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It's Like a Little Ansel Adams Inside Photoshop

There are several ways to convert a color image to black and white in Photoshop. But CS3 has a lock on the best ways. Learn how to do it yourself.
Written by Deke McClelland on August 3, 2007

Average: 3.7 (3 votes)

Categories: Graphics, Graphics Image Editing, Photo Image Editing, How-Tos

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Excerpted from "Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-on-One" (O'Reilly Media, 2007)

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In a world that is saturated with color, there is something about the elegant simplicity of blackand-white imagery that gets right to the heart of things. The removal of color allows our eyes and minds to focus on subtleties of shadow and shape in a way that's different from our everyday visual experience. Creating a beautiful black-and-white image can be very satisfying and relatively easy to do. You can rob your pixels of color in Photoshop CS3 in many ways, from the classic Channel Mixer to Privacy Information the new Black & White command and Camera Raw's Convert to Grayscale check box. Happily, each one of these functions put you in charge of the color-to-grayscale conversion process. By way of example, I'll start with a full-color image from iStockphoto photographer Joseph Jean Rolland Dub (Figure 1).

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Figure 1. The original full-color photograph. Click on image for a larger version. Prior to Photoshop CS3, the best way to convert a color image to black and white was the Channel Mixer. With an image open in Photoshop, choose Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer. Turn on the Monochrome check box at the bottom of the Channel Mixer dialog box and then adjust the Source Channels sliders to define the amount of brightness information to draw from each color channel. Assuming you're working on an RGB image, a good place to start is Red: +40, Green: +50, and Blue: +10 (roughly the recipe for black-and-white television). Note that these values add up to 100 percent, thus ensuring a consistency in brightness from color to grayscale. Happily, CS3 now tracks your total as you work so you don't have to do the math on your own.

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I turned on Monochrome and set the Red, Green, and Blue values to +60, +120, and 80, respectively. That's right, it's perfectly legal to subtract the brightness levels in one channel from those in another. The result is a high-contrast portrait (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Channel Mixer in Photoshop. Click on image for a larger version. Photoshop CS3 introduces a new command that gives you more control and flexibility. Choose Image > Adjustments > Black & White to display a series of six slider bars, one for each of the conventional primary colors. Instead of mixing channels, Black & White weights colors, making for a more subjective experience. It also means you're not bound to make the values add up to 100 percent or any other total. Just raise a value to brighten a primary or lower the value to darken it. Once you've made a grayscale image that you're happy with, you can colorize the image by turning on the Tint check box and the Hue and Saturation values. (Note that the Tint options result in a straight duotone, making them less effective than the Gradient Map approach we learned about in the "Colorizing a Grayscale Image" exercise.) In Figure 3, you can see the results of my application of the Black & White command, as well as the specific values that I applied -- 40, 130, 200, 120, 70, and 300, in that order. Of more interest is the control that each slider provided. The Reds slider affected lips and skin tones. Yellows let me further adjust the skin tones independently of the lips. I used Greens to add some brightness to the irises of the woman's eyes. Cyans and Blues were strictly background colors, while Magentas gave me exclusive control over the lips and the redness in the whites of the eyes. By setting the Magentas value to its maximum, 300 percent, I was able to clear up the eyes more surely than if the model had used Visine.

Figure 3. Black & White in Photoshop. Click on image for a larger version. Camera Raw 4 permits you to convert an image to black and white nondestructively, whether the image begins life as a raw file or a JPEG. In the old days, the Camera Raw conversion process consisted of moving the Saturation slider on the Basic panel all the way down to the left to 100 and then adjusting how colors were weighted with the Temperature and Tint sliders. It was chancy work and difficult to predict. Now we have dedicated controls that slightly exceed the capabilities of the Black & White command. Start by opening an image in Camera Raw, and clicking the HSL/Grayscale icon below the histogram to switch to that panel. Then turn on the Convert to Grayscale check box above the color sliders. At this point, the three subpanels are replaced with one called Grayscale Mix. Right away, Camera Raw applies its idea of the perfect mix automatically. From there, you can make any adjustments you like. To add some color, click the Split Toning icon to display that panel, which lets you assign independent colors to highlights and shadows to create a tritone. It's better than the Black & White solution, but still not as good as Gradient

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Map. To create the example in Figure 4, I lowered the warm color values to darken the face and raised the cool color values to brighten the background and eyes. The lips fell completely in the Reds with the skin tones spread across the Oranges and Yellows. I was also able to integrate the Basic exposure controls and Tone Curve to balance the brightness and boost the contrast. Finally, Camera Raw automatically opened the image as a single-channel document, saving me a step.

Figure 4. HSL/Grayscale in Camera Raw. Click on image for a larger version. Note: Most cameras give you the option of capturing a grayscale photograph from the get-go, but where raw images are concerned, it's a fake. The color information is there, it's merely turned off by a line of metadata, often one that Camera Raw doesn't recognize and therefore ignores. But that's okay, because all that color gives you a degree of post-processing control that didn't exist in the days of traditional black-and-white photography. My recommendation: Don't worry about whether you're going black-and-white or color behind the camera; save that decision for when you're in front of your computer. Excerpted from Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-on-One by Deke McClelland. ISBN 978-0-596-52975-8. Copyright 2007 Type & Graphics, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

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