Creating a Digital Art Photo in Black and White

Shooting in black and white (B&W) is a serious form of art photography. Some people tend to dismiss B&W as boring or somehow less artsy because — face it — there's no color! However, there are plenty of markets for your B&W art photos, from galleries to museums to photojournalism to portraiture and architecture shots.

Creating a B&W print requires no magic wand: You can

• Shoot with B&W film on a nondigital camera. Black-and-white film is probably still the best medium for the genre. The light coming onto the film can create natural sepias with realistic-looking grains that develop when the film is mixed with chemicals.

• Shoot with your digital camera set to B&W mode. For what it is, it's good but can get to look a little like plastic.

• Take a color image and tweak it in Photoshop to make it appear B&W. You can either desaturate your photos or scan them in grayscale mode.

Remember, too, that a digital camera actually captures a color image when set to B&W. If you shoot in the Raw file format, you can easily restore the color later in Photoshop's Camera Raw plug-in.

B&W film

You probably know this, but it needs to be said: Shooting in B&W on a nondigital camera requires using B&W film. This gives you a negative or a positive (film type depending) to enlarge to make a print. Just like color film, B&W film has an ISO rating (how sensitive it is to light).

Scan a B&W print or developed film to create a digitized image that you can tweak in an image-editing program and then make copies.

Shooting B&W on a digital camera

Obviously, digital cameras can't use B&W film, but they do have a setting with which you can shoot in B&W. The B&W mode in many cameras is among many menu items. In some cameras, it may be hard to find without that handy roadmap, the User Guide. For example, the B&W feature on a Canon Digital Rebel XT, can be found within a setting called Parameters.

So what's better for B&W: film or digital? As a comparison, Figure 1 shows two images shot at the same time and angle: one on film and one that's digital. (Okay, both are technically digital now because the film image was scanned.) But there are differences. On the left is a B&W film image of a Spanish-style staircase taken in the P (that's point-and-shoot) mode of a film (Canon Rebel) camera and then scanned with an HP Scanner. On the right is the same image taken with a digital camera (a Canon Digital Rebel), again in the P mode. The film image has a somewhat broader tonal range, with darker shadows and brighter highlights, while the digital image shows better detail in the shadows.

There are at least a dozen parameters at work when you look at images printed on a computer that can make the two different — and those parameters aren't always because of the digital versus film format itself. And of course, there's always the factor of personal preference. So rather than declaring one medium superior to the other for B&W photography, remember that the quality of your digital art photos, whether originating as pixels or on film, depends on two things: the settings you use when capturing the image and the post-capture processing you do in your image editing software.

Don't forget that when you capture in the Raw file format, all the image's original data is still part of the file, including color. Using Photoshop's Camera Raw plug-in (or other Raw-capable software), you can always return to the original image, as captured in the camera, complete with full color (even when the camera was set to use its B&W feature).