There are different points of view regarding black and white photography. Some believe that this was a technical limitation of the past that needs to be overcome and moved on. While others see it as a creative choice that needs to be explored in greater depth.
Camera design technologies are improving with a greater emphasis on improving color ranges, so why do you decide to shoot or process your images in black and white? In this article, we'll look at five reasons why you might want to shoot or convert your images to black and white.
1. Black and white photographs help you see differently
The old “masters” of photography initially shot in black and white because they had no choice. Even with the advent of Kodachrome, which introduced color photography to the world, black and white still existed. This is because black and white photography was (and for some still is) photography in its purest form.
When you remove color, the focus shifts to other compositional elements in the image. This includes lines, shape and texture, contrasts and tones.
With this in mind, it is obvious that not all images convert well to black and white. So look at all the elements and highlight what else you have to work with besides color.
Often black and white helps develop a different perspective of what we are used to seeing and what our photographic eye brings up.
2. Black and white eliminates distractions
You are used to seeing the world in color, and there is nothing wrong with that. Sometimes this contributes to other elements and details being lost or taken for granted. Some elements (highlighted earlier) needed for great photography include contrast, texture, lighting, and shape.
When you shoot black and white photos, you challenge yourself to remove the distraction of color. These include color casts and differences in color temperature (ambient light sources), as well as specific bright elements that may be in the background or distract from your story.
Monochrome photographs force you to focus on shape and texture when composing your composition. If the emphasis is on using colors together, these elements are sometimes overlooked. In black and white photography, distracting colors are reduced to shades of gray.
3. Black and white photography offers creative options.
Since your world is in color, it is safe to say that color photography depicts reality and is more realistic. Thus, black and white photography is seen as an interpretation of reality, or how you interpret what you see.
When you remove color, you not only isolate different elements, but you are also forced to look at how they relate to each other. This will help you explore and create different ways to tell your story.
When you remove color, you remove what your viewer is used to seeing. Now you need to find the stronger elements of the scene and figure out how to use them to convey what you want to portray.
4. Adds emotion or mood
Something about the variation in tonal ranges, rich blacks and deep contrasts appeals to us psychologically. This creates a connection that makes you stop and take notice of what is being depicted.
Many photographers use black and white images to document their travels and in street photography, as well as when depicting religious or cultural events. Monochrome in some genres connects and enhances emotions and mood.
5. Black and white photography is timeless
Even though this is the last item on the list, it is still one of the most common reasons why some photographers shoot in black and white. Monochrome photography is perceived all the time.
Black and white photographs seem to transcend reality and take you back in time. Historical color schemes associated with certain types of film or trends in digital photography may indicate the date your images were created. Removing color makes it impossible to find out when the image was taken.
Bonus
You no longer need to imagine what your scene will look like in black and white, as modern camera technology allows you to try it out on location and see if it works. While some photographers prefer to shoot in black and white straight away, others prefer to shoot in color and then process or convert their images to black and white to achieve a different or better tonal range.
Note. If you shoot in RAW format and set the settings to monochrome, you will see the image in black and white when previewed on the LCD. But all colors will be saved in the file data and will be available during post-processing. This gives you the best of both worlds - a quick preview in black and white and the ability to convert later.
This image was shot in black and white using the camera's monochrome settings.
This image was shot in color and then converted to black and white.
Conclusion
While black and white photography still plays an important role in photography, please note that not all subjects translate well to this mode. While a strong composition doesn't depend on color, sometimes the strength of a photo is its color. That's why it's good to know when to use black and white.
If you're interested in monochrome, look for other compositional elements such as texture, shape, line and contrast. Experiment with shooting and processing black and white images and see what you like best.
Let's figure out what the color we see actually is. Why does grass seem green to us, autumn maple leaves yellow, and strawberries red? This is explained simply. Rays of light hitting the surface of a blade of grass, leaf or berry are partially absorbed by its surface and partially reflected. These reflected rays of a certain wavelength are captured by our eyes, and then the brain “deciphers” the information and gives the answer: what we see is green, or yellow, or red.
The same thing happens with other colors of the solar spectrum (rainbow). But in a rainbow there is neither black, nor gray, nor white. Black color means that all rays were completely absorbed by the surface of the object, white - that they were completely reflected. Such colors are called “achromatic”, that is, devoid of paint. Psychologists attach great importance to them. It is believed that white and black not only influence a person’s mental and physical state, but can also tell a lot of interesting things about him.
Everything every eye owner should know about artists, colorblind people and other bright colors of our lives!
Tata Oleinik
It is no coincidence that humanity received the colors of life: we honestly earned them. Because actually... We're not even sure if we should tell you about this, because it's terrible. Perhaps you would prefer to never know. But the truth is more precious. In general, look:
This world is actually gray!
True, true. There is no blue sky, no red roses, no green grass, no yellow chickens - there are only colorless objects of varying degrees of illumination. Black and white cinema has always shown us the truth.
What we call color is only the ability of our eye to distinguish electromagnetic waves of different lengths (and the perception of this depends on many factors: the degree of illumination of the object, the structure of its surface, the surrounding background, temperature, etc.). Our brains have learned to label these waves, perceiving them differently, while a huge number of other living things get along just fine without color vision (by the end of this article you will know why).
Why are all cats gray at night?
What we call color is just the brain's ability to perceive electromagnetic waves
As well as chairs, people and other trees. Because, as we may remember from biology lessons, rods and cones are responsible for receiving images in our eyes. So, only cones are able to see what we traditionally call color. And their work requires much more lighting than the work of sticks, which are properly prepared to record only the shapes of objects. Therefore, at dusk, the colors fade to disappear completely with the onset of night, even if the sluggish night lights allow us to somehow distinguish houses and cars protruding from the darkness. By the way, too much lighting also prevents us from distinguishing colors, confusing the wavelength measuring device.
Why do I see color if there is none?
Neither physicists nor ophthalmologists will give you a clear answer to this question. Where did our brain even get the idea of color, if, by and large, it does not exist in the universe? So far, there is an opinion that color is an exclusively psychophysiological concept, that it is one of the forms of our sensation of visible radiation. Why this feeling is so powerful and beautiful, we will discuss further.
Is the dress white and gold or blue and black?
The famous dress, the color of which has been debated on the Internet for two years now, was originally blue and black (which is clearly visible in other, not so successful, photographs of this outfit). But in this photo, about 40% of people at first glance identify it as white and gold. This perception depends on one circumstance: if you immediately decided that the dress was taken on a sunny day and lit from the front, it will appear blue to you. If your brain decided that the dress was taken under electric lighting, the source of which is located behind the dress, it will see it as white and gold.
But what’s interesting is that you can explain to your brain that it’s making mistakes. If you meditate with a photo for a long time, squint, move away, move closer, look away and cast it back at the picture, then at one point you will see that the dress has changed color (from white to blue or vice versa). The author of this text, for example, learned to see both color options in a photo at any time without any effort (and seemed to remain sane). This experience is interesting because it convincingly shows how our perception of color often depends not on any realities, but solely on the mood of the cockroaches in our head.
Do animals see color?
Most carnivorous and gregarious mammals do not. They have absolutely no need for it. It makes no difference to the tiger whether the zebra is brown or crimson; It makes no difference to a zebra whether she chews purple or orange grass. By the way, the widespread belief that bulls hate the color red is a myth: back in the early 20th century, numerous tests were done that convincingly indicate that bulls are absolutely colorblind. Just like dogs, cats, bears and, for example, goats.
By the way, an interesting observation was made at the same time: animals with bright variegated colors usually have color vision. If the owner of a skin or coat in its natural form is brown-spotted, yellow-striped, or sandy-discreet, then, most likely, color perception is not the strong point of his species. Subsequently, biochemists confirmed these experiments. It turned out that distinguishing wavelengths requires special proteins produced in various receptors in the retina.
If an animal has only one type of receptor, it will be a so-called achromat, that is, a creature physically unable to distinguish colors. There are dichromat animals that can see only part of the colors that we see, proud trichromats, owners of full triple color vision! Although, to be honest, among insects, birds and fish there are also bastards with five and six receptors, and some types of crayfish have twelve types of receptors, and we cannot even imagine the richness of color that these stupid, useless creatures use. Can you imagine a universe with four times as many colors? So, there it is. But only for crayfish. A disgrace, if you think about it.
Why are there colorblind people?
This is a genetic feature due to which a person is born not a trichromate, but a dichromate, that is, he does not produce one of the three proteins standard for our species. Most often, colorblind people confuse red and green. But these are true, born colorblind people. There are color blindness caused by other reasons, which we will discuss below.
Why does a person need color vision?
With the advent of television and bright books, people began to better recognize different shades of colors.
Then why do birds or bees need it? Animals who chose the difficult fate of gatherers. Unlike a zebra, whose entire reality is an endless but monotonous meal for thousands of kilometers around, or from a tiger, which just needs to smell a large accumulation of meat and follow the trail, the gatherer pulls anything into his mouth. Bees need to cover thousands of flowers per day, preferably without confusing them, for example, with stones; birds - jump through the trees in search of seeds and worms. And a person is forced to wander around the supermarket, looking for pink fruits, yellow juicy lizards, blue crabs and the delicate green of fern sprouts, so different from the not so delicate green of poison ivy sprouts.
At the Leipzig Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, it was estimated that at the dawn of existence, humans regularly consumed up to 1,500 species of plants and up to 1,000 species of animals (insects, birds, fish, etc.). And he needed to be able to distinguish thousands of snacks from others - bitter, burning, poisonous and inedible. Therefore, our omnivorous ancestors gradually abandoned their keen sense of smell and fine hearing, focusing on the patterns of scales, the texture of the peel and the appearance of leaves - modern humans receive up to 90% of information through visual channels. And, of course, gaining the ability to color vision greatly improved his ability to survive.
That is, we see the world the way, for example, bees see it?
Almost certainly not. As we have already written, color is a psychophysical concept, and, most likely, insects perceive color completely differently. They can, for example, detect differences in wavelength as flickering, or closer to how we perceive sound signals (some researchers have suggested that flowers “sing” to insects).
But do people even see colors the same?
There is an even more interesting circumstance: a person’s idea of colors and shades is formed in infancy under the influence of others. If a child from childhood is not accustomed to a special variety of colors and his parents do not teach him to distinguish colors, then his world will be much less colorful than that of children raised among bright toys and things.
Literary scholars have long been concerned that we often encounter strange descriptions of flowers in ancient texts. Israeli linguist Guy Deutscher, in his book “Through the Mirror of Language,” examined these oddities using the texts of Homer. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey make few references to color, compared with later texts such as those from the Renaissance. There are no blue skies, no green fields, no golden braids of Helen. And those mentions of color, which occur occasionally, drive one into confusion. The sheep there are the color of violet. Purple iron. The sea is called “wine red” several times. The faces of cowardly soldiers are green. Homer's honey is green. Hector has blue hair and Zeus has blue eyebrows. And Odysseus has hair the color of hyacinth, that is, intense blue. The only shade that always has its place is red. Red blood, copper, wine.
Of course, according to legend, Homer was blind, but all other descriptions of him are so accurate and detailed that this color blindness is difficult to explain by the mythical blindness of the poet. Moreover, we see similar absurdities in other ancient texts. In the same Old Testament, in the Indian epic, in the Chinese chronicles, for example, we will not find even a hint of the blue color of the sky. It can be red, white and black, blazing with fire, filled with copper, but it is never blue or cyan. At the same time, the blue color itself was familiar to people: in Egyptian frescoes, blue is one of the most popular. But the Egyptians never saw a sign of him either in the sea waters or in the sky above their heads.
According to a number of scientists, for example Gladstone and Geiger, the Egyptians, Greeks, and Chinese, even three thousand years ago, were not very able to distinguish bright blue from black, and pale blue from gray (thus, Zeus’s blue eyebrows and curls Odyssey become more understandable). The same feature is found among many representatives of semi-wild tribes today.
Scientist Daniel Everett, who studied the life of the Pirahã Indians, accurately established that they did not know the idea of color at all: the Pirahã determined colors solely by lightness or darkness. Red, apparently, is more noticeable to them than others, but, for example, they can no longer distinguish blue, brown and green basins of the same color saturation.
Of course, with the advent of a huge number of artificial dyes, television, bright books and everything else, people have become much more aware of the different shades of colors, because from birth they began to be surrounded by very variable color combinations. But there are still “color-blind people by education” who confuse green with blue or beige with yellow simply because in childhood, for some reason (for example, parental neglect), their idea of these colors was not consolidated. By the way, theoretically, this omission can be made up for in adulthood by diligently and regularly looking at bright pictures and teaching yourself to distinguish ultramarine from turquoise with the help of a reliable adviser sitting next to you.
That is, no matter how base it may sound, while admiring the autumn sunset, we experience approximately the same sensations as some little fish sniffing a well-described lamppost: we receive a stream of important information, undergoing lightning-fast and large-scale automatic processing.
And, by the way, now our ability to distinguish a ripe banana from an unripe one from a great distance, by reading the length of the electromagnetic waves emanating from it, can also be considered an important factor for survival. At least at home no one will throw unripe bananas at you, asking why she spent the best years of her life on someone like you.
If your screen suddenly turns black and white in Windows 10, there are not many reasons for this error; it is mainly related to the operation of the system’s special features, namely the Color Filter. This article will describe the fastest and most convenient options for fixing this error.
Black and white screen Windows 10
The main reasons for the black and white screen in Windows 10:
- Color filter
- Video card driver settings
- Third party software
- Monitor Screen Settings
The most common cause of the error is the Accessibility settings - Color filter. To turn it off, go to Settings – Accessibility – Color and High Contrast and disable the item Apply color filter.
In more recent insider builds (for example, 17083), the accessibility menu has changed and this item has moved to a separate Color filters tab with function settings.
The Windows key combination + CTRL + C also allows you to enable/disable this function, but in the latest builds you can control the launch of the Color Filter using a key combination; how to do this using the Registry Editor will be described below.
How to turn off the black and white screen in Windows 10 through the registry
Open the registry editor (Win+R - regedit) and go to the branch - HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\ColorFiltering
The following values will determine the functionality of the color filter:
- Active – determines whether the filter is enabled or disabled
1 = Enabled
0 = Off - FilterType – defines the filter type
0 = Grayscale
1 = Inverted colors
2 = Inverted grayscale
3 = Red-green (impaired perception of green, Deuteranopia)
4 = Red-green (impaired red perception, Protanopia)
5 = Blue-yellow (Tritanopia) - HotkeyEnabled – allow the use of the keyboard shortcut +CTRL + C to enable or disable the filter
1 = Allowed
0 = Disabled
Video card settings
If, after completing the steps in Windows 10, the screen for some reason remains black and white, then the reason may be the settings of your video card.
For Nvidia devices: go to the desktop, right-click on the free space and select Nvidia Control Panel.
In the Display tab, open Adjust desktop color settings. We will need the Digital Intensity extension; in the case of black and white, it can be set to 0%.
For AMD\ATI Radeon devices Several programs have been created to control video card parameters.
For “old” devices – Catalyst Control Center. Resetting color parameters is done using the Defaults button in the Display Color tab.
For “new” devices – AMD Radeon Settings. Open Display settings and perform a Reset.
As a last resort, you can update the video adapter driver. Open Device Manager - Video adapters, then right-click on your video card and select Update driver.
In the first case, try Automatically searching for updates. If an updated driver is found and installed, the problem may be resolved.
Secondly, try selecting a previously installed driver. Select Search this computer for drivers - Driver from the list of available drivers on this PC and install the previously installed driver.
As an alternative, you can remove the device with driver programs and reinstall them after restarting the computer. You can also use the video card driver installer and run a Clean Install, in which case both the driver and the video card software will be reinstalled.
Impact of third party software
If suddenly the computer screen turns black and white in Windows 10 after installing or updating any applications and programs, then there is a high probability that they are the ones affecting the operation of the system in such an unpleasant way.
To determine the cause, we will use a "clean boot":
- Open the Task Manager window (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) and open the Startup tab
- Disable All Entries - this will prevent applications from automatically loading when the system is turned on.
- Then open the System Configuration window (Win+R - msconfig)
- Open the Services tab, check the Hide Microsoft services checkbox and select Disable all
Antivirus services will not be disabled, as they are protected by the self-defense module.
If the problem does not appear after a reboot, you can figure out what application caused the error using a brute force method - gradually turning on applications and services until the erroneous one is identified.
Monitor Screen Settings
The last option to resolve the issue when the screen becomes black and white in Windows 10 is to reset the screen or monitor settings. This option is not suitable for laptops and monoblocks, because the monitor settings are responsible for the screen settings.
If you are using a monitor, try resetting the settings to factory settings.
Additionally
If the suggested options do not help, try the following:
- If the error is software related, run or reinstall Windows 10
- If the error is hardware, to determine the faulty device, check the error when connecting to another PC connector or to another display.
Have a great day!
