Black and White from Color
While digital photography and the Internet are in color, much of desktop publishing is still being done in black and white. Local newsletters, newspapers, posters, mailings, and magazines often require black and white for their purposes.
If you need images for this reason, black and white may be trickier than you think. Newsletters are often printed with muddy or very dark black and white photographs. To select the right pictures for monochrome printing and then to make the proper conversions from color takes a little practice.
Some image cataloguing programs will let you view your images in black and white. With this feature you can quickly scroll through your pictures to see which ones will work best. The freeware program IrfanView, for example, will do this. Look for a picture that is also the right size for your needs. Enlarged pictures do not reproduce well.
To convert a color photograph to black and white, follow these steps:
Once you have chosen a photograph, convert it to monochrome with the grayscale option that is usually in the color menu.
Save it with ‘bw’ added to the end of the file name.
Use the brightness control to adjust the highlights and shadows or the gamma correction to bring out the most complete range of tones from black to white.
Use the contrast control to give the picture some snap. Most black and white pictures do not print well because they do not have enough contrast.
Dodge and burn as needed to lighten some dark areas or darken some light areas.
To see if you are on the right track, print out your black and white photo on your black and white printer. How does it look? If it looks okay on paper, then it will probably reproduce okay.
If the photo does not print well on your printer, go back and try again. You might try starting from scratch — that is, go back to the original color photo and redo the conversion.
Even though converting color to black and white is easy, beginning photographers are often surprised by the results. A beautiful picture of greens and reds when converted might look very drab with the same shade of gray throughout.
Black and white deals with lightness and darkness only, it does not deal with color. In the example above, red and green are often the same brightness and therefore will translate to the same shade of gray when converted to black and white. In addition, many black and white images do not print well. Even when a black and white image looks good on the computer monitor, it might print with much less contrast.
