Color image convert to black and white how to#

An increase in the highlight luminosity, adding a “feel” to the photo, and a nice bit of highlight retained at the top of the trees to offset their blackness. Good separation between sky and building. Here’s what our final image looks like compared to the first, unedited conversion:

Applying these filters can soften you image a good deal. Lastly, when using the yellow filter, it’s always a good idea to sharpen your image to keep it cleaner. Use a minimal Amount (up to -25 or so) and then manipulate the Midpoint slider (as much as you care to) to bring a smoother, less noticeable gradation to your picture. This can work well with portraits, but for large patches of sky, it becomes too noticeable. Then add one more touch: the ‘Lens Correction’ tab (the sixth tab over) and the two ‘Lens Vignetting’ sliders: ‘Amount’ and ‘Midpoint.’ Amount will bring the edges in sharply and will be very noticeable when used to extreme. The ‘Blue’ slider will create a dense sky and the “Yellow’ slider will adjust your highlights. Once you’ve checked the ‘Convert’ box, there will only be a ‘Grayscale Mix,’ greatly simplifying your choices. When working with large swatches of sky, there’s only one thing to do. The palm trees are going to go completely black with very little detail (you can always open up the shadows locally if you want). With some radical adjustments in Clarity and blacks, then converting, the image looks like this: Temperature will also be effective in changing tonality before you go to the HSL tab. Look up at the Blacks slider and add some depth to you darker zones. Clarity will give you a good deal of sharpness at the edges or add some interesting glow to your highlights, and Vibrance will act as a gentler saturation. The HSL/Grayscale has a checkbox at the top of it that says: “Convert to Grayscale.” It will give very generic results, like the image on the right above.īefore checking that box, go to the General tab and adjust the Clarity and Vibrance sliders. The most significant tabs to work with will be the general tab, the first one on the left, the tone curve (second) and the HSL/Grayscale (the HSL stands for Hue, Saturation and Luminance). If you need to do detail work, open the file (at the Open Object button) and work locally within Photoshop. Remember, this is where you do your global work. The panel will be ‘floating’ above Photoshop and it looks like this:Īll of the controls you need to convert your photo to b&w will be right here in tabs on the right. Always make corrections to your file globally in Camera Raw, the panel you will arrive at when opening a RAW file (using CS3).

The second thing is don’t open an image in Photoshop and work in its “native” environment – you will lose tons of data and degrade your image significantly in the process. The first thing to remember is this: if you are going to make changes to an image is don’t work on the original! Always save a master copy somewhere else, and then rename the file you’re working on. Here we’re going to talk exclusively about global changes. That relationship is going to stay the same unless you highlight one are and change it separately from the rest of the photo. It’s important to remember that when making global changes to an image, you cannot change relative values. The separation between the shadow side of the building and the sky at the top is almost indistinguishable. On the right is what it would look like if you simply desaturate it without any additional help. The original, on the left is essentially a flat picture, with no corrections at all.

Let’s take a perfectly neutral color image: It will require more work in the long run when it comes to post-processing, but the results will be better because you’ll have more digital information with RAW than JPG.

Color image convert to black and white how to#

There are any number of places where you can learn about bit depth and color channels that will explain in detail how to go down the Photoshop rabbit hole when it comes to converting color photos into black & white, but here we’re going to use some pretty basic tools that will streamline the process.įirst, it’s really important to shoot RAW with your digital camera. Try turning it into a black & white image instead. Take an image that you’re getting ready to pass on and experiment a bit longer. Or you may simply want to see what a color image looks like in black & white. Maybe you have a photo that doesn’t have a lot of color in it to begin with. You try breaking the rules by experimenting with images shot directly into the sun or even high contrast images that wash out the color, or you’re at a wedding and flash bulbs are going off all over the place and one of them finds its way into your picture. There are always going to be days when you return home with a pocketful of images, hopefully all shot in RAW, and some of them, for whatever reason, just don’t do anything for you.