Black and white or colour

Choose black and white when the photograph is about the people, and colour when it is about the place. That is the whole decision. A portrait belongs in monochrome; a holiday belongs in colour.

Colour carries information, and most of it is about context: where you were, what season it was, what everyone was wearing, what decade it is.

Remove it and the eye is left with structure — the shape of a face, where the light falls, how people are arranged, who is leaning toward whom. Nothing competes for attention.

This is why monochrome flatters most family photographs. A cluttered background stops being a cluttered background and becomes a dark shape. A clashing outfit stops clashing. The picture becomes about faces because there is nothing else left.

Portraits. Anything where the subject is the people themselves.

Photographs you intend to hang. A monochrome print introduces no colour that has to agree with the room, which is why galleries and well-designed homes are full of them.

Mixed or awkward light. A photo shot half in shade and half in sun has a colour cast problem that monochrome simply removes.

Photographs meant to last. Colour dates a picture to its decade. Monochrome does not.

Gifts, especially to older relatives. A black and white portrait reads as a keepsake. The same image in colour reads as a snapshot.

When the colour is the subject. Autumn leaves, a wedding dress, a child's first properly muddy afternoon.

Travel photographs. The place is the point, and the place is coloured.

When it records something specific. A team's kit, a graduation gown, a birthday cake with a number on it.

Anything documentary. If the photograph's job is to remember what something looked like, do not remove information from it.

A monochrome image with a single colour accent — one red element in an otherwise black and white portrait — keeps the timelessness while adding a specific, deliberate signal. Used once, with one colour, it works. Used with several colours it becomes a novelty effect.

This is why the technique appears so often in Christmas portraiture: the portrait itself stays timeless, and one red element does all the seasonal work.

Removing the colour from a colour photograph gives you a grey photograph, not a monochrome portrait.

A good black and white image has a full tonal range — genuinely black shadows, clean bright highlights, and a smooth progression between them. Desaturating a snapshot leaves everything bunched in the middle: no true black, no real white, and a flat grey overall.

That gap is the difference between a filter and a photograph, and it is why properly converted portraits look expensive while desaturated snapshots look like something happened to them.