Creating black and white images from colour

Black and White

Converting a colour image to black and white is not a simple click operation, if good results are required.

To the general public and to photographers, a black and white image will have no colour but will be made up of black on white paper with numerous shades of grey in between. Photoshop refers to this with the graphic arts term of Grayscale.

The Black & White conversion function appeared in CS3 and is a combination of some of the existing methods of converting and adjusting colour.

Open a colour image to be converted.
Image 07.jpg from the Samples-Various folder can be used here.
Go to Image > Adjustments > Black & White.

The image is immediately desaturated with all the colour removed. It is still in RGB mode rather than Grayscale and so the colour sliders still have an affect on the tones.

If an image just happens to have the right colours and tones, then the default settings might work well, but that's most unlikely.
The tractor is the main feature and the orange is made up of red and yellow. The orange is roughly equivalent to a 50% grey and it must be distinguishable from the surroundings.

Moving the Red slider up to 73% improves it.
There is some blue in the original sky but not much in the conversion.
The blue is improved by moving the Blue slider to �70 and then the Cyan slider to �64.
The Green slider will adjust the tones of the foliage.
Moving the slider to the left will darken some of the green tones.
It becomes a matter of taste but a setting of 23 is better.

Clicking the Preview box on and off is useful to judge progress.
The flowers at the front are being lost but a higher Magenta setting will brighten them up. Try 157.

Keeping the different tones separated in can be tricky and further adjustments are often necessary. Perhaps the Red needs to be lowered and the Yellow increased in order to brighten the tractor.

After conversion, some areas which looked good in colour might not be right in black and white; perhaps too dark or too light. These need to be treated locally. An area, such as a face, can be selected with the Lasso and adjusted with Curves; or the Dodge and Burn tools can be used as explained in other tutorials.

Other methods of converting from colour are covered in Photoshop In A Day .

A couple of them are discussed briefly in the next tutorial.

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Black and White - 2
Printing