Eileen Rafferty "Seeing in black and white"

[William Walker]

For years I have read and been told to "see in black & white".

This is the first time someone has explained how to do it in a way that I could finally understand.

I hope you fins this (long) lecture as helpful as I did.

https://youtu.be/V8Hh8S-Z68s

[kers]

Thanks for the link;
It is funny for she has grown up in a digital photo world where BW is much less used.
I have made a lot of BW in my analogue days and then i really thought and saw in BW. Now I am less used to do that.
It was not only a specific choice to do BW; It was easy to develop and print yourself and experiment with printing and develop techniques.; colour was a much more difficult and expensive process. I did colour at some point but i really hated the fact that you are in complete darkness to print and then you turn on the light to explore the colour. impossible.

Many photographs are better in BW, for most of the time the colours presented to you in a scene is just an ugly distracting mess.
BW solves that problem and let you focus on the content.
( In my my 4x 5 inch period i could see upside down-  - and at the moment i can see panorama's)

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

I agree with Pieter.
It was easy to see in black and white 9and upside down) in darkroom (and view camera) days.
These days, unless the color is obviously important to an image, I usually make a copy in LightRoom and convert that to black and white to see which works better.

[RSL]

Everything depends on the picture. If graphics is the overriding thing in a picture, then B&W is the only way to go. But sometimes color matters.

[PeterAit]

I agree with Pieter.
It was easy to see in black and white 9and upside down) in darkroom (and view camera) days.
These days, unless the color is obviously important to an image, I usually make a copy in LightRoom and convert that to black and white to see which works better.

I do the same.

A while back my love for monochrome motivated me to lay out a small fortune for a Leica Monochrom. But I ended up returning it because the images were IMO no better, and sometimes worse, than
 color conversions.

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

Peter,

I have a good friend whom I have known for over fifty years and who has long done excellent B&W film work using a 4x5 view camera. A few years ago he finally broke down and went digital, with a Leica Monochrom, and he still does magnificent work with that. I don't think he ever even shot a snapshot in color.

I went digital in 2004, and visited Death Valley in 2007, getting some nice images of sand dunes, which I immediately converted to B&W (exhibiting them a couple of times.) Then last year some time I happened to go back to look at them in LightRoom and saw how beautiful the color versions looked. So I think (or at least hope) I have finally learned to really look at both versions before deciding which way to go.

[David Sutton]

Useful video. Most images can be converted to a good B&W with enough work. Rafferty's video demonstrates what to look for to minimise post processing.
Nice overview later in the video on lighting and contemporary B&W shooters.
If you can do it well B&W can make your images really stand out in the crowd. Like applying for a job with a letter hand written with a fountain pen.

[Alan Klein]

I've converted color digital shots to Bw by playing with Lightroom luminance for the different colors.  I move the sliders around until the BW image looks pretty good to my eyes with the BW tones.  What else might work better than that?