I think I’ve made it reasonably clear that I’m a color kind of girl. (Or colour, depending on your region!) I like rich greens, earthy reds, oranges of all kinds, and I hate leaving those tones out of the picture. In fact, I find it hard to see past the color, so I normally leave black & white to the pros.

Except when I don’t. You see, I realized I’ve been using it as a tool for quite a while. Converting an image to black & white, easy to do in post-processing, is a great way to test the strength of an image. The particular tool I rely on is the Threshold filter in Photoshop, which creates a stark image, per the Adobe site:

The Threshold adjustment converts grayscale or color images to high-contrast, black-and-white images. You can specify a certain level as a threshold. All pixels lighter than the threshold are converted to white; all pixels darker are converted to black.

Threshold images are the quick, digital equivalents of notan, Japanese for “light-dark harmony”, which landscape painter Mitchell Albala teaches as a compositional tool. Here’s a threshold adjustment for the photo above. (If you’re curious, this is a setting of 110, from a range of 0/white to 255/black)

When I converted the image, I knew why I liked it so much! Maybe there is something to this lack of color after all. Pay attention, Liz!

Over the last year, I’ve been trying to learn my lesson and lose my reliance on color. I accepted a B&W challenge on social media (eek, scary!), and since then, have used it more on my Instagram feed. But my favorite use is still hidden inside my work. These threshold versions of my photos can be used as masking layers in Photoshop, to blend in color selectively, as you can see, left, when I added some green and orange to spice up the original photo.

So, yet again, something I’ve been avoiding turns out to be worthwhile. Seems it’s a lesson I haven’t finished learning yet. True for you too?