Color not good? Try black & white!

Often I find myself in a situation where composition and mood come together nicely, but there just isn’t much color in the scene. Black & white conversion is the perfect solution to the problem. Black & white images work particularly well for landscape scenes that have lots of dramatic clouds.

"Light's Passage" - Patagonia

Such a situation arose recently while leading my Epic Patagonia workshop. My group and I hiked from our backcountry camp to a favorite spot of mine, in order to photograph sunset skies above Monte Fitz Roy. A beautiful storm hovered above the mountain, and conditions seemed good for a colorful sunset. We never got the color we wanted, however, but for a brief moment the clouds parted and several dramatic beams of light radiated from one of the spires of Fitz Roy. It was a great moment, although lacking in color. The moment faded fairly quickly, but for me especially so—a sudden intense gust of wind knocked my tripod over (a common occurrence in Patagonia, unfortunately), smashing two of my filters but luckily leaving my lens and camera unharmed. While I was scrambling to pick up the pieces and assess the damage, my clients were getting great shots. By the time I had everything squared away, the light show was over! Fortunately for me, this was the last in a string of bad things that happened to me on the workshop. Even more fortunate, I had managed to get off a few decent shots before the wind blast hit.

There are many ways to convert your images to black & white, but my favorite is the Black & White Adjustment Layer in Adobe Photoshop (Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Black & White). It allows you to easily and powerfully convert your photos to black & white using six color channels (Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, and Magenta), giving you the ability to easily separate tones in an image. For example, with the image above, I used the Blue and Cyan color channels to selectively darken the blue sky above the mountain, creating contrast and tonal separation between the sky and the clouds. Although seemingly counter-intuitive at first, color is the key to successful black & white photography. By manipulating the luminosity of individual colors in a photo, you can change the relative brightness and darkness of the various black & white tones in your image. In the old days, this was accomplished by placing color filters over the camera lens. Now, we can make more precise adjustments using digital processing techniques.

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Technical details: Canon 5D Mark II camera, 14-24mm lens (@17mm), 2-stop graduated neutral density filter, polarizer filter, ISO 100, f/11, 1 second.

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About Ian Plant (275 Posts)

Ian Plant's photographs and instructional articles have appeared in a number of books, calendars, and magazines, including Outdoor Photographer and Popular Photography. Ian writes a regular blog column for Outdoor Photographer online, and he is the author of numerous instructional eBooks and digital processing tutorials. Ian leads several photo tours each year.