CREATING POWERFUL BLACK & WHITE PHOTO’S

USING YOUR DIGITAL FILES

Why Black & White

Many artists considers the "Art" of traditional black and white photography to be found not only in the eye of the photographer but in the compilation of producing the expressive black and white print through the use of their skills, techniques, and tools found in the darkroom, or in our case the digital darkroom. For many, the darkroom, whether actual or digital, is the same as the canvas and brush are to the painter or the plate and the acid to the printmaker.

Your camera software

To start with your camera though. It probably came with some photo editing software. You might have your own software perhaps �Photoshop, Photo Impact, Photo Studio or any �one of a dozen or so programs that have "photo" somewhere in the title! 

Any of these will do a better job at black and white digital photography than your camera will.

 

Think of it this way your camera �is specially designed to capture photographs. Your software is specially designed to edit photographs. Don't ask your camera to do a job that your software is designed to do it's not what it �was made for! 

And now for the science bit!

To explain in a little more detail:

Light is made up of many colors - think back to rainbows, prisms and "Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain" at school.NB: for the interested, the first letter of each word in the Richard . . . phrase represents the colors of the rainbow in order. R = red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.

When you capture an image with your digital camera the lens focuses light onto the image sensor. 

The sensor is made up of millions of light sensitive dots. These are called photosites - � �just think of them as individual dots.

Your sensor records three types of light red, �green and blue (RGB). It records the strength of each of these from a scale of 000-255.So, a photo site might have a reading of:Red 212�Green 028�Blue 056�The strength of each color is combined to get an overall color for that dot. In this case, because red is the strongest color, this will give us a reddish colored dot. NB: If all three were 000 that would be pure black, and if they were all 255 the result would be pure white

And the math part . . .

Now, think about all the information you have there. Three colors, with 256 possible strengths of color. 

256 x 256 x 256 = 16,777,216

Wow! Each dot can represent any one of over 16 million colors. That's a lot of colors!

So what happens of you set your camera to black and white digital photography mode? It throws away all of those colors and simply records the strength of light at that pixel on a scale of 000 256. � �

on.

000 = pure black255 = pure white

anything in the middle is grey.

This is the main reason why I implore you to not set your camera to black and white mode. 

If you do you are asking your digital camera, that is capable of recording any one of over 16 million combinations to choose from just 256 of them. You're basically throwing away information that you might just need later on.

Still not convinced?

More reasons? You may well decide later on that, actually, that picture might look better in color. 

If your camera never recorded the color information when it took the photograph (i.e. it was set to black and white digital photography mode) you can't put the information back later on. It's gone for good. 

If you decide to go for a black and white photograph anyway, then your software is more than capable of throwing away that information. At least you'll have the choice.

But wait! There's more. Even if you have taken your full color snap and decided that it suits black and white digital photography, tread carefully. 

There are ways to make your black and white digital photography really stand out, and then there's grayscale.

To create top quality black and white digital photos you need to use your photo editing software with a little care. I use the channel mixer function in Photoshop as well as other programs.

Assignment

For our next class I want you to find three black & white photos that impress you and upload them to our wiki page along with reasons why you chose these images