PHOTO TUTORIAL:
Photography's Digital Possibilities
Turning Colour Photos Into Black-and-white
Published 26th May 2008

 

Black and white photography has it’s own charm. Colours are great, but they can create a disharmony of clashing colours and draw attention away from shapes, textures and compositional elements in your photograph. If these are more important to you than colours, consider converting your picture into black-and-white. In the old days before digital photography, you had to decide before you took the picture weather you’d want to use a colour-film or a black-and-white film. Today, with a few clicks in an image editing program you can turn colour into black and white.

There is several ways of doing this in Photoshop, which this tutorial is based on -- similar effects can be achieved in most other professional image editing programs.

Just click on ‘greyscale’ or alternatively set the colour saturation to zero. Slightly more advanced, use the ‘channel mixer’ and tick the check-box called ‘monochrome’. But the most powerful way of converting your colour photo to black-and-white is a rarely documented method using a combination of ‘colour balance’ and ‘saturation’. Using this method is slightly more complicated, but ever so much more powerful. You have complete control over how your colours are transformed into black and white. Here’s how you do it:

1. First turn on the ‘layer box’ (Windows > Layers).

2. Click on the little ‘adjustment layers’ icon in the bottom and choose ‘colour balance’. Click OK when the dialog window opens.

3. Click ‘adjustment layers’ again, this time choosing ‘hue/saturation’. Immediately, set ‘saturation’ to zero and push OK.

Your image is now black-and-white, but here’s where it gets really neat:

4. Double-click on the adjustment layer you created in step 2, called ‘colour balance’.

You now have the possibility to adjust each of the 3 sliders to the left and right, thereby adjusting the way each of these colours are transformed into black and white! This has the same effect as using a colour filter in front of your lens and can make some colours stand out compared to others. Reddish skin-tones, the blue sky, the green grass and foliage, all these and more can selectively be lightened and darkened in the black-and-white rendition, giving you great control over contrast and texture in your photo -- much more powerful than the other greyscale-options that leave average red, green and blue colours with the same boring grey.

But wait, there’s even more: Notice the 3 small radio buttons in the bottom saying ‘shadows’, ‘midtones’ and ‘highlights’? By default the ‘midtones’ is selected, but selecting one of the other two allows you to only adjust the darkest or lightest tones respectively. A good use for this is when you wish to bring out some of the details hidden in the dark shadows of your image. Choose ‘shadows’ and make sure the ‘preserve luminosity’ check-box is NOT selected. Then crank up all 3 sliders by the same amount and voilá, your shadow details come to light!

5. When you’re done, select ‘layers > flatten Image’ on the main menu and save the result!

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