Digital photography and post-processing
Converting Digital Color to Monochrome
How often do you make black-and-white conversions? Maybe you should?
Once upon a time, long, long ago (ca. 1965), I photographed nearly everything in black and white—aka monochrome—because I could process the film and print the negatives myself.
Color was $pendy because I had to send it out to be processed and printed. I had little control using drugstore one-hour labs.
My first darkroom was my blacked-out-with-repurposed-garbage-bags kitchen; I was rapidly learning to manipulate prints, learning “dodging” to make too-dark areas lighter by holding some of the light from the enlarger back with a dodging paddle, and “burning,” aka “printing in” by adding more light to a too-light area either by making a variable hole with my hands or cutting a hole in a card.
Adobe Photoshop has long used these icons to represent dodging and burning tools. It is not lost on old wet-darkroom workers that the symbol for “dodging” and “burning,” its diametric opposite, is a dodging paddle and a hand making a hole. Using the tools was demanding. It was important to leave no visible shadows or rings. Done right, no one could tell you had done it at all. If done wrong, you could see it across the room.
To the best of my uncertain knowledge (since I never printed color), you couldn’t do most of the standard monochrome manipulations in color because you’d shift the color. I read descriptions of trying to make dodging paddles from gelatin color printing filters; that just intimidated me more. I was the rankest of rank amateurs, learning the craft independently from books and hands-on practice. Color photography was far above my pay grade.
I loved black and white. I shot and shot. I acquired a 6x6cm TLR (Twin Lens Reflex). I experimented. I learned things. I built a temporary unplumbed darkroom in a repurposed walk-in closet. Prints went into a final holding bath to be carried to the kitchen for final washing and drying. My bride encouraged me to go to school for commercial photography, often done entirely in monochrome in the late sixties.
I had acquired the knack of seeing in monochrome, observing a scene, and guesstimating how it would look in black and white. I obtained a little studio and shot professionally for sixteen years, doing all the black and white myself and farming all the color to a pro lab.
(Pro tip: If you plan to make a living, stay out of your darkroom, or Lightroom. Hire someone. You only make money when you are shooting and selling. Don’t be like Chuck.)
And then along came digital.
I lost that little butter-and-egg studio, lost my mojo, pegged my guns, and balked at even picking up a camera for years.
Until I acquired my first tiny $100 point-and-shoot and made one solitary digital exposure.
(Shock and awe.)
The paradigm shifted so fast that my head spun.
Suddenly, I could do everything — every thing! — in full color, in any light, process it, dodge and burn and mask and and and; I was over the moon. I remembered Alfred Eisenstadt’s dream:
I also, within days, lost my ability to “see” in monochrome. Maybe I never really had it, but color was captivating. We yumans mostly see in color. Why in the world would I want to keep shooting in B&W?
Sure, even the earliest consumer cameras had a monochrome setting. They could even deliver tints, selenium or sepia tones, faux infrared, all sorts of gee-golly-whiz-bang stuff, but only in JPEG, and I wanted to shoot RAW. So, I pretty much never made conversions because, frankly, I forgot.
But you have to do a lot of tedious computer work to make these new-fangled conversion thingies, right?
Nope.
Being reluctantly forgetful, I forgot to mention that while I am very much into deep post-processing using Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, you needn’t be. Lauri Novak just published this piece in Full Frame: Not Every Photographer Needs Photoshop.
To do B&W conversions, you do not need a high-end $pendy suite of apps. You can program most cameras to shoot monochrome if you are a JPEG shooter. If you are made of money, you can purchase a Leica Monochrom (say it in Deutsch) and shoot in black and white RAW, but the maybe downside is that your $8,000 camera won’t shoot color.
Quoting Lauri Novak from her piece,
I get it. When you are told or it’s suggested to you to use Photoshop, I feel your pain and know that you’re overwhelmed by all the options and the 89 different ways to do one thing in Photoshop.
What got my attention was “… the 89 different ways to do one thing in Photoshop.” It’s true! To a lesser extent, it’s true of Lightroom as well. There are almost infinite workarounds that you can even invent yourself on the fly. Editing B&W conversions is as easy or complex as you care to make it. My advice is just to try it; make some one-click conversions and see what you think.
Little Schoolhouse on the Prairie
Some converted images worked, and some did not.
I soon discovered that some images worked, and some did not. Almost all of the one-clicks were sub-par, which is why I recommend having at least one good editing app. Fortunately, your options are nearly unlimited in modern post-processing. I use Adobe Lightroom Classic and Photoshop 2024, but I’m confident that any good application will do, but the one-clicks get the job done. You can click to determine if a particular picture works or not.
When you do a quick and dirty conversion in Lightroom (Classic; the others may be different), the colors are converted to tones of gray, but the shades may be close enough together that you can’t see the difference. However, you may notice that most of the individual development modules have shifted to black-and-white mode. The HSL Panel (Hue-Saturation-Luminance) now says it is black-and-white. You use the same color sliders, but they now increase or decrease the density of their corresponding grays.
Granddaughter Chasing a Kite
Lightroom Classic lets me digitally copy the color master for a fallback. Adobe lets you create any number of virtual copies that take up no space on the disc. You can experiment with multiple versions, compare and contrast, and arrive at a result you think is swell.
(NObody says “swell” anymore, dude!)
A Stuffed Great Horned Owl in a Nature Center
This Great Horned Owl is a successful conversion. Of course, you can just tap the B&W button and walk away, but the algorithms are only converting the colors to their equivalent grays, which may—indeed, probably will look flat because the color contrasts are gone. If you have some wet-darkroom experience, you will note that the initial conversion appears muddy and lifeless.
It helps to read up a bit on the famed Zone System, but even as a starting point, apps such as Photoshop and Lightroom come with presets for monochrome that let you scroll through and try out several that can serve as an opening approach. From there, I encourage you to adjust sliders to view the effects. The goal should always be to have a 100% black point that needn’t be large and a pure white point. I always back off the white point because I don’t want highlights “clipped” (no detail). The pictures I present here are all processed to that classic Zone 0 to 9. I use it in color, too.
Common Grape Hyacinth in my Tabletop Set
These tiny flowers were shot with a 70mm dedicated macro lens. I could almost get away with a one-click conversion for the upper pair with the bud vase, but I deemed it flat, so I increased the overall contrast slightly and pulled the green slider down enough to preserve detail in the stem.
Nebraska State Capitol Tower emphasizes the statue called The Sower.
The original clouds were there, but I increased their contrast. After trying and failing every attempt to eliminate what looked like fringing around the dome's edges, I concluded it was the strong back sunlight wrapping around the solid object, the same phenomenon we see in a total solar eclipse. I chose a sepia tone for the monochrome to warm it up and obscured the details on the dome to direct all attention to the statue and clouds.
Washington hyacinth berries in tight closeup.
I made the original color in March. Yes, the berries are covered with extruded halite crystals—common salt. I have not discovered why these edible berries would pump salt through their skin's pores on a crisp March morning. Does anyone know?
Nebraska State Capitol Tower emphasizes the statue called The Sower II.
Curiously, I like the black-and-white conversion almost better than the original color. The conversion was a rare one-click that resulted in exactly what I wanted.
Misty Sunrise in Camp in High Summer
I am not sure if this conversion works. You can see at a glance that a lot of tone manipulation was done because the first one-click shot was mush. I like the color a lot, but for the BW, I had to open the shadows more and completely change the brightness of the veld.
Oldest Church in the U.S. — San Miguel Chapel, Santa Fe, NM
The conversion for this picture was easy as I channeled St. Ansel and the Zone System again. I darkened the sky and whitened the cross with my imaginary Wratten 9 deep yellow filter. My folding oak Kueffel & Esser supported my 8x10" Burke and James with its ten-inch Wollensak f/8.0 lens. 😉 (Just funnin’. Microsensor Nikon “Coolpix” P7800 handheld at 1/500 sec, f/4.5, ISO 80, 22mm focal length, equivalent to 105mm full frame.) When channeling Ansel Adams, ya hafta pretend like ya know stuff.
I must have had a reason for photographing my hats, but the monochrome conversion was just a scoche trickier than I expected. I adjusted the density of the lettering by moving the orange slider up.
I am planning to do more of this and get better at it. Back to my roots.
Try it! You may like it!
📸As always, gratitude for looking in. I sincerely appreciate it! Questions in the comments will be answered promptly, so please ask.😊👍
