Black & White Photography

I have had questions from students about the best way to do B&W photography. Is it better to do it in camera or using post processing software such as Photoshop, Lightroom or another similar program?

Different people will give different answers to this question, and there is no “right” answer to this question. Anytime you can do things in camera, it is considered the “ideal” way to do it but you have more flexibility using editing software.

Your camera can make fantastic B&W images but there is a catch, you have to shoot in JPEG only, because if you shoot RAW, the images will appear B&W when viewing them in the camera but once downloaded to your computer they will revert back to full color because RAW format records ALL details and pixels. I’ve had students ask, “what if I don’t have or cannot afford editing software?” Well, first of all, if you are a student at AI, you should have editing software as part of your degree program.

Shot in JPG using Monochrome Picture Style on my Canon 6D

Shooting B&W in camera will give you beautiful B&W images but since you are shooting JPEG, ALL extra data for your image will be discarded and gone forever, you cannot get that back. I, and most professional photographers will tell you it’s best to ALWAYS shoot in RAW for the very best image quality and then convert them to B&W. This gives you the most creativity and best detail in your final image. By editing to B&W in say Lightroom, there are a couple ways you can do it. You can use the Black & White option under the development module, or I prefer to use the Saturation tool and de-saturate the colors from the image, then tweak the contrast to create a more dramatic effect.

Shot in RAW on my Canon 6D and de-saturated in Lightroom

There are also nice third party apps and plug-ins you can use and I personally use quite a few of them to get my images just the way I want them. The NIK Collection is one of my favorites and comes with a great B&W plug-in called Silver Efex Pro 2. This software has a nice set of “recipes” for making different types of B&W images with varying looks, from High Key to Low Key and heavy contrast just to name a few.

Shot in RAW with Canon 6D and then converted using "Antique Plate 1" using NIK Collection

For any friends you have that are into photography and cannot afford Lightroom or Photoshop, there is a free, Open Source photo editor called GIMP, which is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. http://www.gimp.org GIMP is nice as it has ALL of the capabilities of Photoshop with no cost.
Now that you have more information on how to make great B&W images, get out there and make some great ones!

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