Green Channel-this can heighten contrast it’s useful for work with portraits of people with light-colored skin. Work with the red channel is useful for high-key portraits and for landscapes with a blue sky. Red Channel-this can brighten everything that’s red while darkening everything that’s green or blue. They include controls for work with RGB channels-this kind of work was also discussed in our previous article on work with the Editing Layer. (Its shortcut key is Ctrl+G.) Here ZPS offers several controls influencing the black-and-white conversion. The More Complex, More Effective Option: GrayscaleĪnother possibility here is the “Effects” menu’s “Grayscale” item. Using a Quick Filter for B&W gives a higher-contrast picture it’s far superior to desaturation. But it is the very most basic method you can use.
It gives a photo a black-and-white look without ruining its contrast. The simplest method is to visit the Editor in Zoner Photo Studio, click the Quick Filters button in the toolbox towards the right, and use the Black & White filter. The photograph we’ll use for illustration. We’ll start from the simplest method and continue towards more complex, but also more effective approaches. And several of them are in Zoner Photo Studio. There are many methods you can use for creating a black-and-white picture. But a photo that looked bad in color won’t look this good in black-and-white. This photograph had a relatively good technical foundation, so conversion has left it still looking good. It creates gray-and-gray instead of black-and-white. And desaturation leaves a photo uninspiring, flat, and robbed of contrast. And you can do it better than your camera.Īvoid desaturation in Zoner Photo Studio just as you’d avoid in-camera conversion. You can’t automatically color a black-and-white picture, but you can do the opposite.
It won’t save you time, but it might ruin your photos. Steer Clear of DesaturationĪnother thing- don’t do black and white right inside the camera. And black-and-white won’t turn a bad photo into art. In photography you should know exactly what kind of final picture you have in mind. For example you may consider converting a photo to black and white just because it’s blurry and imperfect and you think conversion will improve it, or even make it art.īut don’t.
First, don’t go for black and white when you don’t have a plan.
Remember this difference-we’ll come back to it.įor now, we’ll show you how to convert photos to black and white in Zoner Photo Studio-but before even that, we’ll take a moment to go over what not to do. The “plants” here are the film’s light-sensitive crystals, which are scattered across the film. Analog film, meanwhile, resembles a meadow with chaotically scattered plants-with each plant being able to hold a bit of the picture if light falls on it.
Digital cameras’ sensing surfaces contain a precise grid, like the windows of a skyscraper, with each “window” being one dot in the picture (one pixel). So let’s take a look at how to create black-and-white pictures worthy of the name, using Zoner Photo Studio.ĭo you know how analog film differs from a digital sensor? The nicest description of it that we’ve heard so far is the “ skyscraper vs. These are usually dull, gray, and short on contrast. Maybe that’s why so many of what we call “black and white” photos today are just desaturated digital photographs. Meanwhile, we’re now standing well inside photography’s digital age. Black and white photography’s roots lie firmly in analog film.