From the course: Lightroom and Photoshop: Black and White Photography

Why black and white?

From the course: Lightroom and Photoshop: Black and White Photography

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Why black and white?

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- Alright, so why black and white? Well, there are a lot of reasons why you might consider black and white in your workflow, and I think that you could really look at them as artistic and practical. So on the artistic side, black and white is where the history of photography is. Those really dramatic landscapes. Those beautiful portraits. The reasons that we fell in love with photography in the first place, probably go back to black and white, so maybe you're looking to replicate that, or maybe you're looking to just draw your eyes to the content, and black and white can be great for that, because you focus on texture, you focus on contrast, you focus on the subject. And you can get away with things in the editing process that might be a little dramatic in color. Might be a little distracting. Now, on the practical side, there's some really great reasons to think about black and white as well. When an image is too busy, maybe there's mixed lighting, maybe there are too many colors, maybe there's something distracting, black and white and that subtractive process can be a really wonderful way to help you focus on the image itself. It can remove distractions. It can also remove ruddiness in skin, noise can become grain, and suddenly it becomes charming, it looks like an old film print. When you're transporting large files or printing large files, there's less information and so it's a more efficient process. Passing an image in email, you could have a higher resolution file, because there's less information in it. So there's all sorts of artistic and practical reasons to consider a black and white workflow. But what's wonderful about the skills that I'll teach you is that we're going to go with a non-destructive method. So if you decide later that you want your black and white image to be color, that's no problem at all.

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