About half of my work is film, and while I don't expect black and white film to completely disappear from the market during my lifetime, lately I have been experimenting more with creating the type of black and white images I love with my digital equipment. Creating a pleasing black and white print is not as simple as setting your digital camera on gray scale or desaturating your jpg images in Photoshop.
Both of those techniques usually yield images that are flat and unappealing.
When creating black and white images with your digital camera, it's best to think of the image captured by your camera as just a starting point, like film negatives.
It's also best to save the images in RAW format, not jpg, to give yourself the maximum latittude in adjusting the image overall, but that's another discussion.
My image this week was shot digitally and color corrected in Photoshop's RAW program.
Afterwards, I opened the photo in Photoshop and used the black and white dialoge box. I chose the built-in High Contrast Red filter. Then I further adjusted the image with Curves to create some additional contrast.
The original color image is shown below. The preference for color or black and white images is emotional. I prefer black and white in most cases.
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