“How about a black-and-white challenge?” someone asked a few weeks back on our Instagram feed. Great idea. We haven’t done one of those yet. So let’s get to it.
Sometimes black and white photos can be more powerful than color. Black and white is more pure. Less flashy. It relies on composition a lot more. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a variety of things you can do with black and white. There’s a lot you can do with tone and effects. Here’s a few things to consider when turning your color photos into black-and-white images in Pixlr:
- Getting rid of color can be as simple as heading to Adjustments > Color, choosing Saturation, and turning the dial all the way down. Color begone.
- You can go further with your black-and-white images by adjusting the contrast or lightness. Or just hit autofix. That will usually improve your image. Even better: try autocontrast. It can bring out texture in an image that you may not have even noticed.
- There are a lot of vintage options in the Effects pane of Pixlr that will give you all kinds of different black-and-white and one-color treatments. Worth checking out.
- Making your image black and white doesn’t mean you can’t edit it in other ways. What if you did a bunch of editing on your photo in various ways and made your last step turning it into a black-and-white image? Check out this image of a pier on San Francisco’s Embarcadero near our office. We added an effect that shows silhouetted birds flying by and ran it through a few filters that adjusted the contrast.
Tag your photo #pixlrbw, and we’ll find it on Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. We’ll feature the best through Sunday, with a whole lot of feel-good actions from both us and the Pixlr community: crazy emojis, thumbs ups, congratulations, and thousands of Likes.
Need help? Here’s a short video that shows you where to quickly turn a color image into black and white using Pixlr apps: