How to Choose: Black and White or Color

For this shooting in black and white tutorial, you will learn how to read gray tones when photographing in the field. David shows you a wide-angle image of gray elephants grazing in a field of green grasses. Since grasses tend to turn gray in black and white, there would be little contrast between the green grass and the gray elephants in a monochrome image. If you process the color image in Lightroom and play around with the contrast, clarity, highlights, shadows, and blue and green tones, you can create separation between the elephants and the green background. Now when you convert to monochrome, the final image looks like you were shooting in black and white, but you find the main subjects still blend too much.

The goal of shooting in black and white is to recognize gray tones in order to create separation or contrast. David brings into Lightroom a color image of a field of zebras grazing in Kenya under a cloudy but sky. Clearly with this image, you would think about shooting in black and white—the gray tones, the bright highlights, dark shadows, and black-and-white zebras. David teaches the process of creating contrast by lowering the exposure, then increasing the contrast between highlights and shadows and whites and blacks. Using the graduated filter, he further increases the contrast to create the dramatic separation in the gray tones. The result is a high-contrast, black-and-white image of zebras against a dark sky.

Join Outdoor Photography Guide’s professional nature photographer David Johnston for a lesson on shooting in black and white. You will achieve some striking images.