Sidebar Title Converting an Image to Black and Whitegoes Here
In a world that is saturated with color, something about the
elegant simplicity of black-and-white imagery 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. Creat-
ing a beautiful black-and-white image can be very satisfying
and relatively easy.
You can rob your pixels of color in Photoshop CS5 in many
ways, from the classic Channel Mixer to the Black & White
command and Camera Raw’s Convert to Grayscale check
box. Happily, each one of these functions puts you in charge
of the color-to-grayscale conversion process.
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.
Prior to Photoshop CS3, the best way to convert
a color image to black and white was the Chan-
nel Mixer. With an image open in Photoshop,
choose Image→Adjustments→Channel Mixer.
Turn on the Monochrome check box at the bot-
tom 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, Photoshop tracks your total as you work
so you don’t have to do the math on your own.
Original full-color photographChannel Mixer in PhotoshopBy way of example, I’ll start with a full-color image from
iStockphoto photographer Joseph Jean Rolland Dubé, shown
below. 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 the high-contrast
portrait pictured at the bottom of this page.
Choose Image→Adjustments→Black & White to display a
series of six slider bars, one for each of the conventional pri-
mary colors. Instead of mixing channels, the Black & White
command weights colors, making for a more subjective ex-
perience. It also means you’re not bound to make the values192 Lesson 6: Adjusting Color and Luminance