Black and White Effect Tutorial in Shotcut Video Editor

As you grow your understanding and knowldge of Shotcut, you will want to learn new effects for your videos. This black and white effect tutorial demonstrates how you can change your coloured video into grayscale using the Shotcut video editor.

Regardless of the video editor you use, the way to make a video appear black and white is to lower the saturation to 0%. This strips out all the RGB (Red, Green, Blue) colours, leaving you with shades of white and black.

How you achieve this will vary depending on which video editor you use.

Hue/Lightness/Saturation Filter

In Shotcut you need to apply a filter appropriately named ‘Hue/Lightness/Saturation’. The filter presents you with 3 sliding bars. To create the black and white effect, move the saturation slider all the way to 0%. When completed, play the video clip and you will see it now displays as black and white.

You may have also noticed the ‘Saturation’ filter in the filter list when you were searching.

Saturation Filter

You can use this filter to create the same result. However, you may find you need to adjust the greyscale (lightness) as well. This is where the video clip appears too dark (or light) now that there is no colour in the clip. The lightness is applied by using the slider, which only appears on the first filter – Hue/Lightness/Saturation.

As both ‘Saturation’ and ‘Hue/Lightness/Saturation’ filters do the same thing, I suggest using ‘Hue/Lightness/Saturation’. It is very simple to understand and allows you to quickly administer lightness if it is not correct for your project.

Black and White Effect Tutorial

If you experience any issues creating a black and white effect by following this Shotcut tutorial, I recommend posting the issue on Shotcuts official forum. The team are always helping people and answering questions quickly.

Whilst you are making projects in Shotcut then why not consider uploading them to YouTube? You may even like the idea of creating regular videos that get views and grow your channel? If thats you then check out How to Edit Videos for YouTube!