Turn it black and white

Mono masks a multitude of sins

It doesn’t matter how many times you read this tutorial or how much you practise, you’re never going to capture perfect action shots all of the time. Most photographs that are blurry, noisy or poorly exposed are resigned to the bin without much thought, but if you capture a great moment that’s let down by a few technical shortcomings, try converting it to black and white. Mono images can be more forgiving than their colourful counterparts. A lack of colour can quell busy scenes, making subjects stand out more, and where noise looks downright ugly in colour, it resembles trendy film grain when it’s desaturated. Even slightly soft images seem to work better in black and white, partly due to the increased contrast and partly due to it adding to the vintage vibe. You can quickly gauge an image’s suitability for a mono conversion via one of Camera Raw’s B&W presets.