Color photographs aren’t new. In fact, the first known color photograph dates back almost 150 years to James Clerk Maxwell’s 1861 Tartan Ribbon. Although the first color photograph is rather primitive, by the early 20th century color technology developed to the point that color photographs developed a high enough quality to show the scene rather well. Finally, by the mid-20th century, color photography became widely available to the point that today finding a non-specialty store with a good stock of black and white film can be difficult.

Today, you’re hard pressed to find black and white photos that were taken in casual atmospheres, such as a day at the beach, or an evening out. Surprisingly, its not difficult at all to make your pictures black and white, even if shot with color.

Benefits of B&W

You may be wondering what the point is of taking black and white photographs when we’ve got these high-megapixel cameras to capture as much color as possible. Well, its mostly for artistic and visual reasons. Sometimes, all of the color thats in an image just gets “too busy”, causing distractions in the photo. Black and white subdues the busy-ness that can appear in some color photographs. In addition, black and white photographs can diminish blemishes that appear either in a landscape or on people.

Most of all, black and white photographs simply have a classic, elegant look with an artistic feel.

Some examples comparing the same color photography to its B&W counterpart.

You can even leave part of the shot in color and make the rest black and white.

I’ve seen this technique used in various settings such as:

• A bride shot in B&W holding her bouquet, which is in color.
• A Master’s degree graduate shot in black and white, with their hood retaining color.
• Steven Spielberg used this technique in Schindler’s List, in the “girl with the red coat” shot.

How To?

With the proliferation of digital cameras, the ability to create black and white photographs has become tremendously easy. Today, most digital cameras offer a setting to take black and white photographs, rather than color. I DO NOT recommend using this setting. The reason? Tons of software exists to convert a color photograph into a black and white one.

Of course, you could use a version of Photoshop, or GIMP to convert your digital images into black and white. However, Google’s Picasa software has a very intuitive interface to make simple changes to your photographs, including black and white. In addition, Picasa is a photo organization software. It can automatically scan directories on your computer that you specify, finds the images in those directories, and organizes them into its interface. In addition to changing images to black and white, Picasa also offers cropping, red-eye reduction, saturation, soft focus, spot black & white (the picture of the ivy wall above used this option), sepia, and the list can continue.

A wonderful feature that Picasa has, if the ones I’ve listed aren’t enough, is that it saves any changes that you make to your images. When you make the first change to the original image, Picasa saves a full copy of that image into an “Originals” hidden folder within the same directory, then keeps a listing of any changes you make to the image. So, not only can you restore the original image, but even after you save any changes made, you can undo them one at a time because Picasa knows what you’ve done to the image in previous sessions.

I would certainly recommend experimenting with converting your images to black and white. You never know, a color photo that you don’t like the way it looks may look absolutely wonderful in black and white.

I would also recommend downloading and trying out Picasa. Its free, so what’s the harm?

Click the button below to download Picasa, as well as many other Google Apps.