# Why does a Black & White photo seem more artsy/professional than a colour one? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [October 19, 2004, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123 "2004-10-19T22:31:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Lobsang](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobsang/32/4067_2.png) [@Lobsang](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobsang)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2004, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/1 "2004-10-19T22:31:33Z")
My first guess is that colour photos are far more common to the 21st century eye, and so the relative rarity of a B&W photo makes it stand out from colour photos. ---
**Author:** ![Padeye](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a9a28c/32.png) [@Padeye](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Padeye)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2004, 10:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/2 "2004-10-19T22:45:40Z")
An IMHO or Cafe question if I ever saw one. That’s for the mods to decide. Probably because we are conditioned to see them that way. B&W photography was long established by the time color became commonplace and for an even longer period color reporoduction was too expensive to print a whole magazine that way. To some extent it may be that B&W film and optical printing gave photographers more control than they had with color. Until the advent of digital it was very difficult to get contrast control that was a simple matter of choosing the correct paper and developing time. Color can sometimes be distracting. Go to a national park and take a color photo of a mountain. “Gee, that’s a nice postcard.” In B&W you might end up with [this.](http://www.coolantarctica.com/Shop/ansel_adams/moon_and_half_dome.htm) ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2004, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/3 "2004-10-19T22:49:22Z")
> [@Lobsang](#): > > My first guess is that colour photos are far more common to the 21st century eye, and so the relative rarity of a B&W photo makes it stand out from colour photos. I would say part of the reason is because they don’t look like reality. In a color photo, you get a fairly decent reproduction of reality. In a black and white photo, you still get reality, but with all the color removed (duh.) By taking away all the color, you’re showing the world in quite a different way. It looks more artsy because we (most of us at least) are not used to seeing the world in black and white and gray. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2004, 11:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/4 "2004-10-19T23:03:55Z")
Without colour, composition, texture, pattern etc become all the more important. I’m not sure if I’d agree that they don’t look like reality; I’ve seen a few really stunning mono photographs where it actually took me a while to notice they weren’t in colour and in my memory, they _are_ in colour. Mono forces the photographer to work harder to make the image speak, rather than relying upon the image to speak for itself (which it will often only do superficially through colour). ---
**Author:** ![Dog80](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/6bbea6/32.png) [@Dog80](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dog80)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2004, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/5 "2004-10-19T23:14:42Z")
Photographers choose B&W film for some practical reasons. Real B&W film (not chromogenic) has two main advantages over color negative film. Much better contrast control and wider tonal range (but not as wide as color reversing films). Also, real B&W prints can last longer. Generally, if there’s too much color information in the picture, it might look better in B&W. But if there’s too little information to begin with, the photo might look like crap. Of course, there are many exceptions to that rule. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2004, 11:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/6 "2004-10-19T23:51:12Z")
I’m not convinced B&W does inherently look more “artistic”. It wasn’t that many years ago that all newspaper pictures were black and white, and they didn’t look any less like newspaper pictures then. Certainly, some black and white pictures look artistic, and some scenes look better in black and white than they would in color, but then, the reverse is true, too. There’s not much you can do with a monochrome sunset or rainbow, for instance. I don’t think one can generalize. ---
**Author:** ![R.P.McMurphy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/7993a0/32.png) [@R.P.McMurphy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/R.P.McMurphy)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2004, 12:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/7 "2004-10-20T00:45:05Z")
Oftentimes, great pictures are not created when photographed, they are created in the darkroom. B&W offers some subtle, creative artistic advantages that don’t seem to translate well to color. Study Ansel Adams. Anyone can take photographs in Big Sur, only Ansel Adams could turn them into a standard of artful photography. ---
**Author:** ![samclem](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a9a28c/32.png) [@samclem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/samclem)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2004, 1:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/8 "2004-10-20T01:17:49Z")
While there are many GQ answers possible about this, I think it belongs somewhere else. Let’s try Cafe. **samclem** GQ moderator ---
**Author:** ![that\_darn\_cat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/59ef9b/32.png) [@that\_darn\_cat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/that_darn_cat)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2004, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/9 "2004-10-20T01:51:44Z")
B&W white labwork is much easier and cheaper than color, making it far more acessable to the artist on a budget. ---
**Author:** ![chukhung](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e79b87/32.png) [@chukhung](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chukhung)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2004, 1:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/10 "2004-10-20T01:55:26Z")
> [@that\_darn\_cat](#): > > B&W white labwork is much easier and cheaper than color, making it far more acessable to the artist on a budget. I do wonder, though, if color photography will gain as an artistic medium with the advent of digital photography. Now that you can work with a color photo in Photoshop, you have much more freedom to manipulate the image than any B&W photographer has ever have had in his darkroom. I’m guessing that in the future, more artists _will_ work with color photography, because digital lets them do things they couldn’t easily or cheaply do with film. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2004, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/11 "2004-10-20T02:09:31Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > I’m not convinced B&W does inherently look more “artistic”. It wasn’t that many years ago that all newspaper pictures were black and white, and they didn’t look any less like newspaper pictures then. Certainly, some black and white pictures look artistic, and some scenes look better in black and white than they would in color, but then, the reverse is true, too. There’s not much you can do with a monochrome sunset or rainbow, for instance. I don’t think one can generalize. Newspaper pictures are (or always used to be) extremely low-res due to the limitations of the printing process. B&W film for a long time had a much tinier grain size than color, yielding razor-sharp resolution. ---
**Author:** ![Diceman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/22d042/32.png) [@Diceman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diceman)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2004, 2:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/12 "2004-10-20T02:16:06Z")
I’m with **pulykamell**. There’s a certain surreal quality to black & white photos. We live in a world of color, and when that color is taken away, the resultant greyscale image stands out. ---
**Author:** ![SPOOFE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c5a1d2/32.png) [@SPOOFE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SPOOFE)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2004, 2:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/13 "2004-10-20T02:24:11Z")
I don’t see any added quality to using black and white. To me, it usually detracts from an image. I like seeing the colors. With that said, a good B&W image will always be more appealing than a crappy color. ---
**Author:** ![Blonde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/3be4f8/32.png) [@Blonde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blonde)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2004, 2:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/14 "2004-10-20T02:29:46Z")
What, no mention of the fact that most of us look better in a black and white picture? 🆒 All the best pictures are B&W…now if I could just figure out how to take them with my digital camera… 😕 ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2004, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/15 "2004-10-20T02:41:57Z")
To add to my comments: I would disagree that B&W photos are a matter of practicality. In today’s day and age, B&W is pretty impractical. I find chromogenic black-and-white films (which are processed in color chemistry) to be quite excellent. Shooting Ilford XP2 and printing it onto black-and-white paper yields incredible results. Much better grain structure and tonal range than pure black-and-white films at 400 ISO. Plus, the idea that transparency film (aka slides) have a wider tonal/dynamic range than neg film is incorrect. Slide film is notorious for having a very limited contrast range as compared with negative film. Neg film will always capture much more tonal information than slide. That said, I still think slide film looks better, as it tends to be more “punchy” (a combination of color saturation and contrast) than negative film. Aestethically, black-and-white and color photos emphasize different aspects of a picture. Let’s take a portrait. A black-and-white photo of somebody will draw attention to the shape and form of the face. Your eye will be drawn to the outline of the chine, the shape of the nose, the general structure. In a color photo, your eye is instantly drawn to color: the eyes and the lips. There is a different emphasis in this photo. Take Steve McCurry’s famous National Geographic photo of the Afghan girl. Part of the impact of this photo comes from Steve’s excellent use of color. It’s a photo that would be good in black and white, but is simply outstanding in color. I mean, the green of her eyes is simply unforgettable, along with the green in the background, and the complementary red of her rags. In black and white, the color contrast would be completely lost. It is absolutely essential for the impact of this photograph. There are also lighting situation that tend to be more condusive to black-and-white than color. High-contrast lighting tends to look better in black-and-white. (Like spotlights and the such.) Softer lighting is more condusive to color imagery (although it also works well with black-and-white.) With black-and-white photography you don’t have to worry about the color casts of tungsten, fluorescent, and mixed light sources. You simply have to look out for light and shadow. With color, you have to keep in mind many more things about your film, and correct for different color temperatures in your light sources. Both types of photography have their place, and both can be equally as artistic. But I think the reason black-and-white looks artistic by default is because of what I already mentioned: we’re not accustomed to seeing the world without color. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2004, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/16 "2004-10-20T02:44:52Z")
> [@Blonde](#): > > All the best pictures are B&W… Well, I wouldn’t say that. About 75% of my favorite imagery is color. ---
**Author:** ![Zebra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/c0e974/32.png) [@Zebra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zebra)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2004, 2:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/17 "2004-10-20T02:48:41Z")
I think the reason is the color photography is so common that when you come to a photo where someone actually chose to use B+W the average viewer is like “Whoa, dude”. ---
**Author:** ![Antonius\_Block](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/51bf81/32.png) [@Antonius\_Block](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Antonius_Block)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2004, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/18 "2004-10-20T03:36:28Z")
> [@Blonde](#): > > What, no mention of the fact that most of us look better in a black and white picture? 🆒 > > All the best pictures are B&W…now if I could just figure out how to take them with my digital camera… 😕 Although most digital cameras can only operate in a color mode, the resulting images can be loaded into pretty much any image-manipulation program (such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro) and converted to greyscale (i.e. B&W). The disadvantage of greyscale for digital images is the small range of available intensity information (quite the reverse of the case with film!). The standard greyscale formats have 8 bits of grey information per pixel, leading to only 256 intensity levels. Even graphics cards with 10-bit D-A converters only allow up to 1024 greyscale levels, compared to 16 million colors for a 24-bit color format. If you look at a B&W digital photo of a person’s face in closeup, for example, you’ll often see severe pixellation around features such as the eyes, where the same photo in color looks fine. This is not (usually) due to a lack of spatial resolution, but a lack of available greyscale intensities. ---
**Author:** ![jackelope](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a6a055/32.png) [@jackelope](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jackelope)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2004, 4:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/19 "2004-10-20T04:01:35Z")
There was debate for years about whether photography could be art. Once it became pretty widely accepted that it could, the debate began as to whether _color_ photography could be art, or only black-and-white. (Have you noticed how these long-running scholarly debates as to whether this or that medium “can” be art always seem to end with some visionary coming along and just doing it?) Anyway, here’s a relevant passage from [this article](http://www.masters-of-photography.com/S/shore/shore_articles1.html) by Thomas Weski about the photographer Stephen Shore: > [@](#): > > "As is well known, viewing a color photograph is different from looking at a black-and-white one. Film theorist Stanley Cavell has noted that both in photographs and in movies, black-and-white pictures are psychologically perceived as documents of completed action. The motifs in color photographs, however, appear to be from the present, or even in a certain sense from the future. They are less burdened with the labor of memory, and are therefore easier to approach. As source material for scholarship, they are more exact, because the colors of the period concerned are reproduced. Since color photographs are one stage less abstract than black-and-white ones, they seem to us to be more concrete and to have a more direct connection with the world. ---
**Author:** ![kniz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/c37758/32.png) [@kniz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kniz)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2004, 4:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123/20 "2004-10-20T04:40:34Z")
**It isn’t just the Black and White, it’s also those shades of Gray.** [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-does-a-black-white-photo-seem-more-artsy-professional-than-a-colour-one/270123.md?page=2)