HDR in B&W/ Monochromes

About This Group

HDR is about light; it’s not about color. If you consider yourself a colorist, then you do tend to gravitate to light with color. After all, that is the world in which we live. Monet, the Impressionist painter, whose tonemapped landscapes shocked the establishment, said, “Shadows are not black. No shadow is black.” For most ambient daylight situations, this is absolutely true. We can indeed have some dark shadows, but these are often at night, indoors, or with man-made lighting situations.

B&W photography and HDR photography are thought to be worlds apart.It is curious to me that B&W photographers are often the first to criticize HDR as being “unrealistic”. If I were to retort that the world is indeed NOT black and grey and white, so their photography is intrinsically unrealistic, this is often met with scoffs because it is already a respected niche. However, once we get past all these ridiculous pedantic arguments , we can start to discuss how light works. For artistic reasons, many B&W photographers can crank up the shadows and lights to make hard edges, wonderful shapes, and enshroud the photo with mystery. After all, that emo kid in the corner with the stupid hat looks so much more emo when the hard shadow falls across his pierced nose. Wonderful! Okay, so that form of B&W photography is alive and well, and it will always be an option for people who want to play around within well-established genres.

So, what’s going on with an HDR B&W anyway? Good question! Let me see if I can explain it. I will assume that your eye can indeed see more light levels than your camera can capture. Like Ron Burgandy said, “It’s science!” The goal is to get all the light levels your human eye can see into the final image.
We are all familiar with “compositing” photos, in which we might take the blown-out area of one photo and replace it with the perfectly exposed area of another photo. This was a painstaking process before photoshop, but it’s still no cake-walk in there either. I wanted to say this because HDR is not this simplistic compositing in which you can take big “chunks” of a photo and replace them with other perfectly exposed chunks from other photos.

The HDR process will take those multiple exposures and mix them all together on the pixel-by-pixel level. It would be the same as a human doing back-breaking compositing by looking at each individual pixel and choosing which of the three images the final one should come from. Crazy! We can let the software, do the same thing that the human brain does when interpreting light levels.
I prefer to use the software to make a color version and then convert to B&W later in Photoshop. Then, you can mess with the greens and blues and all those crazy things you know you like to play with. You’ll see wonderful little light details and textures that maybe you have been missing for years.

I invite you to try this and compare it to a “regular” B&W photo. You can also make HDRs from a single RAW file, so perhaps you have some old ones sitting around. Try it with a handful of images and then look at them side by side. Maybe you will find something unexpected!

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