Digital Focus: Experiment With Black and White

Feature: Experimenting With Black and White

Black-and-white photography is a technique born of necessity: color photos were once expensive and hard to make. These days, folks shoot in black and white for very different reasons. For some, the monochromatic palette evokes emotion that color can't easily achieve. Blank and white also has nostalgic value. Whatever the reason, lots of people like to dabble in black and white, even though their digital cameras are more than capable of shooting color.

Black and White to Color

Color film and black-and-white film are very different animals. But to a digital camera and your computer, there's really no difference between the two. It's very easy to convert a color photo to black and white, since a monochrome image is simply a color image that's been robbed of its saturation. The easiest method, of course, is to do it in the camera. Many digital cameras offer a black-and-white mode--anything you shoot with this setting will be captured in black and white. Easy, right? The downside, of course, is that there's no full-color version. So if you later want to see the image in color, too bad.

A better option is to bypass the black-and-white mode on your digital camera and shoot in full color. Once you get the picture onto your PC, you can explore the wonders of monochrome. Some image editing programs, like Paint Shop Pro, have a black-and-white conversion tool. Just open the image file, choose Colors, Grey Scale, and the image is immediately desaturated, or drained of color. Note, though, that you can't go back: Once you've converted an image to black and white and saved the picture, the color data is gone forever. So be sure to save your new black-and-white version with a different file name.

One potentially negative side effect in Paint Shop Pro is that by default the program converts the image into an 8-bit (256-color) file, which is bad because you need a true 24-bit image to perform most editing functions. So after using this tool, be sure to choose Colors, Increase Color Depth, 16 Million Colors--especially if you want to perform any additional tweaks on your image.

Want to have a little more control? Bypass the Grey Scale menu command and desaturate the image manually. It's easy: Just choose Colors, Adjust, Hue/Saturation/Lightness. The Hue/Saturation/Lightness dialog box has a bunch of sliders, but you only need to deal with the vertical one on the left marked Saturation. (Make sure there's no check in the Colorize box, or you'll get unusual color variations.) Drag the slider down to -100 to turn the image into a purely monochromatic picture. What I love about this technique, though, is that you don't have to drag the slider all the way down. You can drag it to an intermediate level like -30 or -50 to create images that have a little color in them, getting some great effects.

Messing With the Hue

While you're in the Hue/Saturation/Lightness dialog box, don't forget to experiment. A really cool trick is to mess with the Hue in an image that is lightly saturated. Once you drag the slider down to minimize the colors in your scene, try moving the Hue slider left and right. You can change the color tones in your picture this way and create some strangely compelling, if somewhat abstract, images. I edited a trio of pictures to show you what these techniques look like: Start with the untouched original; then view the lightly saturated version I made in Paint Shop Pro; finally, check out the last image to see some color tone changes I made.