There are a billion special effects that a photographer can apply to photos.  As a matter of personal taste, I usually don’t go too crazy and prefer to stick with three main looks:  (1) rich, vivid color; (2) black & white; and a (3) slightly desaturated look with a shifted white balance towards warmer colors, which makes a photograph look a little bit more aged and romantic.

It’s not always simple to decide how a photograph should look, but the majority of the time, I react to gut instinct.  If the colors in the photograph don’t add anything and the image itself can stand up well to a bit of a higher contrast level, then I’ll do a quick conversion to black and white in lightroom to test it out.  The higher contrast in a photograph helps to differentiate the colors in the photograph and prevent everything from being a flat gray.  For example, in the image below (from Flickr under a Creative Commons license), the photograph has been converted to black & white, but the scale is likely very flat since there are no true blacks in the photograph. It’s a great photo and the lack of color adds to the general feeling of melancholy in the photo, but for a typical wedding portrait with these colors, I would have decided against a black & white conversion.

D Sharon Pruitt

In my opinion, photographs without true blacks tend not to be good candidates for conversion to black and white. Because there are no colors to amp up the picture, a black & white photo really relies on contrast. For example, in the photo below that I took while in Pamukalle, Turkey, there are true whites and true blacks. This contrast makes the clouds and the trees pop from the background, ultimately creating more depth to the photo.

The easiest way to tell if an image is flat (versus having true whites & true blacks that provide contrast) is by looking at the histogram on your camera or in lightroom. 

When there is a high contrast photo, and the image would likely look good in black and white, the peak likely will curve somewhere in the center and the edges of the curve will fall close to the left and the right of the histogram. If the photograph needs added contrast, you can drag the edges of the curve in the histogram in Lightroom as far to the right and the left of the histogram as you can go without “clipping” or going past the right and left perimeter of the histogram.  In lightroom, you can tell whether you have clipping (which means that you’ve lost detail because the colors have become solid white or solid black) by clicking on the triangles at the top right and left of the histogram.  Clipped areas that are black will show up in blue, and clipped areas that are too white and blown out will show up in red.

Stay tuned for a post on giving your photos the “aged” treatment in lightroom.