Photoshop Tips: Black and White

Even though digital cameras have made colour photography and colour processing easier than ever, black and white photographs still hold as much charm as they always have. This page of our Photoshop tips section looks at the best ways of creating sensual and powerful black and white pictures.
My first tip is not to use the in-camera black and white modes; though it seems like the most obvious way to proceed, discarding the colour information at this stage will prevent you from making some creative changes in Photoshop (or whichever photo-editing package you use).
There are a couple of different routes you can take to make a colour picture Black & White in Photoshop.

Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation

The most simple way of  removing the colour is to Desaturate, but this doesn′t offer you any flexibility. I sometimes find that a partially desaturated image is more interesting, so I prefer to use a Hue/Saturation adjustment, which allows me to control the level of colour left in the image. Additionally Photoshop allows you to "colorize" the picture – i.e. adding colour information that was not in the original photograph. The image below has a sepia tone for example:

Image -> Adjustments -> Black & White

Another way of making an image Black & White is via the Photoshop Black & White adjustment. This option allows you to control the amount of each base colour (Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue and Magenta) that are allowed to go through to make up the black and white version of the picture. This will feel quite familiar to photographers who have used coloured filters with film cameras.

Curves and Levels

It is really important to ensure that your Black & White images have a full tonal range (see here for information on using histograms ). Without this they will seem dull and lack all punch.

Rescue Boring Colour Photographs

I sometimes find that photographs that do not stand out well as colour photographs work much better in Black and White. Providing the composition is reasonable, the conversion to B&W can often overcome lacklustre or dull colouring, particularly if you use the Black & White adjustment above; with this you can change the balance between colours – making blue skies or green plants darker while leaving the pink skin tones bright for example.