Making Black / White in Photoshop

Richard Schneider presents his Photoshop Tutorial on Making Black and White Pictures in Photoshop

Photoshop Tutorial
Making Black and White Pictures in Photoshop

This is to help you learn how to turn regular color photos into professional black and white photos. There are many other techniques of doing this but this one is surprisingly simple and is very effective.

Open your picture in photoshop and:

1. Open a new Channel Mixer adjustment layer.

2. Then click to check the box that says Monochrome to make the picture black and white (but don't click OK yet).

3. Adjust the brightness percentages to fit the coloring of the picture.

(To adjust the balances click on the sliders and drag them to the left or to the right).

With the channel mixer you can accent the brightness of different colors by adjusting their percentages. For example, if you raise the red percentage the red bus in the picture will get brighter.

There is no real exact way to balance a picture, the most common black and white is based on the red colors that's why the channel mixer started out with 100% red.

Try each color at 100% with the others on 0. Based on that, experiment and make it a mixture of different colors but when you find which colors balances you like, for the best results make sure their percentages add up to 100%.

That's all there is to it.

Special thanks to Richard Schneider and PictureCorrect for submitting this tutorial.
Find all of Richard's tutorials at: picturecorrect.com

Copyright © 2003-2005, Richard Schneider, All rights reserved

Comments

[Euciane]

THANKS!
i've been going nuts over b/w convertion!
do you know how to blur the pictures in a way that they look surreal, fairy like atmosfere?

[ricky]

would like to say this was very easy guide and has helped me out big time

thank you so much

[J. Hoekstra]

I am sorry but this is not te way to go. You clearly lose a lot of info in the picture by using this method. Just compare it with a desaturated picture (saturation adjustment layer, then set saturation at 0%) and you will see.

[scott]

Ricky is right, just compared the two, going to Image > Adjustments > Desaturate works a lot better, and you don't even have to play around with it.

[scott]

Didn't realize name was posted under the comment, J. Hoekstra is right*

See:
Black & White from Color

[dave]

of course a lot of information is discarded! you're just using the red channel & so discarding the red and blue channel. that's why he recommended adjusting the channels to taste.

the only way in which desat is better is that it's easier. mr schneider's technique allows you to bring out the details you want by mixing the channels. if you find the best result is keeping them balanced then do that, but at least have a go first!

[dave]

i meant to say, of course, the green and blue channel are discarded! doh.

[dave]

of course a lot of information is discarded! you're just using the red channel & so discarding the red and blue channel. that's why he recommended adjusting the channels to taste.

the only way in which desat is better is that it's easier. mr schneider's technique allows you to bring out the details you want by mixing the channels. if you find the best result is keeping them balanced then do that, but at least have a go first!

[tim]

when you desaturate your picture, you also loose a lot of depth.
if to choose between these 2, i'd go with mono

[Lucifer]

Another way could also be a gradient map adjustment layer, then with the black/white gradient map. It should have the same effect..

[lkyrwi asye]

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[Slumberg]

Nice tutorial! Hopefully it will help me at work!

Slumberg (aka Turtles Slumberg)