Since the exploration of photography as an avid art form, Black and White photos have been the number 1 poison of most photographers. Some say any photo looks good in black and white, and that it’s for amateurs. Let this tutorial speak for its self and prove them wrong! A Good looking photo is a good looking photo, simple as that.

The photo I’m using is of a comedian friend of mine, Jenna, who asked me to take some promotional photos for her. When you take your photo take it in the highest quality, preferably camera RAW and always take it in color, as in camera filters lose visual detail data.

The beginning photo has a lot to be desired, with a highlighted area around her right temple and a overall yellow hue to the whole picture. Since I knew this series was going to be in black and white, I wasn’t as worried about the color temperature, but more about the contrast between the left and right side of her face.

First thing to do is desaturate the image, which brings all the color out. Use your slider and bring the saturation down to 0.

Now a lot of people would stop here. And why not? It’s not too bad… But we can do better. In Photography it’s the little details that separate a good shot from a memorable shot.

Almost all photo editing software has a Histogram and sliders. The Black and White Levels Slider effectively scrunch the output of black and white levels. We want to go for a more contrasty look here, so I’m bringing the black levels up to around 25%. The goal is to find a great medium where can still distinguish the dark areas from the lighter areas, without a noticeable loss of detail. If you push the black levels too far you get distortion, pixelation and loss of detail in the shadows.

Now we can play with the other end of the slider, our white levels. As with the black levels, this side of the slider can bring up your white levels to balance against your darker areas of the image. I felt like this particular image was fairly well balanced and only brought the white levels down to 94%.

Be careful of highlights and overexposed areas, the same way you lose detail by pushing the black levels too far, you can overexpose parts of the image by pushing the White Levels too far.

If you notice in this picture that the right side of Jenna’s face, above her cheek, is partly overexposed. This will soon be remedied!

Now I’ve brought down the actual exposure of the image which is the digital version of a cameras iris. This theoretically lets in less light, giving us a darker image, but maintaining our nice contrast versus just brightening or darkening the whole image.

Notice that highlight on her cheek diminish? Your image will obviously vary based on content and lighting, but again make sure to not overexpose or underexpose the image too much, or you’ll get a grainy picture or loose all your images detail!

One final tweak to the overall contrast of the image by bringing it up about 20-25%. This was a miniscule detail, because we already built our nice contrasty looking image the correct way. This may or may not be a step for you, but if it is it shouldn’t be a jump over 20-25%, because yet again, you fear the overexposure of highlights, and loss of detail in the shadows you worked so hard to get!

Heres our final Image with the adjustment in contrast.

This is the Image if we had taken a shortcut and just desaturated it and pumped up the contrast. See the difference?

And for comparison here was our original image again.

Here is a look at the final chart and a quick reference guide.

• Desaturate 100%
• Adjust black levels 20-25%
• Adjust white levels accordingly
• Bring down exposure to ensure a contrasty boost of our adjusted levels
• Adjust contrast slightly if necessary

Remember Brightness is only the overall bright/dark look of the photo. Contrast deals with the relationship between Darks and Lights within the photo. By spending the extra few minutes you can have Black and White photography that is much improved over just converting your images to Black And White using presets.