While all but a select few photographers take their photographs in color, black & white photography is as popular as ever. Today’s “Photoshop Monday” Video Corner walks us through 4 different tools to create black & white photographs from color photos: grey scale, desaturation, the channel mixer and the black and white conversion tool. While this tutorial is done in Adobe Photoshop CS3, only the black and white conversion tool is unavailable in earlier versions - in fact, grey scale, desaturation and the channel mixer are probably black and white converstion methods that can be used in almost any post processing program (like Paint Shop Pro or Gimp).

This 17-minute video on black and white photography discusses everything from “why black and white?” to numerous tips and tricks to improving your black and white photography. This is also the last article/video in our Articles By Amy Month series. Make sure to check out the links to Amy’s ebooks and her new magazine below.

Does anyone shoot black and white pictures anymore? Of course! It is still one of the first methods taught to photography students and it will always be a remarkable method of employing “chiaroscuro”, or the effects of light and shadow upon a scene.

While modern digital cameras are loaded with an incredible array of settings, all meant to capture images at their best – meaning colors at their brightest and most realistic – there is still a great deal to be said for black and white photography. It is a great venue for artistic exploration, and digital black and white images are as crisp and sharp, and high quality, as their color counterparts.