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 There are two easy ways to turn a color image black-and-white. Both of them are bad. If you go b&w by switching to grayscale, or by desaturating, you’ll probably be disappointed with your results. You may shrug your shoulders and think: Well, I guess there was at least one thing that film did best. If you find your black-and-white conversions flat and ugly, don’t go back to Tri-X. Just do it a better way.
Those two easy ways are the digital equivalent of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. When you go to grayscale, you’re tossing out image data that can give you a lot of control. When you desaturate, colors of similar brightness turn similar shades of gray. That means you’re losing contrast and probably also losing detail that you want to keep.
An image in RGB mode (as all your digital pics will be unless you’ve converted them otherwise) is made up of three channels of color; one each for the reds, greens, and blues in your picture. Those channels hold lots of valuable information that you can use to adjust the look of your b&w shot.
Making the decisions yourself about which colors translate to darker grays and which to lighter ones is the best way to keep the detail you want, while creating the mood you like. In the two methods I’ll explain, color information remains but Photoshop shows the image in shades of gray. One uses the Channel Mixer to
directly affect the weight of each channel, the other, using two Hue/Saturation adjustment layers, is a little more flexible but slightly less precise. Both work well; pick your favorite. But if you have Elements, you’re stuck with Hue/Saturation.
Tip: Since you’ll be looking at a b&w image while making decisions based on the shot’s original color, it’s helpful to save a copy of the color version and keep it open for reference as you work. Or check each channel on its own by holding down CTRL (Command on a Mac) +1 for Red, CTRL + 2 for blue, and CTRL + 3 for green.
Now you can follow along at home:
click here to download the original picture
PC Users - Right Click > Save Target As...
Mac Users - Control + Click > Download Link to Disk
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