Turn your color pictures into Emotional Black and White Photography
I don't know the psychological reason for it, but when the color characteristics are removed from a picture, it automatically has more of an impact. Maybe without the colors, we focus more on the subject matter. The lighting becomes more important as well. I used the natural light from this bay window for this color portrait of this young girl for her first holy communion. I placed a large white card on the right to add a little fill light. The green grass is not overly distracting, but look what happens when we eliminate the colors and turn the photograph into a black and white. In Adobe Photoshop, there are several ways to accomplish this. The quick and easy way is to simple make an adjustment to the saturation. This is okay sometimes, but I prefer to use a "Photoshop Action" The action I use came with a program call Quick Mats, developed by John Hartman. It uses the different color channels to get a more realistic black and white image.
The third version was edited by adjusting the saturation to zero. If we compare the two edited photos, we can see that the second one is a nicer portrait. It's not a big difference in a small picture on a web page. It would be a big difference if this portrait is going to be printed as a wall portrait. If I had taken this picture of my subject in black and white, I would have not had the option to have it in color as well. Back from Emotional Black and White Photography to |
Have you ever looked at emotional black and white photography? Would it have the same emotional impact if it were a color photograph?
Notice with the edited image, our eyes are drawn immediately to her eyes and her innocent expression. 