T h e e v e r y T h i n g d i g i Ta l p h o T o g r a p h y b o o k · · · Dodge and burn as needed to lighten some dark areas or darken some light areas. To see if you are on the right track, print out your black and white photo on your black and white printer. How does it look? If it looks okay on paper, then it will probably reproduce okay. If the photo does not print well on your printer, go back and try again. You might try starting from scratch--that is, go back to the original color photo and redo the conversion. Improving Your Black and White Conversion Even though converting color to black and white is easy, beginning pho- tographers are often surprised by the results. A beautiful picture of greens and reds when converted might look very drab with the same shade of gray throughout. Black and white deals with lightness and darkness only, it does not deal with color. In the example above, red and green are often the same bright- ness and therefore will translate to the same shade of gray when converted to black and white. In addition, many black and white images do not print well. Even when a black and white image looks good on the computer mon- itor, it might print with much less contrast.