A more interesting approach to black & white

Just a few days ago I described the effect to achieve a vintage look in the game. Today I will describe similar effect but it will join black & white and the vintage look techniques into one (a bit sepia like but as I don't like sepia very much I will describe something different). The problem with regular black & white is that it's rather cold in general. Cold images are not that pleasant for our eyes as warm images are. Vintage look effect can make the image warmer and make it more interesting and appealing. If you want to apply it be sure to take a look at the mentioned entry as this one will base on it.

Let's take a look at the base black & white image (with contrast already enhanced - I will write more on contrast enhancement and other filters like saturation or warmify in the consequent blog entries):

As you can see the image is rather dark and cold. Not really interesting to be honest. Boring and dull.

And here is the same image with yellow and pink layers applied (using multiply and screen modes respectively):

Much better but still not good enough but at least there is some atmosphere and feel now. The final step is to apply a warmify filter:

Here is another example. Base high contrast black & white image (high contrast black and white images work best):

And the one with the effect applied:

I believe we are all used to regular black & whites and any other approach to it is more interesting. Besides we generally prefer warmer tones and hence the need to improve warmness of the b&w.

How to warmify colours? Take a look at this entry. The key is to apply curves adjustments. Actually applying a warmify filter stops the image to be in grayscale as you need to adjust especially red channel curve (by applying S-Curve or moving a midpoint). But the adjustments made are rather small and therefore the image is still close to being monochromatic.

As you can hopefully remember from my entry on vintage look I applied there three layers: yellow, pink and blue. Although here I propose using yellow and pink layers only any combination of them might work depending on the desired effect and the input scene. In some of my recent photos I used only yellow and there were some for which I used pink and blue or only blue. Just give a try all combinations.