Converting your images to Black and White

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Taking Control

Photographers have always been keen to find ways of converting images to black and white or monochrome. There are several different ways in which this can be done, however, one of the best ways that I have come across is to use layer adjustments. This method will also give us total control over the full tonal range of our image.

 

With our image open in Photoshop click on the layer adjustments icon on the bottom of the layers palette and select Hue/Saturation.

 

The Hue Saturation will appear as a layer adjustment in our layers palettes and the Hue Saturation dialog box will open. Just click OK. We can now repeat this process again so we have two Hue Saturation layer adjustments in our layers palates.

 

Clicking on the top Hue Saturation layer adjustments opens the Hue Saturation dialog box, we can now reduce saturation to -100 which will convert our image to black and white.

 

Now click on the Hue Saturation layer adjustments immediately above our background image - this now becomes our live layer. From the blend mode drop-down menu select Colour.

 

Now comes the fun part- making sure we're working on the layer adjustments in the colour blend mode, we can begin adjusting the Hue and the Saturation slider. You will notice our image begins to change the tonal range of our black and white image.

 

And there is still more to come - from the Edit Drop down menu on the Hue Saturation pallet we can also select individual colours. And again using the hue and saturation sliders we can make further adjustments until we are entirely happy with the tonal range of our black and white image. But be warned, you can spend hours playing with this method :-)

 

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