Black and White

Most black and white photography is done with digital cameras, which always shoot in color, or rather take three filtered black and white images: through red, green, and blue filters.

Then the image gets converted into black and white, usually in computer. (I can NOT see any reason to set your camera to shoot black and white — you can always "black-and-white-ify" later, but you can never bring back the lost color.)

There are so many DIFFERENT ways to convert color images to black and white that it is mind-boggling. Even Photoshop alone gives you about 10 ways. Here are some examples of different BW aspects of a color image.

Bottom Line: There are different ways to convert an image to black and white and the results can be very different.
BW filter one
original
BW filter two
lab
zero saturation
red channel
green channel
blue channel
BW filter one
original
BW filter two
lab
zero saturation
red channel
green channel
blue channel
BW filter one
original
BW filter two
lab
zero saturation
red channel
green channel
blue channel
Left
Right

This was done using a Photoshop tool made just to turn color into BW. You can see the adjustments I made:

The original image, for comparison.

 

Another conversion using a Photoshop tool made just to turn color into BW. You can see the adjustments I made:

This is the black and white channel I got after converting the image to LAB space, with a bit of contrast added.

This is what you get if you just turn down the color saturation to zero — often considered the worst way to convert to BW because you can't control which channel contributes to the final product.

Just the red channel.

Just the green channel — if you have to pick one channel for the BW version this is usually the one, since most digital cameras gather twice as much green data as blue or red.

Just the blue channel.

This was done using a Photoshop tool made just to turn color into BW. You can see the adjustments I made:

The original image, for comparison.

 

Another conversion using a Photoshop tool made just to turn color into BW. You can see the adjustments I made:

This is the black and white channel I got after converting the image to LAB space, with a bit of contrast added.

This is what you get if you just turn down the color saturation to zero — often considered the worst way to convert to BW because you can't control which channel contributes to the final product.

Just the red channel.

Just the green channel — if you have to pick one channel for the BW version this is usually the one, since most digital cameras gather twice as much green data as blue or red.

Just the blue channel.