journal features

digital black and white

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Yokohama, 2010.05.23

I've tried an experiment in black and white digital photography.

I followed this tutorial to make some black and white images from photos taken with my digital SLR. Usually I'm not blown away with the colours in my digital pics. It's always "HEY YOU WANT SOME COLOUR? CHECK OUT THE RED CHANNEL ON THIS BABY!"

For instance, this item from this weekend. It's even been partially desaturated and it still looks way off.

pinkj flowering bush looks too livid

This is typical of the digital camera's love of primary colours and odd handling of anything else:

Kenny accuses me, but his skin tone's off

Compare that with this image made on film.

no color manipulation required—it's film

So I decided to see what I could do in black and white imagery using the so-so color images from my digital camera as the source. I'm fairly pleased with the results, though I see room for improvement.

faux black-and-white image of some guys sitting around

Joon's since suggested that I try a plug-in for lightroom that's specially designed for the task. I'm going to give it a whirl.

Three good things that happened today:

1. had some time to tinker with photos

2. I seem to have the site's images migrated nicely to AWS

3. thank the gods that kenny's old enough to entertain himself once in a while

rand()m quote

If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it. A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

—Roald Dahl