Black and white images created from colour

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Black and White, others methods

Fine Art Printers
There is another method of conversion to black and white which is more sophisticated and a little more involved. It can give more refined results and is preferred by some fine art photographers and printers.

It uses Hue/Saturation with a couple of Adjustment Layers.
Being a technique which is rather beyond the basics, it is described in detail in the Photoshop In A Day manual.

Channel Mixer
For those with CS2 or older versions, the Channel Mixer is an extremely good feature with a bit of practice.
The two samples below help to illustrate the scope available with Channel Mixer.

On the left, settings are such to give a general black and white image, while on the right, the settings are more extreme with 100% red. This would be like using a red filter on the camera while using black and white film. The bus is a very light tone and the blue sky has gone a dramatic black.

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The Channel Mixer method (also comprehensively covered in Photoshop In A Day) is a good starting point for converting from colour, and it's worth experimenting with the sliders to compare results.

Terminology

With black and white and colour images, photographers, graphic designers and computer people sometimes use the same terms but they mean different things. In computer imaging, computer convention takes precedence and photographers in particular need to adapt.

Common terms are monochrome, duotone, halftone screen, grayscale and grayscale - yes there is a difference between 'grayscale' and 'grayscale'. All these are explained in Photoshop In A Day .

Loads more explanations can also be found, such as the file formats of TIFF, JPEG, PDF, PNG, GIF; and the colour modes LAB and CMYK.
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