How to properly convert your photos into black and white fine art

Photo editing is an art, and that is also what distinguishes a photographer from an artist. Portraiture goes far beyond this, you not only need to know your art, but you also have to have great personal skills to be able to connect with your model. Light and body language are two key composite elements of a great portrait, the rest in up photo editing skills. Having said that, color photo editing and black and white conversion have lots in common. In order to create an amazing black and white photo, you need to create a really good color version of it beforehand, so then you can work with tones by changing color values on top of contrast brightness and other settings. If the colors are all over the place, so will be the 256 tones of black and white photo. Final touches applied to black and white portrait will also be different than those in a color version.  If you look at those two portrait photos below, you ll notice an opposite vignette effect applied to them. Whilst da dark vignette works great in the color version, by adding drama and contrast, it would look claustrophobic in a black and white version.

model: Stanislava

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