It just doesn’t go away! Dating from the very earliest days of photography, capturing an image in black and white, call it what you will, for many the monochrome image was and is photography. Many digicams have a B&W mode for original capture and there’s much software offering sophisticated techniques to transform, convert and maximise an original colour image. Author Dillard makes the point that colour images are often described as “lifelike, true and real”, while B&W photography steps around these labels and delivers a representation rather than a mirror. Almost right from the book’s opening chapters there is heavy emphasis on RAW capture and post treatment in Photoshop; I could find no reference in the book to Apple’s Aperture nor Adobe’s Lightroom applications. Dillard comments that most people using Photoshop take the Image> Mode> Greyscale route, allowing the software to create a single grey channel. He adds “That’s great — its’ very easy …” but that path offers no control over colour mapping and any benefits gained from individual hue control.

Black & White Pipeline: Converting Digital Color into Striking Grayscale Images [Book Review]