Digital Focus: Turn Photos Into Black-and-White Art

Add an antique look to photos; learn all about digital camera lens sizes.

Dave Johnson

Feature: Black and White Is Beautiful

In the old days, everything came in just two colors--black and white. In fact, it has been only in the last few decades that the world of photography and entertainment has exploded into near-universal color, with affordable color TVs and ubiquitous color photographs and movies. And while color is nice, there's a certain elegance to black and white that keeps artists coming back to it. Armed with your digital camera, you can make your own black-and-white masterpieces.

Shoot in Color

You may have noticed that your digital camera has a black-and-white setting. That's right: You can take pictures in gray-scale if you want to. Just search your camera's menu system for the B&W option; it's probably in there somewhere (if in doubt, check out the camera's user guide).

I recommend that you avoid the camera's B&W mode, though. Why? Because once a picture is shot in gray-scale, it's black and white forever--there's no way to convert it into a color image. In my early days of experimenting with digital cameras, I took a few pictures in black and white that I later wished were in color. So leave your camera in ordinary color mode. We'll convert it to black and white on the PC.

Converting to Gray-Scale

In my experience, the best candidates for the old black-and-white treatment are portraits, though you might find any number of scenes that look good with their color removed: landscapes, shots of old buildings, antique machinery, and so on.

Once you have a picture that you want to use, load it into an image editor like Paint Shop Pro. The gray-scale conversion is typically a one-step process. In Paint Shop Pro, for instance, just choose Colors, Gray Scale from the menu.

Try Sepia Instead

Black and white is fine, but suppose you want to create an antique effect. If that's the case, a sepia tone might be more appropriate. Sepia is a brownish hue common to old photographs thanks to the color of the dyes used to print them.

You can manufacture your own sepia effect by starting with a color image in Paint Shop Pro. Then choose Colors, Adjust, Hue/Saturation/Lightness from the menu. In the Hue/Saturation/Lightness dialog box, click the Colorize check box and grab the Saturation slider (it's the one on the left). Drag it up and watch the tone of the image change. You should find that a Saturation between 15 and 30 generates a very pleasing effect.

Dirty Up the Image

Now that you have a gray-scale or sepia-colored image, you might want to make it look a bit more antiquated. The trick to doing that is adding some noise--speckles on the image that'll remind viewers of the large grains in old-time film.

Choose Effects, Noise, Add from the menu and set the Noise level to around 30 or 35 percent. Be sure it is set to Uniform, not Random, and click OK. You should immediately see your image fill with speckles. You can stop here, or further enhance the image by running the Posterize filter on it. Posterize reduces the overall lightness levels and can be used to both take the edge off the noise and create a "flatter," more contrasty image that doesn't look quite so modern. To do that, choose Colors, Posterize from the menu and set the levels to a number between 5 and 8 (use your own eyes to fine-tune it). Click OK, and save your completed image.

Dave's Favorites: Find Cool NASA Photos

Ever since childhood, I've been a space fanatic. And while my dream of flying into space has largely passed me by--unless PC World somehow makes me rich and I buy a ride on the space station, that is--I can still look at photos from space.

The good news is that almost all NASA photography is in the public domain. That means you can download pictures of the space shuttle, a planet, or the moon landings, then use them virtually any way you see fit. The problem, more often than not, is finding cool pictures to begin with. It sometimes seems to me like the NASA Web site was designed by a monkey with no sense of direction.

But now I feel like I've found the golden key to the castle. Just visit the JSC Imagery Services Web site to access as many as 250,000 digital images of spacecraft, astronauts, people, and missions. On the site's Search page you can enter terms like "Mars," "Mir and shuttle," or "astronaut and food" to get a long display of image thumbnails. There's even a clever interactive map of the world that you can use to find photographs that astronauts took of the earth. If you're an astronaut-in-waiting, these Web pages deserve a bookmark.

Q&A: Understanding Digital Camera Lens Sizes

I have not bought a digital camera because of the short focal plane that makes my 19mm lens a 28mm lens. To get the same wide angle with a digital camera would require a 10mm lens. I haven't bothered to check what a 300mm lens would be.

--Ernest R. Schlachter, Wichita, Kansas

Thank goodness you're not on Jeopardy, Ernest, because you failed to phrase that in the form of a question. Nonetheless, you make an excellent point: Since the light-gathering CCD in a digital camera is so small, digital camera lenses have relatively more magnifying power than do their 35mm SLR equivalents. That can be a good thing, since it takes a smaller lens to take telephoto images, though you sometimes pay for it at the other end of the zoom range. I've seen some monstrously large add-on wide-angle lenses; it can take a lot of glass to make a reasonable wide-angle image.

If you know the ratio between your camera's built-in zoom and its "35mm equivalent," you can calculate the focal length you need for other kinds of lenses. Consider a camera with a focal range of 7-21mm. If you check the camera's user guide, you may find that the camera has a "35mm equivalent" focal range of 28-84mm. You may want to know what size lens it would take to give you an effective 200mm focal length with this camera. That's easy, since it's a ratio of the actual lens to the 35 equivalent:

7/28 = x/200

or, x = (7*200)/28

Do the math and you find that your camera would need a 50mm lens to magnify images as well as a 200mm lens on a 35mm SLR. Since your camera already zooms out to 21mm, a 2X add-on telephoto lens would be close and a 3X add-on would be more than enough.

Hot Pic of the Week

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $10 and $100.

A gentle reminder, folks: We disqualify some really wonderful pictures every week because the submissions don't follow the rules. Be sure to include everything we ask for in your e-mail message, including a description of your picture and your complete contact information, or your entry is wasted!

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering please read the full description of the contest rules and regs.

This week's Hot Pic: Picture Perfect Run, by Jim Mayo, Waltham, Massachusetts

Jim says: "This is a photo of a drag bike flashing by in front of me at over 100 mph. As you know, it is very hard to capture action photography with a digital camera. With a lot of experimenting and practice I took this action shot by panning with my Olympus 3030. If you look closely, you can see the front wheel is off the ground."

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