When to make pictures black-and-white

[Cindy Pham]

Just wondering: when do you know you should retain the colors of your photos, or change them to black and white? As much as I love getting vivid colors in my photos, I'm always hesitant if it's necessary to make them black and white. If done right, it could look very powerful. If not, the photo might look too flat. How do you decide?

[Persephone]

for me I like to make it black and white whenever it related to olden days, like old buildings old jetty, and such...

sometimes portrait with very strong features I'll make it black n white too~

[Erica DeCola]

I think it depends on the individual image and what feeling you're going for with it....

[Katie Smith]

The three times I usually change to black and white are
-when the mood has a dramatic or classic feel (love a pouty-lipped portrait in b&w)
-when the colors clash (my 1.1.11 shot was converted because their shirts didn't go well with the hats)
-when I can't get skin tones right (that's actually not a good reason but it's a bad habit I can't seem to break)

But I'm mostly a portrait photographer.

[Stephany (orchidfire)]

I dunno, I usually just make my pictures black and white if I feel like it would look good in black and white... I never put my camera on the black and white setting, though; I always take a color picture and convert it so that I can have the color copy, too.

If you're going to desaturate a color picture, though, make sure you play with the channel mixer (you can use Photoshop or Gimp) and not just the desaturate shortcut.

[Rebecca Doyle]

I find b&w can really enhance emotion in some shots... street scenes, people at an airport - for these type of shots I think removing the colour helps to take the distraction away from 'extra stuff' in the shot, and just focus it on the people you are trying to capture.

[Joanne Medeiros]

I switch to B&W for some of the reasons listed above as well as when a shot has no reason to be in color, when color does not enhance the image and feel of the shot, when the color is distracting. I love B&W and intend to use it more often.

[Kristin]

I've never had much of an eye for b&w photography, although I understand the theory that you want to take a shot with high contrast already between the bright/light & darks

[Chaynee Bella]

@cindyisboring

I choose to go black and white if I want an emotion to stand out with the photo. If it's landscapes I keep the color and work on saturation.

[Jordan Anderson (icywarm)]

B&W captures light and colour captures tones.... for me it is difficult to convert from one to the other... when i use B&W film, it is because there will be nice light and I use colour when I know there will be perfect light, or if I want to show the colour in a subject...

[Teresa (pocketmouse)]

@cindyisboring ~ totally depends on the feel you're going for. I tend to convert to black and white images that are high-contrast, and/or when I feel the colour distracts from what I want the photo to convey.

[Teresa (pocketmouse)]

e.g. in this one: I didn't like the colours, so black and white made it look cleaner



and in this one: I really wanted the lines on the road to pop.

[John West]

Depends on the shot itself - most of the time I shoot in colour and transform the picture in B&W in the postprocessing stage.

This is a shot that didn't look that good in colour, so I took a different approach when I was postprocessing the image:

[Marianne Piano]

B&W also hides errors :P E.g. When your camera's LCD screen is broken and you're accidentally taking pics on tungsten white balance setting outdoors and have no idea till you've gotten home XD B&W/sepia hides many photographic sins!



Original (bright blue!)