Why Black and White Photo Strips Look So Good

Take any photo strip you are unsure about and convert it to black and white. Surprisingly often, it gets better. Not slightly better, but enough that you keep a strip you meant to delete.

This is not nostalgia and it is not a trick. There are four mechanical reasons monochrome flatters amateur photos. Knowing them tells you when to use it and when it won't help.

This is a case for black and white photo strips. It's also a guide to making them well, instead of desaturating and hoping.

Reason one, it removes the hardest problem in amateur photography

The single most common technical flaw in home photographs is inconsistent colour temperature. Household bulbs are warm at around 2700K. Daylight is neutral at 5500K. Screens are cool. Most rooms contain at least two of these at once.

A camera can only correct for one. Whatever it picks is wrong for the others. One side of a face turns orange, the other faintly blue, and skin looks slightly unwell. It's very hard to fix afterwards. The two casts need opposite corrections in different parts of the same frame.

Monochrome deletes the problem. There is no colour to be wrong. Most rooms in the evening mix a lamp, a window and a TV. Remove colour, and that room becomes easy to shoot in.

Reason two, it flatters skin

Skin is not a single colour. It holds redness, shadows under the eyes and blotches from the cold. Your eye ignores them in person, but a camera records them all.

A camera isn't being unkind. It's being accurate, and that accuracy is the problem. In person you see a face in motion, in context, with your attention on the eyes. In a photo you see a still rectangle. Your eye goes to the highest contrast, often a patch of redness on a cheek.

Converting to monochrome collapses all of that variation into a single tonal value. Redness becomes a slightly darker grey, usually so slight that it disappears. That's why black and white has been the default for formal portraits for a century. It works just as well on a laptop strip.

Reason three, it makes noise look like grain

Every digital camera produces noise in low light, and small sensors produce a great deal of it. In colour, this appears as blotchy patches of red, green and blue in the shadows. It looks like a defect because it is one, and there is no visual tradition in which it is desirable.

In monochrome, the same noise looks like film grain. And film grain carries a hundred years of serious photography with it. The identical data reads as a fault in one rendering and as texture in the other.

For anyone shooting on a laptop webcam this is a significant practical advantage. The camera's main weakness becomes a stylistic feature rather than something to apologise for. More on working within those limits in how to make your webcam photos look better.

Reason four, it unifies four frames into one object

A photo strip is four photographs that need to read as a single thing. Inconsistent frames usually break that. The light shifts, someone moves into a new colour cast, or the camera changes its white balance.

In colour those inconsistencies are obvious. Frame two is warmer than frame one, and the strip starts to look like a collage.

Monochrome collapses the differences. Four frames with slightly different colour casts become four frames with almost identical tonality. That's why black and white strips so reliably look considered. It's a big part of what people mean when they call a strip "aesthetic", as covered in aesthetic photo strip ideas.

How to shoot for black and white

Deciding on monochrome before you shoot rather than afterwards changes what you should do, because the rules are different.

• Think in tone, not colour. A red jumper against a green wall is high contrast in colour and near-identical grey in monochrome. Check that your subject and background differ in brightness, not just in hue.
• Use harder, more directional light. Soft frontal light that flatters a colour portrait can look flat in monochrome, which relies on shadow for structure. A light at 45° or even 90° works far better.
• Let the shadows go dark. Weak, grey black and white looks like a mistake. Committed black and white has genuine blacks in it.
• Keep the background darker than the face. Without colour to separate subject from background, brightness difference is doing all of the work.
• Bigger expressions. Colour carries a lot of the emotional signal in a photograph. Remove it and subtle expressions read as blank.

The lighting side of this is covered fully in the photo booth lighting guide.

Converting well, rather than just desaturating

Sliding saturation to zero is the worst way to make a black and white image. It maps every colour to its brightness with no adjustment. The result is usually flat grey, with sky and skin the same tone.

A better conversion does three things:

• Weights the channels. Good monochrome conversion lets you decide how bright each original colour becomes. Darkening reds and lifting yellows is a standard portrait recipe. It's roughly what an orange filter did on old black and white film.
• Adds contrast. Almost every straight conversion needs more contrast than the colour original. This is where flat conversions come from.
• Sets a true black point. If the darkest part of the image is grey, the whole thing looks washed. There should be something genuinely black in the frame.

A dedicated black and white filter in a photo booth will generally do all three. A saturation slider does none of them, which is why the results differ so much.

When not to use it

Black and white is not always the right answer, and there are cases where it actively loses.

• When colour is the subject. A carefully assembled outfit, a Halloween costume, a coloured backdrop, anything at a colourful event. Removing colour removes the point.
• When the tones are too similar. Mid-brown hair against a mid-brown wall separates fine in colour and merges into a single mass in monochrome.
• When the light is genuinely beautiful. Golden hour, warm lamplight, a sunset through a window. Colour is doing the work; keep it.
• Every single time. A collection where everything is monochrome loses the contrast that makes any individual one striking. Use it when it helps, not as a rule.

Why it ages better

There is a final reason worth mentioning, which is less technical and more about time.

Colour photographs date. Clothing fashions date them, and so do fashions in colour grading. Think of the saturated mid-2000s, the teal-and-orange 2010s and the muted film look of the 2020s. Each was everywhere, and each now dates a photo.

Black and white has no equivalent. A well-made monochrome portrait from 1955 and one from last week are difficult to separate on rendering alone. There is no era-specific grade because there is nothing to grade.

A photo strip is meant to be looked at in fifteen years, so this is a real advantage. It's also part of why photo strips feel timeless, as explained in the comeback of photo strips.

Try it on the next strip you take. The free online photo booth has a monochrome filter, and one hard light from the side is the only setup required. Want a friend in the frame too? Our online photobooth for long-distance friends runs the same filter on a shared strip. Every download is 600 × 1800 pixels, ready to print.

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