Recently I read two books about black and white photography. One of them especially about post processing. Both of them are originally English books translated to German, Post-Production: Black and White and Working in Black & White.

There is not much text. Don’t expect to learn much about black and white photography theory here. But the photos and the descriptions are inspiring. The print is very high quality and the layout is great so it is a pleasure to read them.

The one about black and white post production is quite poor if you are doing digital photography. The traditional photography lab techniques with certain films, papers and chemicals for toning are explained quite well but the digital information is often vague and sometimes just wrong:

• Steve McLeod is saying that JPGs are loosing quality (because of artifacts) as more as you save and load them. That’s not true. Loading doesn’t cause any modification to the JPG and saving does only cause some quality loss if you increase the compression.
• Talking about scanning negatives, he mentions the ICE technology to remove dust with infrared. This book is about black and white photography, but he does not mention that ICE does not work scanning traditional black and white negative film!

I liked the second one (Working in Black & White). The photographs and the explanations are inspiring and although there is not so much theory to squeeze out, I recommend it.

Update: As Frank pointed out correctly: Of course, if you touch a JPG in any way and you save it again, you will produce more artifacts, even if you save it in the same quality. Every time the JPG compression algorithm has to be run, it will produce artifacts.