One of the most difficult challenges in concert photography is dealing with color. Live music performances can have strong color casts and difficult color pairings that are hard to manage. Some people convert their photos to black & white as a way to avoid dealing with color management, but it’s worth noting that color matters in black & white photography too. Even in the days of film, photographers could add a color filter to their lens in order to block or drastically affect the representation of certain colors in the black & white negative. I’d like to talk a bit about my approach to processing black & white photos in Lightroom, and I hope you’ll find the information useful.

Yasiin Bey at Brooklyn Steel, 2019

A before and after split of the same photo

When I decide to process a photo in black & white, it’s usually because I want to simplify a visually busy image, or just because I prefer how the image is represented over its color version. In the photo above, the lighting was completely blue, and while I don’t personally mind the color version, I find the black & white version much more striking. In the photo of Bleachers below, the lighting wasn’t particularly challenging, but I liked how much more I was able to make things stand out in black & white. Black & white photography should be a choice, not a last resort.

Bleachers at Brooklyn Steel, 2017

A side-by-side comparison of the color and b&w images

When processing a photo in black & white, you are assigning each color a particular gray value. The relationship between those colors can still be affected by color temperature, just like they are in full color. Adjust the sliders and see how your image is affected. I also recommend checking your edits zoomed in, because sometimes the adjustments can create unnatural transitions between tones. I also like to check the profile browser. By default, clicking the “B&W” button on the basic panel will default to the “Adobe Monochrome” profile, but you can find your camera’s black & white profiles, as well as others made by Adobe in the browser. These can give you good starting points for your image.

When using the Adobe profiles, you will have access to the B&W panel on the Develop module. This allows you to adjust colors independently of each other. You can move each slider on its own, but I prefer to take the pointer in the upper left corner of the panel and place it directly over the area of the image I want to adjust. By clicking and dragging with the pointer activated, Lightroom will adjust the colors you click on. This is nice because you aren’t usually going to be dealing with something that is purely a single color. 

The B&W panel with the Black & White Mix sliders

If you are using one of the camera matching profiles, the B&W panel is disabled. However, you can still make adjustments using the color temperature sliders on the Basic panel, and the sliders on the Calibration panel. Allow yourself to experiment and observe how the sliders affect your photo.

Just a note that if you have used the color grading panel, or if you have adjusted individual color channels in the tone curve panel, this will show as a color cast on your black & white image. You’ll have to remove those adjustments before proceeding. 

I’ve always had a soft spot for black & white, and I hope that you’ll experiment and think about approaching it as more than an emergency exit from difficult color situations.