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I know, you’re probably asking “A tutorial on converting images to greyscale? You must be off your rocker! It’s just two mouse clicks!” But ah! It can be so much more than that! To get the best of your photos, you must use the right method! And this tutorial will help you decide which method that is!
First things first: The image we will be using:
Our Base Image
There are 3 different ways of converting to greyscale in Photoshop. There is the simple Image->Adjustments->Desaturate, which produces this result:
Image->Adjustments->Desaturate
That gets the job done, but we can do much better. Another way is to go to Image->Adjustments->Hue and Saturation. This allows you to choose just how much saturation you want the image to have, and 9 times out of 10 will produce the same results.
Finally, there is Image->Adjustments->Channel Mixer, which will produce the most striking results. This will open a dialogue box which lets you decide exactly how much of each RGB value to output in the image. The key here is to check “Monochrome” at the bottom of the dialogue box.
The Channel Mixer
Here we can play with the sliders to get the best output. Leaving the settings as is (100% Red, 0% Blue, 0% Green) yields the following result, looking slightly infrared:
100% Red, 0% Green, 0% Blue
0% Red, 100% Green, 0% Blue creates a slightly deeper skin tone:
0% Red, 100% Green, 0% Blue
And 0% Red, 0% Green, 100% Blue creates a very dark skin tone, as we are losing all of the reds and greens in the image, leaving just the blues, which don’t reflect off human skin very well:
0% Red, 0% Green, 100% Blue
Play around with the settings to get a result you like. Some interesting results:
-100% Red, 100% Green, 100% Blue
100% Red, -94% Green, 142% Green, -98% Constant
And I think I’ll go with that one for this particular picture. A little overexposed in the background, but without dividing this image into layers, that’s as good as it’s going to get. Maybe we’ll cover that in the next tutorial.
Hopefully this tutorial has shown you that effective Black and White in post is more than just a few clicks, but isn’t overly complicated. With just a few extra minutes per photo, you can produce some fantastic photographs.
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