How To Take A Good Black And White Portrait

This will make your photos eye-catching and impactful.

How to take a good black and white portrait. A black-and-white portrait revolves around the contrast between black and white. Many photographers recommend focusing on the eyes when taking black and white portraits. Turning a picture into a good black and white is fairly simple but there are a few basic rules you need to follow.

Given the chance however when looking at two portraits side by side nine times out of ten the black and white portrait will hit me in a place where the color photograph just cannot reach. The wet black road in the center of the frame takes the eye through the image and then the speckles of black bring the eye back down. These sold blacks and whites will create an overall dramatic feel to your photograph.

The simplest and the worst method to convert color photographs to black and white is to simply desaturate or discard the colors. Combine that with a great pose and youll have the perfect black and white portrait. First and foremost is to make the blacks very black and the whites very white.

I like to see a lot of contrast in black and whites. Often dismissed as an ancillary detail that should be glossed over the dedicated background of a monochrome actually deserves to be given the time of day. For a photograph to stand out you want a mix of solid blacks and whites and a variation of grays.

Thats when they really seem to pop. You can use your DSLR for black and white photography. You can do this pretty much in any image editing software.

This allows you to focus on important things such as light and contrast and not get distracted by color. There are ways to change in-camera settings to allow yourself to photograph straight in black and white. Use it for color and then convert the images later during post-processing.