Hello again, Stefanie here chatting about when to use black and white photos and when to use colour.

I have to confess that I take all my photos in colour and that I prefer using them in colour. When choosing a kit to go with my photos, I select based on the colour pallete. When the colours clash too much and make me want to twitch, my first step is to change the photos to black and white using the conversion in photoshop elements, I sometimes boost the contrast – making the whites lighter and the blacks darker. This adds a little more drama. Removing the colour from photos can remove contrasting eye sores in the back ground but it also plays up the textural elements within the image, as well as creating a mood, one of timelessness or years gone by, a classic portrait always looks great in black and white.

This layout of hubby changing the wall colour of our daughter’s bedroom has to be in colour. The whole story of the layout is about saying goodbye to the bright pink of a few years ago and her wanting a new sophisticated colour scheme. Kit is Just be Happy by Digital Scrapbook Ingredients.

I converted the two portrait photos in this layout to black and white, but when I compared them side by side I felt that losing the colour drew the attention to the food and not to the people, which kinda defeated the object, as spending time together was the subject of the layout, not what we were eating. When I examined the photos, I saw that the colours we are wearing actually contrasted very well from the back ground of the venue, so I decided to leave the colour photos as they were. Kit is A fresh Start by Digital Scrapbook Ingredients.

This layout is about the flowers that hubby surprised me with. As the flowers were the subject of the layout I wanted to show him and them off and chose to let our portrait be in black and white so that the viewer takes them in as secondary and I love it this way. Kit is Beautiful you by Digital Scrapbook Ingredients (retired).