Black and White Digital Photography

There are two ways of obtaining black and white digital photography. One is to see if your camera has a black and white setting and use that for creating a black and white photo. Black and white photography was the way it was in the beginning.  This was because the early efforts in photography were still grappling with ways of handling color because (among other reasons) the early films did not handle longer wavelengths of light very well.

Even when the technology was around that could cope with color, the outcomes varied according to manufacturer and processes so that it was difficult to get a true rendition of a scene because the colors in the scene varied from film type and manufacturer to film type and manufacturer.  Even after color became the norm for photography, there was still a high demand for black and white photography. Black and white digital photography has the same kind of appeal for the artistic photographer.

This seems quite a simple procedure – you just get a camera that has black and white as an option and set your camera to that mode.  But wait. There is a catch to using this method. Using the black and white setting produces 8 bit black and white JPEG images. This can be quite limiting if you want to work with the photograph. This does not leave you a lot of leeway for posterization. Posterization is the process of converting gray shading into more clearly marked delineations of color. In an 8 bit images, there are not many bits that can be posterization and any kind of delineation is going to end up looking like a band of color rather than a gradation of color.

Luckily, there is a second way of creating black and white digital photography. You can shoot your photo in raw format and convert this raw file into a color photo and the convert that to black and white.  Even if the conversion to black and white only produces 16-bit images, you still have a lot more data to work with.

When you take a photo with a digital camera, you are recording the information in pixels. These pixels are red, green, or blue or some combination of these three colors.  When you take the photo in color, you are capturing all the variations in shading that these colors can create.

As you begin the process of converting the photo to black and white, you have a wide variety of choices of how you want to tone and shade the photo before you convert the final product to black and white. Black and white digital photography is more than photography – it is art performed on the photograph after it is taken.