I’m curious about the role of black and white photos in observations - they can be useful for emphasizing textures, patterns, and contrasts that might get lost in color images. Are they acceptable on INaturalist to use in addition with the raw photos? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
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As someone who does a lot of ID, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with posting black and white photos, although depending on the species it might make it harder to get an ID (this very much depends on the taxon, and for a lot of species I don’t think this would be an issue at all). If you were also posting the raw photos then I can’t think of any reason not to post black and white ones!
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If it was microscopy photos of unpigmented organisms, it would likely be acceptable.
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I think they should be fine especially when you have mentioned that the raw images are attached alongside it.
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As an addition to coloured photos, it might be helpful.
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See also discussion here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/black-white-photos/26582
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Black and white photos are fine, if they have accurate locations and dates and have some hope of being identified.
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If only that was the case for all photos. Sigh…
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yes
Ravens come out well in B&W:
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Nighttime images from trail cameras are in black and white and seem perfectly acceptable, so I don’t see why not. Whether they are good enough for RG ID would be on a case-by-case basis.
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I was just going to say that - if you see an ivory-billed woodpecker on a trail cam at night, you better post it.
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Black and white is certainly acceptable, as it is evidence of the organism, but if you take a photo in color, switching it to black and white is probably silly since color plays a role in many IDs
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For which kind of organisms were you thinking? While trying to ID some killer whales to individuals after a recent boat trip, I noticed that the guides mostly feature black and white photos. Perhaps this speaks to you point about lack of colour helping to emphasise particular features.
@insectobserver123 @apusaffinis Any organism. Heres an example of photos from a recent upload, always in addition to the color photos. I use “high-contrast” and “infrared” black and white filters to distinguish different details not as easily seen in the raw image. And id likely never use them as the first photo unless it’s an extremely common species, maybe.
Thankyou everyone for your input aswell!
Although I wonder how or if this would interfere with CV data? Especially for species with low observation counts.
I forgot about trail/game cameras (camera traps). I’ve posted quite a few observations obtained at night and in B&W. Perfectly good records. The CV doesn’t have a problem IDing most of them.
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