Black and White Without the Nostalgia

I shoot black and white because color lies. Not always, but often enough that stripping it away reveals what the photo was actually about. Shadows, geometry, texture ( the things that make an image hit hard ) — they get buried under a warm sunset or a green field. Black and white forces you to deal with structure.

I've been shooting B&W for over a decade. Started on film, moved to digital, went back to film for a bit, then settled on digital with a film-minded workflow. Here is what actually matters.

Shoot in Color, Convert Later

This is the one thing everyone gets wrong about digital B&W. Setting your camera to monochrome JPEG mode means you're throwing away data. Shoot RAW in color. Always. You can convert in Lightroom, darktable, whatever. The point is you keep the color channels so you can manipulate them during conversion.

A red filter effect ( darkening skies ) is just pulling down the red channel in post. A green filter ( lightening skin ) is boosting the green channel. You can do both on the same image if you shot in color. If you shot in-camera B&W, you picked one and you're stuck.

Contrast Is Not a Slider

People crank the contrast slider and call it done. That's not contrast, that's clipping. Real contrast is about placing tones where you want them, not pushing everything to black and white extremes.

Here is my actual process:

1. Set the black point first ( hold Alt/Option while dragging Blacks in Lightroom )

2. Set the white point the same way

3. Adjust midtones with the Tone Curve, NOT the Contrast slider

4. Use the HSL panel in B&W mode to shift specific color ranges

5. Add local contrast with a clarity brush on the subject, not globally

The Tone Curve is where B&W lives. I use a gentle S-curve almost every time. Lift the shadows slightly ( don't let them go pure black unless you meant to ), drop the highlights a touch. The midtones carry the image.

The HSL Panel Does the Heavy Lifting

This is the part most people skip. When you convert to B&W in Lightroom, the HSL panel becomes a luminance mixer. Each color slider controls how bright that color renders in monochrome. This is where you make skies dark, skin glow, and foliage separate from everything else.

The classic move: pull Blue and Aqua down to darken skies. Push Green and Yellow up to lighten vegetation. Warm skin tones? Push Orange up slightly. Every scene is different but these are the starting points I use 90% of the time.

B&W starting points (Lightroom HSL):
Red:    +5
Orange: +10
Yellow: +15
Green:  +20
Aqua:   -25
Blue:   -30
Purple: -10
Magenta: 0

Tweak from there. Don't just copy these numbers — look at your image. But if you're starting from zero, this beats flat conversion by a mile.

Why I Stopped Using Film Presets

I went through a phase where every B&W image got a Tri-X preset or an Ilford HP5 emulation. Looked fine. All looked the same. The thing about film is that each stock had specific tonal characteristics BECAUSE of the chemistry, not in spite of it. Slapping a preset on a digital file doesn't give you that. It gives you a curve shape that sort of approximates it.

I still like the look of film emulations for specific projects. But for day-to-day work, I build my own curves per image. Takes 30 seconds once you know what you're doing, and the result actually matches what I saw, not what some preset developer thought Tri-X should look like on a sensor it was never designed for.

When Not to Shoot Black and White

When the color IS the point. Sunset at José Ignacio. A mate setup on a green table. The red of a Ferrari in a sea of grey cars. If removing color makes the image weaker, don't remove it. B&W isn't a cheat code for bad photos, it's a choice that works when form and tone matter more than hue.

I see a lot of beginners convert to B&W to save a boring color shot. It doesn't work. A bad photo in color is a bad photo in monochrome, just with less information. The fix is better composition, not desaturation.

My darktable Pipeline

I switched from Lightroom to darktable a while back. The B&W workflow is the same idea but the tools are different. Here is my module stack:

darktable B&W module order:
1. exposure ( set black/white points )
2. color zones ( convert to B&W )
3. tone curve ( S-curve for contrast )
4. color balance ( luminance shifts per channel )
5. local contrast ( clarity on subject )
6. diffuse/sharpen ( subtle sharpening )

The color zones module in darktable does what the HSL panel does in Lightroom. Same concept, different interface. Color balance replaces split toning for adding subtle warm or cool tones to shadows and highlights.

I also use the filmic rgb module instead of the base curve. It handles highlight rolloff better and gives a more natural tonal gradient. Took me a week to learn, been using it for two years now. Worth the learning curve ( pun intended ).

Conclusion

Black and white is a simplification, not a filter. You remove color so the remaining elements have room to breathe. Shoot in color, convert with intention, adjust luminance per channel, and build your own curves. That's it. No presets, no magic, just decisions.

The best B&W images I've taken all have one thing in common: I knew they were black and white before I pressed the shutter. The light told me. Learn to see that.