6 Tips Digital Photography in Black and White

Printing Picture Perfect B/W

You might think that if you print black and white pictures any basic black and white digital printer will do. I mean after all, you're not dealing with the intricacies of color – right? Wrong. For sharp quality prints you need a quality printer.


Color or black and white digital photos—it doesn't matter. You need a printer that captures not only the vibrant colors, but also crisp detail. A less quality printer would create washed-out black and white photos. Grays, blacks and whites would look blended, not sharp. So as far as printers go, your choice is pretty much black and white for printing black and white.


Sepia: Colorful B/W

Don't look at everything in black & white! Along with standard black & white digital, some digital cameras offer other effects. One of the more popular effects is called sepia. Sepia is similar to black and white in that's it uses a simple color scheme to tell the visual story. In the case of sepia, however, that color is brown.

When a sepia image prints, it comes out looking like one of those old, antique photos. Other than your digital camera, the sepia technique is available on most image editing software. Though, with the software you can also use other colors for your single tone image.


Change Color With a Click

Another point goes to digital in the digital vs. film debate in the category of special effects. The obvious advantages when it comes to black and white film lay with the digital camera:

• If you want to shoot a roll of film in black and white you need special black and white film, however, if you want to shoot black and white on a digital camera just change to the black and white digital setting (either with a click of the knob or a push of the button).

• You can switch between taking color and black and white photos without first using an entire roll of film (with a non-digital camera you would have to go through the black and white roll of film first before you went back to color).

• With digital cameras, you can see your images immediately so, you can not only see if the shot actually came out, but if the shot works well in black and white.

Don't Re-Shoot, Retouch

Have you ever taken a bunch of photos, looked at them later, and wished they were in black and white? Well, it's too late now, right? Wrong! With digital a digital camera it's possible to turn your color digital pictures into black and white digital pictures in seconds…without re-shooting them.

Just like photo retouching can alter image sizes and shapes, it can also do the same with color. This means that you can convert any color image to a digital black and white photo.

*Remember that you might need to do some adjustments to the image so it doesn't come out too dark or light when you print it out.

New Technology Creates Old Look

Make your new pictures look old—in a good way! Another thing you can do with black and white digital photo and retouching software is play around with aging the photograph. To create this old illusion there are a variety of black and white digital effects at your disposal:

• Effects that can make the picture look grainy
• You can also fool around with the lights and darks to make the picture look washed out or faded
• You can blur the picture to match that old-world photo lens quality

Art Imitating Life

So why would you take black and white pictures instead of color? Why wouldn't you?

Black & White digital photos add emotion to a photograph by really bringing out shadows in the picture and highlighting their darkness.

In addition, since you lose the distraction of color, the viewer only focuses on the image.

So, if your subject is a little drab and lifeless, or if you just want to accentuate it, leave the color out to add a little art with black and white.