How to convert to black-and-white in Photoshop CS3 Part 1 (Black and White Adjustment Layer)

There are many ways of converting a color photograph into black-and-white in post-production. The quick and easy way is to just convert to grayscale or desaturate completely the image, but these are in almost every situation, your worst possible option as you have absolutely no control. As an introduction, I suggest you go over our Think About Color post before continuing.

If you're using Photoshop CS3, a good way of converting a photograph to black-and-white is to use the Black and White adjustment layer. This will give you a great deal of control over how different colors are rendered in a grayscale image. Take the photograph below for example. It's not a great shot, but it'll serve for the exercise as it has clear areas of orange, green, blue, and red.

If you just go to Image>Mode>Greyscale, you'll turn it into a black-and-white shot, but you'll get the photograph next to it as a result. Not terrible, but not great by any stretch of the imagination. All the colors turned into a similar shade of gray. There isn't a lot of contrast really. Look at what used to be a green and orange wall on the left. In the color version there's a nice contrast between the 2 colors, but in the black-and-white they look almost the same.

How to improve it and have more control? Use the Black and White adjustment layer! Here's how:

• Start with the color image and add a Black and White adjustment layer. You can do it by either going to Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Black and White... or by clicking in the New Adjustment Layer icon in the Layers palette (screenshot below)

• The Black and White adjustment layer will open up. Here you can either play with the presets, which try to mimic what color filters did in the film days, or just play with the sliders to get the look you want.

In this example, I chose the Green Filter. If you look at the sliders you'll notice that it boosts the Yellows, Greens, Reds and Cyans. That means it will lighten the areas in the photograph that have those colors.

In simple terms, the way the sliders work is this:

1. If you pull it to the left (less than 0%) the corresponding color will become a darker shade of grey.
2. If you push it to the right (values over 0%) the corresponding color will become a lighter shade of grey.

That's really all there is to it. Just play around with the sliders until you get the photograph to where you want it.

Quick tip: if you hover over the photograph you'll see the cursor turns into an eyedropper. If you click you'll see one of the colors in the layer window flash. That's the key slider that will affect that area.

A few different examples using the above photograph:

Red Filter

Green Filter

Custom Filter

As you can see, you have much more control over what your photograph will look like in black-and-white if you can control how each color is going to be interpreted in grayscale. Hopefully you'll find it useful.

I'll go over other methods in future posts.

Comments

[jim]

I'm using Photoshop CS and this doen't work. Are you going to explain how to do it in older versions of Phoshotop?