Christian Photographers Community

I learned a new technique in photoshop for converting a color picture to B&W.

I thought I might put the steps down here so others could experiment with it and see how well they like it too.

If you like tips like this, I'll write a few more as I think of them, as I find time...  ;)


Photoshop Color to B&W

- open color picture in photoshop

- make a new layer

- fill new layer with black

- change blend mode on new layer to 'color'

- between these two layers, create a hue/saturation layer

- adjust hue from one extreme to the other to adjust the b&w look of the picture (to taste)

That's it...  Any questions?

Jim

Thanks for the new technique. I was skeptical about how will it would work, but I just tried it and it seems to work great and the results were very good...

Why do you make a new layer black?

it makes it so the color blend mode transforms it to shades of black based on the color.  I suppose if you made it a diffrent color, it would make it shades of that color based on the rgb color value...  I'll have to try that.

that's an interesting approach...  I've always done B/W conversions in a few different ways...  the traditional grey scale option, dumping color channels always works well, not to mention the previously mentioned hue/saturation channel dump.

The black layer/color blending seems to work well.  Has a certain different cet of parameters than the hue/sat technique  when done on its own which are interesting.  My blues became darker and my greens became lighter as compared to a normal hue/sat dump but that could just be my image.

Using the two together as mention as far as I can tell is neglects the possible benefits of at least one of the layers since it seems to me that it's the last layer on top of the image that makes the difference in this situation since both layers are affecting the same exact thing and working off of the same palette.

~Phil

Interesting...I have to try that on my next B&W conversion. I usually use the channel mixer to convert my photos to B&W and play around with the red channel to get the right tones. It is similar to using a red filter on a film camera.