Black & White Photography: Using Color Filters to Enhance Your Film & Digital Images

Color filters and the science behind them are an essential part of black & white photography, both when shooting with photographic film or creating digital edits in programs like Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop! In this class, you'll learn how you can enhance your black & white photography by using color filters, whether physical or digital, in your workflow.

I’m Dominic Righini-Brand, and I have been using color filters to enhance my black and white photography throughout my career as a photographer, designer and teacher. Color filters come in a range of different hues, and knowing what filter to use in which situation, or what filter to use when dealing with a tricky image edit on the computer afterwards will speed up your workflow, drastically improve the quality of your photographs and allow you to create a more desirable look.

This class is designed for digital photographers, media editors, content creators and graphic designers who want to create exciting and original black and white edits, and traditional film photographers who want to get the most out of their photography when shooting with 35mm and medium format black and white films.

In this class, we are going to dive into the world of using color filters in black & white photography, both when shooting on film and by using the tools available in Adobe’s digital darkrooms, and we will:

• discuss why black and white photography is still important today;
• look into the theory behind black and white film photography and using physical color filters when shooting on film;
• explore how color filters can be used to improve the quality of your black and white photographs or image edits;
• run through each of the color filters and how they can be used;
• look into how to replicate the effect of color filters digitally and enhance your black and white photographs in Adobe Lightroom or Lightroom Classic, Adobe Camera Raw or Adobe Photoshop.
• explore a few quick tips for creating versatile presets for editing your images in Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop.

This class is for intermediate to advanced level students, and to get the most out of this class you will need to have a good understanding of photography’s terminology, techniques and processes and have some experience with editing photographs in Adobe Lightroom or Lightroom Classic, Adobe Camera Raw or Adobe Photoshop, and using basic tools for adjusting exposure and contrast, as well and using Curves.

For the best experience possible you’ll need a Creative Cloud version of Adobe Lightroom or Lightroom Classic, Adobe Camera Raw and/or Adobe Photoshop. You can download the latest trial version of the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography suite from adobe.com.

Related Photography Classes:

• Beginner’s Guide to Retouching Old Photographs in Adobe Photoshop
• The Camera’s Journey Through Time: A Brief History of Photography
• Mastering Duotones in Adobe Photoshop