The Art of Black and White Photography

Narayan S. R.

It is a very well designed course for professionals who want to work on Black and White images. Great learning. Thanks.

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Kurane Y.

i love it!! easy to understand.

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Danialq

It is really good to have visual experience of subtle details about B&W photography. Much more appealing way of delivering the essence of techniques and tools.

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Rodrigo C. B.

Muitas dicas boas. Vai bem a fundo no assunto.

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Vanessa S.

It was good but I expected more about photography than photoshop

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Oliver B.

very informative

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Pete D.

Great explanation of how to use photoshop for black and white.

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Wady C.

Ottimo corso per iniziare a capire le basi del bianco e nero. Peccato che non sia stato più aggiornato. Forse una piccola lezione sugli aggiornamenti delle applicazioni più usate, non sarebbe stato male. Consigliato!

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Albert L.

The course covers an extensive array of post processing techniques to get the best black and white image out of your RAW files. The pace starts gentle, as one learns about techniques that are not recommended just to put everything into context, but the pace soon picks up. The later sections cover more complicated techniques, but do so clearly and in a well structured way. I'll need to go back to these, probably two or three times before I could say I understand them, but this is what I wanted in the course, and it delivers.

The techniques are illustrated using Photoshop. I use Affinity Photo, so there will be a little bit of work for me to see which ones transfer across easily, and which are a bit harder to replicate. Still I could follow along as the teaching is such high quality.

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Hamish M.

I've been a hobbyist photographer for decades. However, it's easy to "fall into a rut" when it comes to post processing your shots. This is why I took this course.

This course assumes no prior knowledge, and while beginners would probably need a copy of Photoshop to "keep up", experienced users of other photo editing apps can probably find the vast majority of features used (black and white conversion, saturation, gradient tool, curves, masks, blending options, etc) with a little experimentation if they're reasonably familiar with the app already. Beginners can also do this if they're willing to take the time to explore the menus, or look specific features up. Obviously the layout and icons may be a little different between apps, but it's entirely doable. For fun, I've found most of the options in TWO alternative applications, and gotten great results from what this course has taught me.

I agree with other reviewers that the version of Photoshop depicted here is now... VERY dated, so if you're running the latest Creative Cloud version there ARE going to be differences. That said, the older versions of Photoshop are more likely to have greater "feature overlap" with other cheaper Photoshop-like software like Affinity and the FREE GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). So I consider it minor stumbling block for beginners, but a huge benefit for anyone else NOT using the latest Photoshop.. or Photoshop at all.

I like the fact that this skips over Lightroom styled apps (like Lightroom, Darktable, and DXO's Photolab for example), and delves into apps which have less focus on "quick and dirty/bulk adjustments", and offers insights on how to use a variety of tools in detailed ways.

Now some other reviewers have criticized the "Let's take several opportunities to outline a bunch of ways to process black and white images... that I'm later going to discourage because it's better if you use these one or two ways over here." Yes, on the surface it seems like a waste of time to go through these methods you may not use later. However, I think it's invaluable to see the MANY ways you can go. It's also important if you use more than one app for your post processing (say you have Photoshop at work, and Affinity at home) because you'll be able to adapt to using the best features whatever app you have at hand.

I think it's also important to demonstrate the pros and cons of each approach. Sometimes your choice of processing method/tool is a trade off between ease of use and fine control, other times, the most complex methods can render an inferior result, and take more time to do it. (So stop sticking to what you know and make your life easier). So it explains WHY some options may be better, and when it's more a matter of personal choice. That was useful to me.

Even though I've used Photoshop for years, I hadn't gone through every method, or feature. I did what I had to, in the ways I knew about, even if it was time consuming, less than ideal, or a combination thereof. I honestly don't think anyone is aware of ALL the ways the features can be used and combined, so seeing a range of tools was a HUGE help.

Has this course helped ME to bring out the best in my images... I'd say that there's a definite improvement. My images are more nuanced, clearer, draw the eye to the more relevant parts, and I've even had one person say "Your shots were pretty good before, but now I like to look a bit longer at the textures and details, and get more out of them".

Enough said!

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