Anyone who has tried black & white photography will know that it’s not as simple as it seems. You can switch to your camera’s black & white modes, turn the saturation down to zero in your photo editor or wade through long lists of presets and still not achieve drama, depth and richness.
It’s because black & white is visually very different to colour and not just in the obvious way. It relies on contrast, light and shade and composition for its effect, and you need to develop a different kind of eye when taking pictures. You also need a different set of editing skills, as some of the best black & white imagery of the past was made in the darkroom, just as much as it was in the camera.
These days, of course, we have digital darkrooms where just about anything is possible. But since digital cameras are designed for shooting in colour, how do you translate this successfully into mono? That’s what this article is for, covering three different stages in the black & white editing workflow. We’ll start off with basic conversion techniques that give your images real depth, move on to the advanced dodging and burning techniques used so much by darkroom experts, then finish off with ways to replicate the vintage and retro effects that were
