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

[accoup]

I'm using Photoshop CS3, but this process should be nearly identical in previous versions of Photoshop.

[tridibesh]

If you give some picture clip it would be better

[christian louboutin]

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[virginia online]

I played this often, but for me, our creativity never stretched past trying to figure out what animal we would be. I'm still un-decided on the matter.

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My pal sent me an email suggesting i read this. I love it, i bookmarked your site. Keep the updates coming.

[nantaPD]

Yes that's another way making BW from color image..... Thank for remind me...

[Photoshop Warrior]

Great technique and some images when changed to B/W actually look very nice while maintaining the integrity of the image. Excellent tutorial!

[Leia @ Adult Tricycle]

I've spent hours searching and trying out tutorials. But I understood NONE of them. This one finally worked! Thank you!

[WSD]

Brightness is one of the most important things inside black and white, while not using brightness you can lose most of the white.

[Yulia]

Yes... I agree.. That's one of some ways in making BW foto.....
Thank for remind me.....