Bw or color or……..

Color evokes emotion and emotion helps to tell your story. This is also why when you watch a movie you will notice that every scene is carefully tinted and even the music is painstakingly chosen to enhance the mood or tell the story.

So how do you do this with photography?

Let’s start with the basics.

Color is nice
Bw is cool
But don’t forget there are so many options for tinting an image and enhancing that mood. We might not have music but we do have a whole arsenal of tools in our raw convertor or editing suite.

And it can even be done quite easily in Lightroom or any other raw convertor. You can manipulate the color image but also after you made it BW you can still add coloring. Even when you use a color preset on a BW image.

And with the new colorgrading tools in Lightroom you can literally have a fun filled day experimenting 😉

So although the photo might look perfect out of the camera (which of course is our goal) I think it’s incredibly important to not forget that final step … Tinting.

I do this with almost every image you see. I do always start from the same base (light meter and color checker) to make sure every single shot gives the same result when I use a preset or filter (can’t stress enough how important that step is)

Exceptions are ofcourse images where the original color is vital. Or think about images for news outlets. But even than I think it really depends on the images. I don’t want to break open a can of worms. But I’m against Photoshopping a news image. However, if by just changing the color of contrast you get the message over more clearly……. Why not.

So keep experimenting and don’t be afraid.

For my presets visit frankdoorhof.com/presets they can be the starting point for your unique looks.