Doing Black and White from Color

One of the great things about Photoshop is that there is always about a dozen ways to do something. The thing that drives me crazy about Photoshop is that always seems to be about dozen ways to do something.

I do not like in camera conversions to Black and White because there is no one setting that will work great for both people and landscapes. Plus once the conversion is done you don’t have a color image to go back to.

Here is what might work well for those who want to do black and white with more control.

Starting with a well exposed color image (RAW or Jpeg) add an adjustment layer for any conversion. Then you always have a color image to go back to for any reason.

(These tips also work with Photoshop Elements, The exception being the Black and White adjustment layer. However in Elements under Enhance is Black and White adjustment which does the same thing. Just be sure to have a copy of the color image or a second Background copy layer for the conversion)

Any adjustment layer works off of the image below it. So in the case of Black and White it is working off the COLOR image below. Just doing a desaturation of the colors is really one of the lowest common denominators of making an image black and white. All Photoshop is going to do is look at how bright or dark a color is and give it a gray value. This is the same thing that is going on with an in camera setting of Black and White.

So what can be done? In the old days of film we would put color filters in front of the lens and using black and white film get different looks. Red filters would give us a dark sky and deep contrast with landscapes. Think Ansel Adams running around a national park kind of look. For people we would put a green filter on the camera and get really nice skin tones.

You can still see these effect just by going to Channels and looking at the RGB channels of Red, Green, Blue and how they make the image look. You can even just use one of these channels for your Black and White look or as a good starting point.

So getting back to the Adjustment Layer for more control over the image click on that little Circle that is half black and white and look for Hue and Saturation. You just add two of them to the image. The top one is just to desaturate the image with pulling the slider all the way to the left. Then go to the middle one, click on the colorize box and move the Hue slider back and forth. What you are doing is just putting a million different color filters on your image for any look that appeals to you. You can move the saturation slider to increase or decrease this affect.

If you have CS 3 or 4 then you have an even more powerful way to change the look of your image. It is the Black and White Adjustment layer. With this you have a number of preset filters you can use and a number of sliders for changing the look of the colors under it for darker or lighter tones. However just like a late night commerical for the Chop Wow “Wait there is more!”. If you move your cursor over the image and click and drag you can lighten or darken the tones under it for even more control in just those tones. As I noted this is not in Photoshop Elements but outside of the cool cursor effect you can move the sliders for more of global effect and it has some pretty nice presets too.