It’s Friday! There was no prompt last week because I sort of went into lurk mode - it’s a bad habit that I need to work on.
This week’s prompt is black and white.
Whether it’s a two-tone cat or something quite mundane made dramatic with filters, I want to see how the lack of colour can be a focus of your shot.
Usual rules apply: No NSFW and no shots you didn’t take yourself.
This is part of a series I took during the very first lockdown, on the banana plantation we were staying on in Carnarvon, WA.
Oh man this is so unfair, how are we meant to compete with this 😆. Such an awesome shot!
Lol, cheers for that
That’s so cool!
Okay, here’s mine. I messed with a few different sliders and ended up with a grainier look than the original but I really like it.
I like it!
Wow this is really cool!
I figured continuing with the car theme would be the best way to compete. :)
This is a Morris Minor clad in corrugated iron, made by Kiwi sculptor Jeff Thomson, displayed at the Whanganui i-site.
That’s such a kiwi thing to do, I love it.
Late entry; just went out and took this. I have gone with the car theme as well:
That came out really cool!
Thanks! Black and white really does give things more mystique!
Not for any of the stuff I tried 🙁
Maybe it was because you were looking for high contrast subjects instead of relying on the b&w to create contrast?
I still like your one though!
Initially I also tried black-and-whiting a bunch of photos I had already, but none really came out ok.
I think the issue is that I thought I was picking things with a high contrast, but this contrast was mostly from large differences in colour (e.g. super bright yellow against a darker green background). When converted to black and white, they were a lot closer in colour than they were initially.
I also noticed everyone elses photos seem to be a different colour of black and white, if that makes sense.
Yeah it does make sense. Professionals etc can actually tweak the tone darkness/lightness of each set of colours in an image (e.g darken all the cyans by 15%, lighten all the reds 20%) individually to get the best contrast mix. That’s the secret to getting good black and white reproductions of colour paintings for example.
We’re probably all using different filters and some will have presets that increase contrast. My go-to is photoshop express for android; you can really play around with it.
I found this really hard. I took a bunch of pictures that I thought had high contrast; trees, flowers, bushes, bark patterns. But when I converted them to black and white none of them really popped.
Here’s my favourite from what I got, but still not that happy with it.
I like it, it feels kind of tense, like something is about to emerge into view.
Thanks!
Which method of converting to black and white did you use? It feels to me like that one is more grayscale. You might also just tweak the black point and sharpness to see if that helps? Here is one I took of Wrights Hill fortress awhile back, I basically did that to it.
I had the image open in Digikam and used the editor to convert it. There were a few options but I just tried them out.
It feels to me like that one is more grayscale
I gotta admit, I don’t know the difference. Is this one greyscale and the others posted black and white?
I expect you can guess the difference between grayscale and black and white based on the names - essentially black and white contains only those two, while grayscale has assorted gray shades as well. Black and white can look casually grayscale at high definition where the blacks and whites are mixed (a 100x100 square with 50% black and 50% white equally distributed throughout is going to look gray on first glance at a distance).
I can’t say if your image is grayscale because I have not properly looked at it - it just feels that way on first glance. I’m also not familiar with digikam so I don’t know what it defaults to when converting color to monochrome.
I do like the composition, btw.
Any digital image is actually red green and blue, those are the colors of the pixels on your monitor. When there’s enough of them your brain is tricked into seeing other colors. To get even more meta, all colors are just made up by your brain.
So I don’t understand your distinction between black and white, and grayscale. Whether it’s a gray made of black and white pixels or a “pure gray” doesn’t matter, it can look the same. Unless it’s a style where the pixels are supposed to be visible, e.g. pointillism.
Modern monitors do black (pixel off), and white (all three colours at once), as well as grayscale (method varies depending on display type). All of this means that images are displayed in the colors they contain. Or in this case, don’t contain.
Grayscale will display differently to black and white or sepia or full colour.
Okay, here’s one I found on my phone and desaturated just now.
Then here’s the version where I upped the contrast, decreased black point and shadows, and increased white point.
Colour version for reference
Thanks! I also am not very familiar with Digikam, in terms of image editing. I opened it in GIMP and tried adjusting the things you suggested. Here’s a new version, it definitely looks more black/white but not sure if it’s an improvement:
It’s kind of up to you if you’re happy with it, but it does seem more stark now.
Yes, I guess each have their own good qualities.
