Give me those nice bright colors, and Black and White, too.

Paul Simon sang praises for Kodachrome, and we do love those "nice bright colors" but there is still something about Black and white photography that I love, too. A few days ago, I was looking through some older photographs and thought it would be interesting to see what I could make of them in Adobe Lightroom.

The pairs of photos below were originally shot in color. According to the photo properties, they were both shot with a Kodak "Easy Share" digital camera in 2001 for Half Dome, and 2004 for Red Rock Canyon. However, I don't remember having a digital camera then and thought these were shot with my OM1 film camera. I assume the photo data's memory is better than mine!

I pulled some of the photos into Lightroom to see what they would look like as a B and W photos. I was surprised by the results, especially in light of the fact that it was an older point and shoot, low resolution digital camera. 

The first pair of photos are from Yosemite Valley. The original was shot in color, and then post-processed in Lightroom using the selenium setting and then tweaked.

The next pair of photos were taken at Red Rock Canyon in Mojave, California.  On this one I used the yellow filter and increased the blue to create the dark black sky.