When color can be too much

Jamsil. All photos by Tom Coyner

By Tom Coyner

I love color ― sometimes too much. But there are times when color simply gets in the way of a good photograph. Bright colors can enhance, but they can distract. Often the better photograph focuses on tone and patterns. In such cases, monotone (black and white) photographs are the better way to go.

Wonseo dong.

When shooting black & white photos ― or selecting color photos for conversion to monochrome ― here are some of the elements to consider:

1. Texture. Can you find or bring out texture that adds to the image?
2. Look for lines of composure that build the image. You may wish to crop the image differently than if the image had remained in color.
3. Does your image in color have colors that detract from the overall composition? Distracting colored sections that you may wish to crop may remain in the monochrome version.

Most digital photographers shoot in color and later do most of their preparation in color before converting to black and white in LightRoom, Photoshop or with other tools.

Why? Color files contain more information that allows later greater manipulation and control during the black and white conversion/fine touching.

(Should you use LightRoom, please be aware that Adobe has just released a major upgrade with Release 7.3. The release number shows that that this the biggest upgrade in years, including some major additions to color and monochrome manipulation.)

This may surprise you, but all digital cameras take only black and white photographs, but then immediately use in-camera algorithms to create a color spectrum of red, green and blue.
As a result, one sees color photographs on your LCD panel and when you download the image files.

Finally, Photoshop and some other software tools offer layering of images on top of each other. Sometimes it is useful to take the original color image and then overlay it with the black and white copy.

Then, after checking for exact alignment between the two copies, experiment by decreasing the opacity of the top black and white layer to get a desired level of desaturation of the original color image as the result of combining the two versions of the same photograph.

Vietnam, Hoilan Bay.

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