the best effects.

The reason so many photography courses and schools teach black and white photography early on is that it is an excellent way to train the eye to recognize what makes a striking composition.

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. So while the colors can be quite beautiful, black and white makes the photo more dynamic.

In spite of its attributes, after the media went full color in the 70′s and 80′s black and white photography faded. It soon became increasingly more challenging to find places that sold and processed black and white film. Now thanks to digital cameras and editing, black and white is back!

How to Recognize Great Black and White Pictures

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 that don’t have a full spectrum of colors like 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! Search online for Ansel Adams work. 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. But once you get experience with using your photo editing software, you’ll find that you can create even better black and white images by shooting in color first and then desaturating it in the editor. Another benefit to this method is that you’ll never end up with a day’s worth of pictures all in black and white because you forgot to reset the camera!

Check the White Balance on Your Camera

While the easiest and simplest way to use your photo editor to change a color image to black and white is to desaturate the colors, this method doesn’t allow you to 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 Use of Your Photo Editor’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 there are no colorful tones in black and whites, there are still tones 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. Black and white photos look great framed and deserve to be on the wall for all to see. You should select picture frames that showcase your image with simple clean lines rather than distract from it. 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. Hopefully, this article has inspired you to take more black and white photographs!

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