Black and white photography. Photo editor

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when humanity first invented photography, all photographs were black and white. They look mysterious and charming. Although high-quality photographs can be taken in a wide range of colors these days, black and white pictures are still popular. In addition, experts say that if you transform a color photograph into a black and white picture, you can hide minor defects and imperfections in the skin. Let's look at how to take a photo in gray tones using Paint, Photoshop or the Internet.

How to make a picture black and white in Paint?

Paint is one of the simplest image editors. There is nothing difficult in using this program to convert an ordinary color photo into black and white. The instructions below will help you complete the procedure:

Since Paint is a standard program on Windows operating systems, you don't have to install it. Just open the image in the program by right-clicking on the picture and selecting “Open with Paint”;
There is a "Correction" menu on the toolbar. Click on it and select “Make black and white”;

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To save the converted photo, you need the “File” and “Save As” tabs;

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Enter a file name and select a folder or location on your computer where you want to save the photo.

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How to make a photo black and white using Photoshop?

In Photoshop photo editor you can make a picture or photo black and white in no time. To do this you need to have this program on your computer. If it is not there, you must first download and install it on your device, following the instructions. And to convert a color photo to black and white, follow these steps:

I offer you the easiest way to make a picture black and white in Photoshop: desaturate it. To get started, upload your photo to the program. After this, duplicate the image layer by pressing the following key combination: CTRL+G;

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On the toolbar, select “Image”, then “Correction” and finally “Desaturate”. After this, the color photo is colored in shades of black, white and gray;

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Save the photo to your computer. To do this, find the “File” item on the toolbar and select “Save As”. Experts recommend saving images in JPEG format, as the pictures will be clearly expanded and will retain the full range of black and white shades.

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How to make an image black and white online?

There are many resources on the Internet that allow you to transform a photo, including changing the color scheme to black and white. I chose the “Editor.Photo.to” service, which I liked because of its simple and stylish interface. Below are instructions on how to use it to make a picture black and white:

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Find the "Effects" section. It is located on the control panel, on the left;

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Apply the Black and White effect. With the white circle you can change the intensity of the colors.

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As we can see, there is nothing difficult in turning a color photo into black and white. To do this, you don’t even need to have a photo editor on your computer.

I was recently asked about the process of converting an image to black and white, specifically how you can tell if an image is suitable for it. So in this article I am going to talk about how to properly convert an image to black and white and how to do it in Photoshop without losing quality.

When is it better to convert an image to black and white?

There are three ideas that come to mind when I'm trying to evaluate whether I should convert my image to black and white (hereafter abbreviated as BW):

First of all, this is a little obvious, but what kind of result do you want? Did your client specifically ask to take a B&W photo? Are you participating in a photo competition in the B&W category? You're doing a series for a B&W gallery (because actually, it doesn't look very good when you only have one or two B&W photos among the color ones, you want to have a good mix right?) Like I said, it's pretty obvious that you need to consider the end result, but it was worth saying again.
Secondly, you need to consider the value of dynamic range. In photography, the term “range value” refers to the ratio of dark and light areas of an image. So when I say evaluate the range of an image, I'm talking about whether you have deep blacks and bright whites in the photo. What's your dynamic range? For the most part, "flat" images don't look very good in black and white. Traditional B&W have good contrast and fairly spread values throughout the histogram. So, if your image has these components, then it may be a good choice for converting to B&W.
I'll write an article on color theory and color relationships at some point, but if you have weird color combinations that don't look good together, that photo might be a good candidate for converting to B&W. Let's face it, some colors don't go well with others. B&W can be a great way to avoid inconsistency and get a great photo.

Just a tip: if you squint your eyes while looking at an image, you'll see fewer colors and a wider range. This can help give you an idea of whether your image actually has the appropriate dynamic range.

How to convert a color image to black and white

Okay, let's now talk about how to convert an image to B&W, because there are two ways: the right way and the wrong way. You can certainly get the same result, but if you do it wrong, you will actually lose quality (technically, you are sacrificing bytes of information). In this article I will talk about using Adobe Photoshop. There are other conversion programs you can buy, but in terms of practicality, why pay extra when you can do it very easily in Photoshop.

Step 1

If you find an image that you want to convert to B&W, the first step is to open the image in Photoshop. In my example, I'm using one of my wedding photos, which you can view on my website. It was taken during the first dance and I just really love this photo in B&W.

Step 2

Don't do this!

In short, you are actually changing the color profile, which means you are losing pixel information in the colors. But you don't want that, you want to preserve as much information in the image as possible.

What you want to do is done using the black and white settings. You can access them either from the top menu Image > Mode > Black and White(Image > Adjustments > Black&White) or in the sidebar on the right, click on the settings button (as shown in the picture), and then click on the Black & White icon, which is indicated by a black rectangle divided into black and white diagonally.

Step 3

Once you click this icon, you will see the value settings for each color (see picture). Note that Photoshop has preserved all the color information in the image, it just displays it as B&W, but all your color information is preserved.

It also gives you more control over how you change the B&W, as you can adjust it on a color-by-color basis. But keep in mind that you shouldn't push the color limits too far, or you'll start to see bumps and jagged stripes in gradient areas like the sky. You'll see this immediately when viewing the image if you start moving the sliders too much, so you'll immediately see what I'm talking about.

Step 4

After that, you can use other adjustment layers (which act like smart layers, if you understand what that means, and which is a very good solution) to adjust the image the way you need: exposure, contrast, levels, curves, filters, and etc.

Step 5

Once you've made all the editing steps you thought necessary, hopefully you've ended up with an image that you're happy with as a result. Now all you have to do is save it according to your needs and depending on the desired result.

David Wahlman is a wedding and portrait photographer based in Redding, California. He works around California and strives to expand the geography of his filming. You can see his best work at www.wahlmanphotography.com and follow his posts at

Many people have at least once thought about restoring old black and white photographs. Most of the photographs from the so-called point-and-shoot cameras were transferred to digital format, but never gained color. The solution to the problem of converting a bleached image to a color one is very difficult, but to some extent accessible.

Converting a black and white photo into color

While it’s easy to turn a color photo into black and white, solving the problem in the opposite direction becomes much more difficult. The computer needs to understand exactly how to color a particular fragment consisting of a large number of pixels. Recently, the site presented in our article has been dealing with this issue. So far this is the only high-quality option that works in automatic processing mode.

Colorize Black was developed by Algorithmia, a company that implements hundreds of other interesting algorithms. This is one of the new and successful projects that managed to surprise network users. It is based on artificial intelligence based on a neural network, which selects the necessary colors for the uploaded picture. Frankly speaking, the processed photo does not always meet expectations, but today the service shows amazing results. In addition to files from a computer, Coloriz Black can work with pictures from the Internet.

Save the image divided in half by the purple line (1);
Save the fully colored photo (2).

Your picture will be downloaded to your computer via your browser. It looks something like this:

The results of image processing show that artificial intelligence based on a neural network has not yet thoroughly learned to turn black and white photos into color ones. However, it works well with photographs of people and paints their faces more or less well. Although the colors in the example article were chosen incorrectly, the Colorize Black algorithm still selected some shades successfully. For now, this is the only current option for automatically converting a bleached picture into a color one.

Have you ever wondered how to create beautiful black and white photos? Well, there's good news and bad news. First of all, shooting in black and white is still photography. This means that if the image is unsuccessful, then no amount of black and white magic will save it, that’s a fact. But the good news is that by following a few rules when creating black and white photos, you will have a lot of control in post-processing. Here are three that you might find useful.

№1 Initially do correct settings

Let's get started. There is only one requirement for creating black and white photographs - raw format. If you can't shoot in raw, shoot JPG in color. Ironic, I know, but I'll explain why later.

This is not an ironclad rule, but it is better to lose detail in the shadows than in the highlights. This means that it is better to underexpose than to overexpose, as this will greatly damage the black and white photo. But this of course remains at your discretion and intention. If you want to overexpose for a specific reason, then do it! Depending on the image below, you may want the highlights to be blown out.

Most modern cameras can shoot in pure RAW and display the image on the screen in black and white. If this is possible in your camera, then take advantage of it! This way, when you shoot, your image will be closer to the final result you had in mind.

#2 Two things to look for

Black and white photographs are usually considered last. If the image doesn't look good, convert to black and white and get a good frame. But it doesn't work that way. If an image looks good in black and white, it means all the necessary elements were there to begin with. In any case, intentional black and white photographs will always be superior to those taken as such as a fallback option.

When you shoot black and white photography there are two things to look for, contrast and shapes.

Contrast in light and color

Look for contrast in highlights (light versus dark) as well as contrast in color (ironic again!). Once again, these rules are not mandatory. But if you are just starting out, it is better to first understand the rules and then break them.

Let's look at the graphs:

On the color wheel, shades that are close to each other will tend to look flat (like the two orange shades above). And colors that are far apart, like opposite sides of a circle, will appear more contrasty (blue and orange).

Search forms

In black and white photography, objects are reduced only to their essence, since there is no color to distract attention from form. This means that the composition must be strong as the elements of the photo become more obvious. Black and white photography doesn't seem so simple anymore, does it? Let's look at another example using the colors above.

The blue bunny stands out more than the dark orange one due to the color contrast.

INLightroom

This is where black and white photography really comes to life. First, I'll explain why I recommend shooting in color (or raw). The thing is, if you shoot straight in black and white, you'll get many shades of gray that the camera captures. But if you're shooting in color initially, you'll have much more control over tones in post-production. See below:

One stripe of color creates three different stripes of black and white (gray shades). The black and white shades you get are malleable. See how the red spot gives you three different shades of grey.

When shooting in color, you can say "red becomes very dark and blue becomes very light." You can do the opposite and say “the blue becomes very dark and the red becomes very light.” Now do you understand why it's so important to shoot in color? You lose these options when shooting in black and white.

PanelB& W VLightroom

In Lightroom, go to the Adjustments module, scroll down and click on B&W (right in the HSL/Color/B&W panel). All the color sliders are at your disposal here. Take the first slider. Moving red to the left will make all shades of red darker. The same goes for the rest of the sliders; orange, yellow, green, cyan, indigo, violet and magenta.

The good news is that you can work directly on the image. See that weird circle in the top left corner? If you click on it and hover over any part of the image, click and drag up, down, left or right, it will automatically sample the color and allow you to edit the black and white mix from there. You will see the corresponding sliders move and all similar colors (shades) in your image will be adjusted.

The image on the left is straight from the camera in formatRAW. On the right, all I did was darken the blues using the blue slider.

Once you've completed the black and white conversion, tweak the clarity and contrast. Again, this won't magically make the image beautiful, but if the composition is right, you should get a good result. Here's the final image:

Conclusion

As you can see, good black and white photography is based on the same rules that make a good photograph. But other than that, this special black and white aspect is about understanding how color transforms into monochrome. A good exercise is to convert color images and experiment with conversions to better understand how it works. Be yourself, stay focused and keep shooting.

Hi all! As usual, I am with you, Dmitry Kostin. And today we will photoshop again. Remember how we did? Be that as it may, this is not surprising, since it is not at all difficult to desaturate the image. But how to turn a black and white photo into color? Is this possible?

Of course it's possible. Already, even entire films are being colored. Why make some image color? But it’s still a very interesting experience. Can you imagine? You can come up with the colors you would like to see in this photo. For example, you can set the color of your eyes, hair, skin, clothes and much more. This is how I colored old photographs. It turned out funny)

Let me not make long introductions. Let's start coloring right away. Open any b/w photo (I chose a photo I found on the Internet).

Just look at what mode the photo is in. It's just possible that it was saved in the format "Grayscale", then you simply won’t be able to work with color.

Change the color mode to RGB. To do this, go to the top menu and select “Image” - “Mode”. Well, if it’s not RSL, then install it.

Let's look at the first method, namely the one familiar to you.

Blending Options

Here is another fairly effective trick for coloring photos. The main thing here is to create a separate layer for each element. I took a new photo for these needs.

By the way, this was the very first method that I learned about. When I found out about it, I liked it so much that I colored a lot of photographs).

Layer mask

Well, the last method of transformation for today is using a layer mask. Let's get straight to the point.

Well, in the end you get a beautiful color photograph and it looks completely different. Oh, but of course I messed up a little. But you can always correct this.

I will never cease to be amazed at the power of Photoshop. Indeed, in many cases, the same problem can be solved in several ways, and you yourself can choose the method that suits you best. By the way, which method do you like best? Or do you have your own way of turning a black and white photo into color in Photoshop, which I did not describe here? Please write in the comments.

If you want to quickly explore the capabilities of Photoshop and learn how to work with it, then I strongly recommend that you watch excellent video course. Everything is described in detail, everything is told in human language and laid out on the shelves. The material is easily absorbed. So I recommend it.

Well, I'm done for today. I hope that you liked my article. Be sure to subscribe to my blog updates, then you will always be aware of the latest information on the blog. I won't spam. I promise). I wish you good luck in mastering Photoshop. Bye bye!

Best regards, Dmitry Kostin.