Overview

A magician makes an
elephant disappear.

The desert oasis is just
a mirage.

Somebody tells you,
“Love that outfit.”

Things aren’t always
what they seem.

Even when you see them
in black and white.

Today, graphic designers are putting more color into black and white images than ever before. Aided by desktop print production tools, such as Adobe® Photoshop® and Illustrator®,  and the near-universal availability of four-color presses, designers are adding colors to enrich, improve and add to the impact of conventional black and white images.

The questions are “How?”, “When?” and “What?” How do colorful black and white images work? When should you use them? And what goes into using them effectively?

To answer those questions, we first need to recap how halftones work. That’s because the vast majority of the commercially printed images that appear today are halftone images, very like the first one that appeared in 1880.