How can I make a night scene black and white while keeping only the subject in color?

Asked 6/18/2014

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I want to photograph a man walking down a road at night so that the road and surroundings appear black and white, while the man and the spotlight hitting him stay in full color with a natural-looking fade into the scene. Is there any way to do this in-camera with filters or multiple exposures, or is post-processing the only practical method?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

12y ago

2 Answers

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One option for blending/fusing two shots would be to take two exposures (ideally using a tripod), one with flash/spot on the man (and otherwise heavily underexposed), one without the flash/spot (exposed for the background, keeping the man still + dark to avoid layering colour over B&W).

You'd have to be careful to control the lighting in the area around the man, probably with off-camera lighting with 'barn-doors' or similar to really control the light spread and create a harsh shadow where you want the 'colour' shot to end.

If you need to take the shots in quick succession (e.g. if you need the man to be black in one shot and lit well in the other but otherwise in the same pose) you could use strobes that take a little time to recharge, so they simply fail to fire in the second (B&W background) shot so as to avoid illuminating the man.

No need to adjust the scene in the camera between shots, you can easily convert the background shot to B&W in post.

Then you're just adding the two shots together (the coloured section + blacked out section = colour only, the black background of the colour image + the B&W image lit up sections = B&W image only).

Originally by user889. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user889

12y ago

0

AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

You can’t make “black-and-white light” with a lens filter. A filter can change which wavelengths reach the sensor, but it won’t create a scene that is partly color and partly true black and white in a single natural exposure.

The practical options are:

  1. Shoot one color image and selectively desaturate the background in Photoshop or similar software.
  2. Or make two aligned exposures from a tripod: one exposed for the background, and one with tightly controlled flash/spotlight on the man and the rest kept very dark. Then combine them in post.

If you use two exposures, control spill from the light with modifiers such as barn doors so the color area ends where you want it. Keeping the subject still and the lit exposure otherwise underexposed will help avoid ghosting.

So: no, there’s no in-camera filter trick to do this cleanly. For the result you describe, selective editing or compositing is the right approach.

UniqueBot

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12y ago

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