The earliest snapshots were all black and white. Nowadays we mainly shoot in color, but it is still a cool idea to experiment with black and white photos on your smartphone every now and then. There are many ways to do this. We show you which ones!
Taking Black and White Photos with Your Smartphone
You may find black and white photos old-fashioned and dusty. However, you can give your snapshots a cool character by not shooting in color. Especially on cloudy days, when the light is not so beautiful, they still get something dramatic and sometimes even something artistic.
Most smartphones offer a number of filters in the photo app, including two or three options for black and white. Of these, there is usually only one that you really want to use. That is the simple version that simply converts the colors to gray tones in a neutral way. The other options often add a lot of contrast or make them very soft. That can be nice in exceptional cases, but usually produces photos that look artificial.
The photos below were taken with the OnePlus 12, which offers three black and white filters in the photos app. These let you easily convert your photos to monochrome.
As you can see, ‘Gray’ does not remove the colors completely, but they are largely suppressed. Furthermore, the contrast has been reduced considerably. With ‘Contrast’, as the name suggests, the contrast is absurdly high. We do not find it very attractive in any case. The normal black and white version does look fine.
More and more smartphones allow you to apply a filter while taking a photo. This way, you can check how your picture will look before you print. This is useful, because then you can immediately see whether the photo you want to take is cooler in color or in black and white. The OnePlus 12 offers two options here: mono and black and white.
This time the differences are a lot more subtle. Mono looks the most neutral, while Black & White adds extra contrast. It is not nearly as extreme as the filter we saw above, though. Both options are perfectly usable.
Doing it yourself is always more fun
As the various filters have already shown, black and white is not a matter of removing colours and that’s it. Even if you photograph in mono, there are many ways to give your photos their own character. For this, it is best to photograph in RAW format, because then most details are retained. If you have Lightroom Mobile, you can play around with different settings to your heart’s content. However, you can also get a long way with the built-in app on your smartphone.
Contrast is even more important in black and white photos than in color photos. It largely determines the look of your photo. In the second photo below, we have therefore increased it considerably (but not excessively), which gives it a dramatic character. We have also added vignette ring. This makes the corners slightly darker, so that the viewer’s attention is drawn to the center. You can do all this with the editing options on your phone.
Do you really want to give your photo an old look? Then you can choose sepia. This will make your photo look like it was taken in the 19th century. Some smartphones offer a ready-made filter for this, but in Lightroom you create this look simply yourself.
The last photo above is not completely black and white, but still has a little bit of color. That also creates a completely different atmosphere. You can play with that by choosing ‘saturation’ in the photo app on your smartphone and dragging this slider three-quarters to the left, for example. Then the colors disappear into the background, but they do not disappear completely. The possibilities are endless.
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Source: www.androidplanet.nl
