Now is when we get to decide how we want to deliver the style, look and feel of our black-and-white image to our audience. You can select Color, or you can select Black and White.

If you look at the top of the Basic panel in Lightroom Classic CC’s Develop module, you’ll see a couple of options next to Treatment. With Lightroom, it’s pretty straightforward. It’s nothing like Photoshop conversions where we have a handful of techniques to choose from, like using Luminosity Masks, Gradient Maps, adjustment layers or going straight to the Main Menu at the top of the screen and simply selecting Grayscale, to name a few. Still, converting images to black-and-white with Lightroom Classic CC is not complicated. Just removing color greatly limits your ability to stylize your black-and-white images. It’s certainly a way to do it, but far from the best way. Wait! What? Shouldn’t we just move our Saturation slider to the left to remove the color and be done with it? Well, actually, no, I wouldn’t suggest doing that.

When crafting black-and-white files-more specifically, when we are developing RAW files-we need to think about color. Of course, seeing images through this “different prism” is quite another thing than crafting them.

Things become simpler, or, as I like to think of it, being biased toward the style: black-and-white is more to the point. Shapes, tones, patterns and textures become the central focus of a photograph, and we’re unburdened by how colors blend, contrast or enhance the experience. When color is absent, we are left with the opportunity to experience attributes of a subject or the details of a setting more intimately. Looking at black-and-white imagery means viewing the world around us through a different prism. A black-and-white image of Montaña de Oro in central California.

Lightroom classic editing