When NOT to Convert to Black and White
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As much as I like black and white (B&W) images, there are a few instances when it’s a terrible idea to go B&W with your color image. Assuming that you’re shooting color RAWs, which you should, you should never shoot B&W JPGs—or even JPGs period!
So back to when you shouldn’t convert to B&W: Simple. Don’t convert to B&W when your original image looks better in color.
Here’s an example:
When I shot this, it looked horrible on the back of my camera because I display my images in monochrome. I should have displayed this set in color because the blue sheets were indistinguishable from the skin tones when converted to B&W. In the above left image, the sheets blend into the skin, and you can’t really tell whether you’re looking at the model’s skin or the bed sheets.
So the rule of thumb is this: When your subject’s luminosity blends with the foreground/background luminosity, it’s a bad idea to convert to B&W.
Here’s a good time to go B&W:
When the subject stands out from the background in terms of luminosity, because in B&W, all you have is luminosity. No color channels. Just shades of grey. This is also the prime example of why you shoot in color RAW. Those dark green rocks in the background? Well, I can make them any shade of grey I want—anything from bright white to pitch black. Now I’ve got luminosity control on the channel level because Kate’s skin is red-yellow.
Keep the B&Ws coming, but keep these tips in mind!
LUCIMA
Charles Lucima is a photographer/retoucher based in Los Angeles specializing in fashion, editorial, and beauty. His clients include designers, apparel brands, and modeling agencies around the world. http://www.lucima.com/
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July 03, 2018 at 3:36 am, Rajiv Chopra said:
Shooting with film is the best way to do B&W.
Having said that, your advise is good
June 25, 2018 at 10:14 am, sandrino said:
Converting to B&W is a creative process. You don’t just convert to a generic B&W. You can select what colors become more luminous and which are darker, you can add more or less grain, you can use sepia or not, etc. There are so many creative choices when using B&W and that’s why I love it for portraits. I rarely take a portrait that doesn’t look better in B&W, but then again I’m not just using a generic B&W filter, I’m making creative choices.
June 23, 2018 at 9:40 am, Leslie Savege said:
How about never!!! You shoot black and white; you can’t make it color later. If you want black and white, do it in post, and have the color photo in case you want it for something that comes up later. You tell me I should always photograph in RAW and then tell me there are times to photograph in black and white. Are you for real?
June 23, 2018 at 8:25 am, Ron Anderson said:
Good point concerning the luminosity levels of the skin tones when converting to B&W. Your example image is exactly why I love using HSL adjustments in Lightroom. Unlike Photoshop, Lightroom has an HSL adjustment for Orange, which usually allows me to easily adjust the luminosity of the skin tones. In your example, it would only take seconds to brighten the skin and darken the blue sheet, thusly attaining the desired results!
June 24, 2018 at 1:53 pm, apelles1 said:
Just curious how people feel about the Lieca M Monocrom $6,000 new to $3,500-$2,500 used on Amazon. a camera that only shoots B&W . I know many will be aghast but B&W in digital has gotten alot better when this thread began. I often like to shoot B&W Jpegs and RAW with the Sony A7R ll. Many professionals are renting high end video camera’s and pulling stills ,post production has become even more time consuming. I have a friend who is hired to pull stills from these expensive shoots where the photographer does do much more than direct and people are hired to do everything else at nominal wages while the photographer gets an exorbitant day rate. Occasionally this comes back to haunt them in epic fails that have been printed such as Gwenyth Paltrow’s legs came out of her hips in a way that is only possible in Ancient Eygptian art and her upper torso and face were frontal, this ran in Vogue.
July 29, 2013 at 4:31 pm, ibhome1 said:
test
July 02, 2013 at 10:27 am, Sreynaga Dev said:
testing
August 10, 2012 at 2:52 pm, Bob said:
Ahahaha
February 02, 2012 at 6:22 am, Joe Scrogham said:
OMG, not the raw vs jpg argument again …
BW vs Color .. is a judgement call the photographer needs to make unless the client thinks otherwise .
Whoever said not to convert color to bw on the computer don’t know wtf they are doing.
I shoot raw 99.9% of the time. However, when I get a job to shoot 600 day care kids, it’s time for jpg.
February 01, 2012 at 10:54 pm, Ian Mathers said:
JPEG and RAW, black and white or colour, digital or film.. Technicalities aside – LUCIMA takes fucking fantastic photos.
January 28, 2012 at 2:09 am, Gary Livingston said:
…
“[Don’t do this when it is worse than that other thing.]”
Lucima is a fantastic photographer but, the worst writer ever. haha.
By extension of his writing skills he is a terrible teacher. *sigh* Such a shame.
January 26, 2012 at 9:56 pm, Philipe said:
If I want black and white, I put the setting on black and white on my camera.
I don’t convert in photoshop..
If I want both color and black and white, yes I switch back and forth on my camera. I look at each picture that is shot, before the next one is taken.
All your doing by converting is see if it looks better in black and white.
If it looks ok in color it may look worst in black and white.
If you don’t have the right color tone and settings right; your then trying to convert a bad color picture. That has a bad foundation.
For me its important for me to “see” it in my LCD screen on my camera and make adjustments in my camera.
Rather than shooting sorting what good or not and converting…
Too much wasted time..
January 26, 2012 at 2:16 am, Mark Salo said:
“Assuming that you’re shooting color RAWs, which you should, you should never shoot B&W JPGs—or even JPGs, unless you are Ken Rockwell. Then you get to do whatever the hell you want because the laws of physics don’t apply to you.”
Now I know why I envy Ken Rockwell!
January 25, 2012 at 10:00 pm, Jofriese said:
B&W Filters
January 25, 2012 at 9:30 pm, Anonymous said:
I must say that, although you are “right”, you are kind of missing the point….
First:
I do agree to always shoot raw, no matter what, unless there is a specific reason for shooting jpg; Like client needs or the need to transfer the photos directly over the mobile net to a server of some kind.
Hard drive space is cheaper than ever, so space issues shouldn’t be a problem for anyone, if your computer cannot process a 15-20 mb raw file, you have a serious hardware upgrade issue.
You’re simply just throwing away data you might need and making things like white balance corrections problematic by using jpg. I would NEVER shoot b&w directly into jpeg’s _ever_, always convert from color on the computer.
Secondly I disagree that some photos look “good” in bw and some do not.
I know at least 4 different ways to convert a photo into black and white, three which controls how, for example, the hues for blues skin look.
Knowing _how_ to convert to black and white, can make any photo stand out in black and white.
Doing all in-camera is either very lazy, or a very bad practise.
YOU as a photographer is responsible for the final look of the photo, it has been like this since the dawn of photography.
Throwing that away, makes you more of a “shooter” than a “photographer” in my opinion. (specific client needs is a special case here, as there are clients that pay you for the quick, initial jpgs directly via wifi or on the mem card and do their own processing, I am sure).
January 25, 2012 at 8:45 pm, Just a guy said:
I think you missed the biggest point here. Shoot in RAW + B/W JPEG. That way you can see, on the LCD screen, generally how the scene and subject reproduce and you can adjust the lighting, posing and wardrobe to make more successful B/W pictures. Later you can still have the color as an option and process from the RAW for more refinement of the tones of the image.
January 25, 2012 at 5:13 pm, Bill said:
I don’t agree with the ‘RAW’ comment. Often I shoot both hi-res jpeg and raw and in post processing I see very little advantage to raw. If you get the exposure right the first time a jpeg looks great and 16×20 repro is no big deal. But then I think mp3’s are as good as analog. So there. Just an opinion.
raw files eat up card and hard drive space, take too long to convert.
January 25, 2012 at 4:56 pm, Sergei Pyuro-Photographer said:
I can learn a lot just by looking at your work. It’s inspiring. The topic you chose to write about is not very educational, because while others argue about it, I just think everybody has his own approach.
January 25, 2012 at 8:22 am, Neil said:
The only reason not to go to BW is because your skills in raw dev are not good enough. Whether or not an image looks better in color or BW is purely subjective and totally based on your success or failure in conversion. Revisit your images once and a while as your skill set improves and you’ll find any images can work in either.
Agreed once in jpg you’ve already limited your conversion options.
January 25, 2012 at 8:02 am, doug said:
thinking about the final result -> shooting -> developing bw film negatives in a special way -> and processing in darkroom 🙂
The same controlled development with raw (or tif) = developing film negative + Photographic paper is exposed to light in a controlled manner :)))
Only jpg when client needs picture at once…but then its normally not bw… 🙂
January 25, 2012 at 4:49 am, ArtsyFartsy said:
Shooting B&W is optimally approached as a choice before the shot, which includes pre-visualization. Like we did when we shot film (or sometimes still do). You need to see in luminosity and know what colored filters would do (or color channels in Photoshop). This seems like advice to “bangers” and applies to shots on goal, spaghetti thrown at walls, and monkeys at typewriters as well.
January 25, 2012 at 5:41 am, Ricardo Gomez said:
Totally agree. You just can’t shoot in color and then convert into B&W and think it will look just as good. You need to shoot knowing that it will be converted. I had a model concerned with purpose shoes that she was wearing and I told her not to worry since they will look grey in the photo. Which worked fine.
I’ve shot some pictures that looked ‘okay’ in color… But looked fantastic in b&w… Hey, I’ll take what I can get!
January 25, 2012 at 5:42 am, Ricardo Gomez said:
Heehee.. That’s ‘purple’, not ‘purpose’ shoes…
January 25, 2012 at 3:21 am, Tony Yang said:
What’s RAW? JK. JPEGs all the way! Anyways, have you thought about color channels to adjust your black and white images? You can make the skin brighter or darker relative to the other colors in the image, not just click the desaturate filter.
January 25, 2012 at 1:29 am, Julian Wilde said:
Or when there’s a lot of “RED.” 😀 -JULIAN
January 25, 2012 at 12:59 am, gré - Kelly Segré said:
Charles…we love you and all, but the law of physics don’t apply to me; I shoot jpeg 😉 Also it is important to think in black and white if your intent is to create a black & white images (which in my case is 90% of the time). Creating an image shouldn’t be converting an image after the fact…planning ahead and lighting it correctly should determine whether it is black and white or color.
January 24, 2012 at 11:54 pm, Darren said:
Passing this on to a few people. Thanks
January 24, 2012 at 8:10 pm, Adrian said:
I just thinklike this.
Does B&W help focus in the important part of the image?
January 24, 2012 at 7:42 pm, Rob Mulligan said:
“Unless you are Ken Rockwell” – hahahahahahaha
That’s pretty funny!
January 24, 2012 at 7:38 pm, Anonymous said:
You want B&W? Shoot some film!
January 24, 2012 at 7:29 pm, JosefinaPhoto said:
I can agree with this! When black and white looks better then my color image, that’s usually what I switch too.
January 24, 2012 at 7:08 pm, Tony M 1 said:
Simple good effective advice !! Poor Ken he does get a hammering !
January 24, 2012 at 6:58 pm, Joseph Graf said:
It is obvious from some comments that these photographers never dealt with film negatives. Yes, you can get a good jpeg image from your camera. But you are letting the camera do all the thinking for you. That is not how most of the better photographers work. Making the image conform to your vision requires being able to manipulate the data as much as possible. Jpeg is a lossy compression algorithm. It throws data away! Why lose the extra latitude that a RAW file provides you with to accomplish your creative vision?
January 24, 2012 at 7:02 pm, Ryan said:
Because most of my creative vision lies within the setting of the shoot. Adjusting, creating, moving or otherwise manipulating the light that I have, then using the camera to capture that – not the other way around. The latitude given by raw is useless and costly when these steps are taken before the click of the camera.
January 24, 2012 at 7:17 pm, Joseph Graf said:
I would have to argue that you would get even better results if you were to use RAW. Ansel Adams, one of the most renowned photographers of all time, was of course meticulous about light. Nevertheless he heavily manipulated his images in the darkroom. If he were alive today, he would shoot RAW. No doubt about it.
January 24, 2012 at 7:38 pm, Kevinpeters777 said:
Agreed. You’re really only sacrificing time – in terms of writing to your camera / HD and disk space. That’s it. If recycle time is critical to you or you’re shooting a lot of sport/action then JPG is probably a sensible alternative.
But in a ‘controlled’ envirorment, when you want to stack the odds of getting ‘the shot’ as much in your favour as possible, RAW gives you that extra edge. Again at a minimal cost. As much as I admire you’re willingness to get the shot right first time, there’s nothing wrong with having that extra bit of data, should you not quite nail it on shoot.
January 25, 2012 at 4:23 pm, Anonymous said:
I fully agree. Ansel Adams was first a keyboard musician and he wanted to have with the zone system something he saw as similar to the well tempered scale of Bach, in music. Adams was a craftsman and the zone system his method of exhibiting it in chemical photography. Were he active today, he would only shoot RAW. Those who insist that jpeg is as good or better remind me of the photographers of the past who insisted that Drug Store Processing was just fine. They knew no photographic craftmanship.
January 24, 2012 at 6:50 pm, Michael Fowler said:
Excellent advice, thanks…I had not thought of shooting in B/W profile while in RAW so I could quickly see the basic contrast.
January 24, 2012 at 6:47 pm, Ryan said:
I hate the “never use the jpg” mindset. I only use RAW when shooting weddings, or other scenarios when lighting is not ideal. JPG compressions are fine when you control your light the correct way.
January 24, 2012 at 6:47 pm, Hungry Eye said:
Apparently, the laws of physics don’t apply to Ken Marcus, either. He is another who shoots brilliant work in .jpg format.
Personally, I shoot RAW, as I need all the bandwidth I can muster. 😉
October 31, 2011 at 6:11 pm, Ibpremium said:
comment 11:17
October 28, 2011 at 7:22 pm, Ibpremium said:
comment 3 13min
October 28, 2011 at 7:08 pm, Ibpremium said:
second comment
October 28, 2011 at 6:48 pm, Ibpremium said:
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