Black and White or Color?

One of my favorite things to do after I’ve cropped and centered all of my digital images is to play with the colors. Sometimes I’ll highlight blues or maybe the reds, but most of the time I like to turn them into black and white images. Of course my photo editing software has about seven different versions of black and white, and darn if I don’t like them all. What does this mean? It means that I’ll end up with half a dozen versions of the same image.

Yikes! You wouldn’t believe how much space this can take up. It’s ridiculous, but I have to make all of the versions then line them up side by side to decide which one(s) I like the most. Then I delete the losers. Yeah, I’m OCD like that. All of this saving and editing eats up disk space in my computer and causes the hard drive to look like a fragmentation party. In a bad way. Because I do this with pretty much any portrait shots, nature shots, animal shots, still life shots (what can I say I love black and white images) I’ve found I need to defrag my computer pretty much all the time when I’m in editing mode. Luckily for me, this keeps everything running smoothly so I don’t have to choose between black and white or color — I can have both!

Photo Credit Brian Schulman

June 17th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Digital Manipulation | (0)