Black and White Photoshop Tutorial

Posted by taoski | Filed under Geeky, Software

I like doing black and white photos. Correction, I LOVE doing black and white photos. When I was at college doing my Art Foundation Course a few years ago I fell in love with the bashed up old Praktika camera they loaned us in the Photography class.

I still love taking black and white photos but now that I own a Canon A70 digital camera, the black and white part is done in Adobe Photoshop.

Here is a quick tutorial on how I convert my colour shots to black and white. This is only for beginners though and I will not be going into using the advanced tools such as curves or the using the histogram.

1. Load the image into Adobe Photoshop. I am using Photoshop version CS2 for this tutorial, but I think the previous versions use the same commands.

This will be my starting image. A nice shot from my holiday to the Lake District a few years back. The photo is slightly over exposed on the sky portions, but when that converts we will get a nice over powering white sky with dark contrasting stones and hills. Remember, the effect we are going for is contrast.

2. Select Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer.

3. Tick the option for Monochrome, and slide the Red channel to 0% and the Green channel up to around 100%. You could always slide up the Blue instead and this will give a slightly different feel and contrast to the image, but I feel that the Green channel works best.

4. If you make sure you have the Preview item ticked, you can see you image change as you control the channel sliders. Sometimes a little Green and Blue can make the image look nicer. Click OK and the changes will be applied.

5. To make the image more contrasting, we will need to increase the contrast slightly. To do this, select Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast. Make sure you have the Preview item selected and gradually move the contrast slider up until you are happy with the effect. Don’t go mad though otherwise you will end up with just a bland 2 colour image! In this example, I have only gone as far as +20 contrast.

6. Click OK and you are done! Here is my final image ready for printing.

You can check out my other Black and White photos over at my Flickr page. These were all converted using this method.

Comments (7) | June 2nd, 2006

7 Responses to “Black and White Photoshop Tutorial”

  1. The Technocrat Says:
    June 2, 2006 at 11:30 am

    cool! I like it. I took a photography class just for some extra credits…I ended up liking it very much, and now almost all of the pictures in my house are black and white ones that I took for the class.

    I just need to find someone that will scan in about 30 rolls worth of negatives for me so I can throw them up on flickr…

  2. thatedeguy Says:
    June 2, 2006 at 1:36 pm

    Why wouldn’t you just do a desaturation on the shot? Then play with the contrast and such? Same effect, only 1 step.

  3. Taoski Says:
    June 2, 2006 at 3:10 pm

    Mmm.. yes, maybe.
    I will try that too and see.

    I have also seen people duplicate the desaturated image on another layer and set it to overlay with a reduced opacity…

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