![]() The blurry, grainy view from Niépce's villa window is hard to see in the Web site's gallery, but the ghostly image still made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a French gentleman of means, created the image in the spring of 1826. While researching this piece, I stumbled across the Web site of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, which houses in its collection the first photograph ever taken. ![]() ![]() Maybe it's the writer's frustration of trying to paint images with words, or the photographer's struggle to capture an entire story in a single moment the two mediums seem to complement each other, telling richer stories together than either one can on its own. I'll admit to being in the former category whenever I can take out my DSLR and snap a few photos as part of an assignment, I'm a happy, happy writer. There's a saying that posits all writers really just want to be photographers, while all photographers want to pen bestselling novels. How to Create Black-and-White Photographs with Color Accents: Author's note Your final product will be a mostly black-and-white image with a few key objects painted in bold colors. You can play with the saturation levels of each color group to create the amount of grayscale - and the specific hues - you're interested in. Whatever colors are left will be striking. So what does this do to the photo? By pulling a particular color's saturation down to 0, you're omitting it from the image and creating grayscale. As always, make sure you save your edited image under a different name (using Save As) so that you'll still have the original color photo.Repeat this for all but one of the color groups.Select a color you don't want to highlight and drop its saturation to 0.Saturation is the variable we're interested in here. (In Photoshop, this is called Adjust Hue/Saturation.) This will allow you to select specific color ranges, such as blues, greens, yellows or reds, and then adjust their temperature, brightness and saturation. First, open the color adjustment window in your editor.Just don't convert the image to black and white - that will prompt the software to ditch the color data entirely. The black-and-white reduction you see would vanish if you undid the filter. (You may find this option in the Filter, Enhance, or Adjustment menu - in Adobe Photoshop, go to Image > Adjustments > Desaturate.) The on-screen image will change to black-and-white, but the software will retain the color data. After opening a color photo in your editor, apply a black-and-white filter to it. Sometimes, after all, the fun is in making your audience think and keeping them guessing.ĭigital editing tools allow you to apply various filters and effects over your original image. On the other hand, you might want to colorize a small background detail, pulling the viewer away from the subject and adding mystery - the viewer will wonder what's so important about the seemingly tiny detail. Study the color photo: Where do you want to direct the viewer's attention? Maybe the main subject has a colorful feature, such as a bright red bow in a model's hair. The specific process for the program you use may vary slightly, but the instructions on the next two pages will give you a big head start toward learning to add color accents to black-and-white photos.Īdding color accents to your black-and-white photos isn't hard to do, but, like any artistic technique, it's most effective when used judiciously. įor such a complex effect, it's an easy one to achieve with modern editing software. You instinctively scan the rest of the picture and pick up on the emphasized pattern and texture play against the color contrast, causing a truly enhanced viewing experience. The color provides striking contrast that immediately draws your eye to the colorized subject - most often the main focal point of the photo. These attributes would still be there in a color photo, but they take front-and-center in black-and-white.Īdding a selective splash of color to a black-and-white image leverages the most powerful features of both black-and-white and color photography. We may impose remembered hues on an object seen in black-and-white, but we're also likely to become much more aware of the texture, patterns and shading in the image. Take away the color from even a familiar image, however, and our minds are thrown for a perceptual loop. Color is a powerful force for driving our focus - the hunter-gatherer instincts that helped us spot animals hiding in the bush now draw us to pick out the color that doesn't seem to belong in a scene. But in an era when color photography can capture the most subtle shades nature throws at us, why does black-and-white photography still hold such sway? Part of the answer has to do with how we're wired to process visual information.
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