MAKE BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOS IN PHOTOSHOP TUTORIAL

 

Credit by : photoshopCAFE

Make Black and White Photos in Photoshop TutorialHey, Colin Smith here from PhotoshopCAFE and today I'm going to show you the best way to do Black and White inside of Photoshop. As you're aware, there's more than one way of doing many things inside of Photoshop, and black and white is one of those.  There are multiple ways of creating a black and white image, but I'm going to show you the best way, and I'm going to tell you why it's the best way. First of all, the first way you could do it is to convert it to grayscale, but what you do, when you do that, is you throw away two-thirds of your information.  So you're throwing away two of the channels and only keeping one, so you're losing a lot of information; a lot of details.  It's not the best method. The second method, which is sometimes people use and it's great for doing special effects, to get a quick black and white is to just desaturate the image.  You just Command ShiftView, Ctrl Shift View on Windows, or just select Image Desaturate.  Now, that will get you a black and white and maintain the three channels, but the problem with that is you get no adjustments.  You don't get to choose which areas you would like to have lighter, and which areas you like to have darker, so it's one trick ponyónot necessarily the best. The third option which most people are using is a black and white adjustment.  If you are smart, you'll be using it as an adjustment layer because it's much better, but here's problem with that.  That will give you a lot of control or enable you to bring up theHighlights and the Shadows wherever you want, but the problem is if you push one of the thosecolor sliders too far, it starts to introduce odd effects, and you'll see like this grain, and this little kind of noisy thing going on there.  And it will degrade the quality of your image if you're not careful. So, then, the last method and the method that I'm going to show you actually is a method we've been doing for years, and that's to use Channel Mixer.  So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how to create a black and white conversion using the Channel Mixer, and what it does is it uses the actual information in the colored channels, so you're not introducing any noise or any problems in there, and we can blend the different channels together to get just the right blend, to get the perfect black and white.  So let's jump in and have a look at that right now. So here we have an image that we want to convert to black and white, and we could go under the Image Adjustments and under the Adjustments here, we can find our Channel Mixer.  But whatI'm going to do is I'm going to apply it as an adjustment layer because it's always a better idea to use an adjustment layer.  So just grab the adjustment layers here and then we're going to go to Channel Mixer.  Now, what Channel Mixer doesólet me just pull the Properties so we can see it on the side hereóas we go into these channels, if we actually look at the image, there's our composite image that we see in RGB channels.  If we look in the Red Channel, we can see that's the information there, where it's lighter, it means there more of that color.  So we can see there's redder here on the rocks and in the trees. If we hit the Green Channel, this will show us where we are on the greens.  Where its dark means there's an absence of green.  Where it's light, there's more green, as we can tell that water is pretty green.  And then, if we hit Blue, notice there that we can see it's brighter there in the sky, meaning there's more blue in the sky, bluer in the water. You can see it's very dark over here and in the trees, meaning there's no blue in there. So the point of working with the Channel Mixer is that we can convert it to a monochromatic or a grayscale by clicking here on Monochrome.  Now, this converts it to black and white, but the cool thing about it is that we can adjust the red, green, and blue and balance the amount of each one of those color channels to create a better conversion.  And you'll notice here that right now, by default, it's 40, 40, and 20, and the total there is 100.  Now you need to be careful not to go too much over 100 because if you do that, then the image will be too bright and it will start to clip.  If it stays too low beneath it, then the image is not going to be light enough.  Sometimes there's going to be times, obviously, a whenthe image is a little dark or a little light, where it doesn't have to reach 100.  And he also have the ability to do the constant. So if we mix these and we get a nice mix between the three of them, and it's a little too bright or a little too dark, we can just move the constant.  So let's have a look at how this works.  Let's look at the sky there with the blue.  If I increase the blue, notice I can brighten up that area of the sky, and if I go there to darken this down, obviously, its affecting the whole image.  But look at these areas that don't really have blue, such as these leaves here and these rocks, and some of these little islands here.  You'll notice that they don't move as much because they're not being affected by blue.  And it's the same thing with the red.  If we do the reds here, we can see our rocks there will get a little brighter or darker, and you can see how that affects like the sky, for example, is not really changing much, so you can see that. So what we're going to do here is I'm just going to reset by clicking there and we 're going to hit our monochromatic again.  And in the greens, we can see how all our greens are affecting everything, particularly in this foliage over here and in these leaves. If we push it a little too high, it can start to look infrared.  All right, so we're doing to reset this.  We're going to have monochromatic, and, now, we're going to have a look at creating our Channel Mixer.  Now what I want to do is we'll start with our reds.  Let's play around with our reds a little bit.  I'm kind of liking that.  And let's play with our greens, and then our blues, maybe too much blue.  We want that blue to lighten up a little bit, but we don't want it to blow it out here, so why don't we take these reds down.  I want the greens so you can see how it's really just changing the overall appearance. So let's find a nice amount of green there.  I'm kind of liking how this foliage is looking here.  The blues are looking pretty good.  Maybe the reds could be brightened up a little bit. Let's just play around with that until we find a nice mix.  So, now, if you look at this, what we've got here is a pretty good overall mix between the three.  Now you just go and play around with them a little bit until you get exactly what you want.  But that is only91%, so we can brighten up some areas.  If we want to brighten up maybe the skies the blues, we could push that up a little bit more until we get a good adjustment there, so you can kind of see that's what we've got. Now watch for some of these areas that might be clipping.  We can fix that by the constantly reducing it or we can increase it to brighten up certain areas there too.  So don't be afraid to use that.  I'm just going to set that back to zero because we don't need it right now. I'm just going to give this just a little bit more into the reds and I'm going to pull back the blue just a little bit because I don't want that to clip.  So, as you can see, that we've got a pretty nice conversion there, the way we've converted this to black and white, and we've maintained a lot of the detail there. Hey guys, thanks for watching.  As you can see, the Channel Mixer really is the best way to create a black and white conversion inside of Photoshop.  If you enjoyed this, hit the Subscribe button because I've got new tutorials I'm creating all the time, andI'd love for you to have them.  Also, don't forget, add a comment, add a Like, tell your friends about this.  And until next time, I'll see you at the CAFE.