If you’re into making black+white photographs, this is a great book: Advanced Digital Black+White Photography by John Beardsworth. Thorough descriptions and plenty of examples make this a great reference for Photoshopping photographs into their very best black and white selves.

I am not sure I can rationalize making color photographs into black and white. Maybe I’m too practical to see the reason for it. I really like black and white photographs and I actually enjoyed watching my black and white tv way back when. But if I had been given the choice to watch tv in color or black and white, I think I would have been crazy to give up the opportunity to see everything in color.

My argument is this: if you take pictures with black and white film, that’s a conscious choice– you’re looking through the lens knowing that the images you capture will be black and white. If you take color photographs, it seems a little presumptuous to then fiddle so much with the color that you totally eliminate it all together… clearly I am not an artist in the true sense of the word. Because to me it’s like throwing away a lot of perfectly good information by discarding the color. I do sound loony, but by golly, that’s how I feel. And it’s a free country, so I’m gonna stick with my opinion.

My verdict: If you feel you have to make your photos black and white, this book is good for you.