The 365 Project: Week 25

Water droplets on a leaf

For this week on Picaboo, the theme was converting your photos into black and white.  The photo above made into their weekly blog post of the best of the week!

Kaylie playing in the driveway

Sailboat on the bay

Black and white photos are one of my favorite.  They add a sense of drama with the stark contrast and added details.  Not that there's anything wrong with color, it's just more interesting without sometimes!

Trail to the beach

Not everything looks better in black and white though.  I find the best subjects for black and white are people, pets/animals, and dramatic landscapes (you know, like those awesome black and white mountain scenes), and urban landscapes (brick looks freaking awesome in black and white).

Fresh picked blueberries from my garden

Now I know you can probably take photos already in black and white with most digital cameras and I use the feature too but they tend to turn out more of a muddy grey and need more post processing.  If you are more comfortable with using this then go ahead.  I prefer to take photos in color and then change them to black and white.  This allows me to keep ones in color that I don't particularly like in black in white and also like I mentioned, it saves on some post processing if I do convert them.  For this week's photos I converted some of them using Picmonkey, a free online photo editing site, and some using Windows Live Photo Gallery, about the most basic yet very helpful photo editing tool for us not-so-Photoshop-savvy people.

Lavender in bloom

A vine in my planter called Silver Falls

Once you've uploaded your photos and converted to black and white, you're going to need to do some tweaking.  If you don't then you are really amazing!  All you need to do is play with the basic photo tools: highlight, shadows and most importantly, contrast.  Just play with it till the details begin to really pop!