Adobe Photoshop CS5 One-on-One

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.

Below and to the right, you can see the results of my applica-
tion 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 maxi-
mum, 300 percent, I was able to clear up the eyes
more surely than if the model had used Visine.

Camera Raw, which we’ll see up close in Lesson
9, 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 mov-
ing the Saturation slider 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 right-clicking an image thumbnail in the
Bridge and choosing Open in Camera Raw. Then
click the icon below the histogram to switch to
the HSL/Grayscale panel. Then turn on the Con-
vert to Grayscale check box above the color sliders.
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 icon to display the Split
Toning panel, which lets you assign independent
colors to highlights and shadows to create a tritone.

Black & White in Photoshop

To create the bottom-right example, 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.

HSL/Grayscale in Camera Raw

Converting an Image to Black and White 193