Should Your Team Headshots Be in Black and White?
By Koby Sirkovich, Head Photographer 9 min readChoose black and white when two things are true: your team page needs to look cohesive, and nobody coordinated the wardrobe. Removing colour takes out the one thing that varies most from person to person, so photographs taken on different days, in different outfits, still hold together as one company. That is why it sells as a set: about one in ten companies asks BusinessPortraits.ca for black and white alongside its colour photographs, and in nine years not one of those requests has covered less than the whole team.
In colour
In black and white
Same crop, same light, same face. The clothing colour lands on a mid grey; nothing else moves.
When marketing rebuilds the team page and the session is already booked or done, someone asks whether the page would look better in black and white.
What black and white fixes on a team page
Black and white removes clothing colour, so a group photographed in different outfits still reads as one set.
We read a group of faces by looking for what they have in common, and colour is one of the properties the eye groups by. The standard review of the research puts it plainly: "Elements that share visual properties (e.g., color, size, orientation) tend to be grouped together" (Wagemans et al., Psychological Bulletin, 2012). A team page shows this exact problem. Faces sit in a grid, and the eye decides whether they belong to one company or to several. When the shirts run from burgundy to pale blue to charcoal, colour is the property pulling the set apart. Take it out, and the crop, lighting, and background all point in the same direction.
Take out the one variable and everything else already matches.
Coordinating wardrobe in advance is the first move, and the cheapest. We send preparation guidance, wardrobe included, before every session, and teams that work from it hold together in colour. Our wardrobe memo is the one to forward, and the preparation guide covers the rest of what people ask before the day.
Black and white is most useful when wardrobe choices were unplanned: teams photographed across several sessions, an office where the wardrobe memo reached one team's inbox and not another's, or leadership groups photographed months apart. In those cases the colours were never going to line up, and removing them holds the set together anyway. Black and white also offers a classic look that ages well.
Monochrome has trade-offs, and they are worth knowing before a whole page commits to it. Colour does work that grey cannot. A brand system built on a colour palette can set a colour portrait against it and have the two agree, while a monochrome portrait stands apart from that system by design. The same holds anywhere the photographs appear alongside colour material: a conference program, a report spread, a sponsor page. Neither set is better than the other. They are useful in different places, which is why most companies that go monochrome keep the colour set as well.
How often companies ask, and what they ask for
About one in ten companies asks us for both colour and black and white. About one in a hundred asks for black and white on its own. Over nine years, every one of those requests has covered the entire team.
Black and white is always a whole-team decision. In nine years, nobody has asked us to convert one person.
Individual style preferences do come up: an executive who likes a particular look, a founder who wants something different from everyone else. Requests for black and white never arrive that way. They come for the whole group or they do not come at all, which says what companies are buying. Not a mood. A page that holds together.
The decision is about a single page, not about how the company wants all of its photographs to look.
What deciding before the session changes
Deciding early does not change the photographs. It changes what everyone knows going in. When a marketing lead specifies black and white for the leadership page, the purpose is settled before anyone is photographed, and that makes every later choice easier: the crop, how many images per person, and what the background should be doing.
About 95 percent of the companies that ask for black and white tell us before the session. The other 5 percent lose nothing by working it out later: lighting, background, and wardrobe advice are the same either way.
Since nothing changes during the session, everything specific to black and white happens in post-production.
Why the conversion is per-image work
There is no black and white button. We work each image individually so the tones stay natural and the subject stays clear of the background.
The reason sits in how colour becomes grey. An international standard sets the weights: under ITU-R Recommendation BT.709, green carries roughly 71 percent of the brightness, red 21 percent, and blue about 7 percent, because that is roughly how the eye sees them. A navy jacket and a forest green one look nothing alike and can arrive at nearly the same grey.
Two jackets, two colours, one grey.
Graphics researchers name the consequence. "Visually important image features often disappear when color images are converted to grayscale," write Gooch and his co-authors in the paper that first framed the problem (Northwestern University, 2005). In a default conversion, they note, a red line can come out the same shade of grey as a green one. Three colour values go in, one shade of grey comes out, and whatever will not fit is lost on the way.
In a headshot, what gets lost is separation. A dark suit against a dark background reads as two colours to the eye and can collapse into one shape in a default conversion. We adjust each image by colour rather than globally. It takes as long as the other finishing work in a headshot price, and it calls for the same judgment as retouching: looking at each image and deciding what it needs.
Where the photographs are displayed matters. A team page shows faces small, and reduction costs detail. At that size, broad tonal separation is what carries the picture.
Keeping both sets, and keeping them matched
We deliver both versions, and the black and white counts as an additional image at $54.98, because we process it separately rather than copy it from the colour file.
- 01Both versionsTwo photographs per person, the black and white as an additional image at $54.98
- 02Changing your mindWe archive every session for five years; the colour version stays there to order
- 03The people who join laterPhotographed to the same written settings, so nobody looks like a later addition
That is two distinct photographs per person, not one image and a copy of it. Each needs different work, and desaturating the colour file is not that work. A toggle would cost nothing and we would include it; this is not a toggle, so it carries a price. What the session itself costs per person is on the pricing page, and it moves with headcount.
The black and white is almost always made from the image that person already selected, so the two files show the same face and pose with different finishes. Occasionally someone picks a different image for the monochrome version, and we finish that one instead.
Changing your mind later is straightforward. We archive every session for five years, so the colour version of any photograph is still there to order inside that window, and you can extend that window if you want the files kept longer. You are not settling anything permanently on the day the page goes live.
Joining a black and white set is no harder than joining a colour one, which is the thing to confirm before committing a whole page. We hold the choices from the original session on record, so we photograph anyone joining later to that same standard. That is the practice behind handling lateral hires between company-wide headshot days, and it is why the set holds as the team changes.
Photographed at a later session
Questions companies ask about black and white corporate headshots
Should our team page be black and white?
Yes, when nobody coordinated the wardrobe across the team and the page needs to read as one set. Removing colour removes the property pulling the group apart. When we photograph a team together to one wardrobe note, colour holds together on its own and the conversion buys less.
Can we have both colour and black and white versions of the same headshot?
Yes, and about one company in ten does exactly that, which makes it ten times more common than asking for black and white on its own. Counted in files it is two photographs per person, not one and a copy, and the second counts as an additional image at $54.98 because the two need different work. Companies who take both have a colour file for anything that has to sit inside a colour brand system, and a monochrome set for the page where the group appears together.
Do we have to decide before the session?
No. About 95 percent of the companies that ask for black and white decide beforehand, but nothing about the session changes either way. The lighting, the background, and the wardrobe advice are the same. Deciding early helps because it means you already know what the photographs are for, not because it changes how we make them.
Does black and white make a team photographed in different outfits look like one set?
Yes, and that is the main reason companies ask for it. Wardrobe colour is the one property that varies from person to person on most team pages; we already hold the crop, lighting, and background steady. Removing the one variable leaves a set whose remaining properties match, which is what makes a group photographed months apart read as one company.
What happens when someone joins after the team page is already black and white?
They join the set the same way anyone would. We hold the choices from the original session on record, so we photograph anyone arriving 18 months later to those same written settings rather than matching by eye. The monochrome step changes nothing there. We apply it to the new image exactly as we applied it to the originals.
Can we go back to colour later?
Yes. We archive every session for five years, and you can order the colour version from the archive inside that window. An optional image archiving subscription extends it. The decision stays reversible for as long as we hold the session.
Why is black and white not just a filter?
Because different colours can arrive at nearly the same grey. The conversion is a weighted sum of the colour channels, with green carrying about 71 percent of the brightness, so a navy jacket and a forest green one can flatten into the same tone. We adjust each image by colour instead, which keeps a dark suit clear of a dark background rather than letting both collapse into one shape.
Does everyone on the team have to be black and white, or can we mix?
In nine years nobody has asked us to convert one person, and the reason holds up. A single monochrome portrait in a colour grid reads as an error rather than a choice, because the eye groups by shared properties and one photograph that does not share them stands out. The decision works at the level of the page.
How does a black and white team page work with our brand colour palette?
It sits apart from it, deliberately, and that is the trade to weigh. A brand system built on colour can place a colour portrait inside it and have the two agree; a monochrome portrait will always read as its own element on the page. That suits a team grid, which is usually its own block anyway, and it is why most companies who go monochrome keep the colour set for everything else: the report spread, the conference program, the sponsor page, anywhere a portrait has to sit next to brand colour and match it.
We need both versions for a large team. Is there a volume discount on the second image?
No. The group discount applies to the per-person session rate, so a larger team lowers what each person costs to photograph. The additional image is priced separately at $54.98 and stays there whatever the headcount, because the work is the same on the sixtieth photograph as on the first. So the second version scales in a straight line: a team of 60 taking both versions adds 60 additional images.