Written By Steve Patterson

For most of Photoshop's lifetime, converting color photos to black and white has left many people feeling blue. Sure, there's been quick and easy ways to go about it, like simply desaturating the image or converting it to Grayscale, but these methods gave us no control over the process, leaving Photoshop to throw away color information any way it saw fit, and the results were usually less than spectacular. We've had slightly better and more impressive sounding ways of converting to black and white, like switching over to the Lab color mode to separate the color from the lightness values in the image, but even then, we had no control over the results. In fact, up until recently, the only way to gain control over the conversion was to use Photoshop's Channel Mixer, which was fine as long as you understood a thing or two about how Channels work. Even then, using the Channel Mixer never really seemed natural because it forced us to think like Photoshop rather than asking Photoshop to think like us. For something as common as converting color photos to black and white, there had to be a better way.

Fortunately, the folks at Adobe agreed, and in Photoshop CS3, they introduced the only tool you'll ever need to convert your color images to black and white. It's called the Black & White adjustment, and it's easy, it's totally natural, and it's even lots of fun! In fact, it's so simple that anyone can use it regardless of their skill level! With the Black & White adjustment, you can easily emphasize certain areas of an image and de-emphasize other areas based on their original colors, without having to know anything about Channels or what Photoshop is doing behind the scenes to display color. Want the sky to be darker in the black and white version of your photo? Just drag the Blues slider towards the left. Need skin tones to appear lighter? Drag the Reds slider towards the right. Does the brightness of the grass or the trees need a little fine tuning? Drag the Greens slider left or right until you get it just the way you want it. It's really that simple!

As with most image adjustments in Photoshop, the new Black & White converter comes in two flavors. There's the standard pixel-based version found by going up to the Image menu and choosing Adjustments, and there's the adjustment layer version. We're going to focus entirely on the adjustment layer version, since as we saw in the Non-Destructive Photo Editing with Adjustment Layers tutorial, adjustment layers allow us to work flexibly and non-destructively on our images. Since the Black & White adjustment was introduced in Photoshop CS3, I'll be using CS3 for this tutorial. Of course, you'll need at least Photoshop CS3 as well if you want to follow along.

Want an easier way to follow along with our tutorials? Download them as printable PDFs!

Here's a photo I have open in Photoshop. I want to convert this photo to black and white using the Black & White adjustment:

I want to use the adjustment layer version of the Black & White converter, so I'll click on the New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette and choose Black & White from the list of adjustment layers that appears:

This brings up the Black and White dialog box. The main features in the dialog box are the six color sliders, each one controlling one of six primary colors in the image starting with Reds at the top followed in order by Yellows, Greens, Cyans, Blues, and finally Magentas at the bottom:

These sliders adjust how bright or dark each color will appear in the black and white version, and we can use them to emphasize or de-emphasize certain objects or areas in the image, brightening areas we want to bring attention to and darkening less important areas, based entirely on the original color of those areas. Dragging a slider towards the right will brighten areas that contained that color, while dragging a slider to the left will darken areas that contained the color. There's really nothing more to it than that!

Notice how, when you bring up the Black & White dialog box, each slider is already set to a certain value, with Reds set to 40%, Yellows set to 60%, and so on? These are the default values that Photoshop uses as a starting point for the black and white conversion. You'll also notice that as soon as you choose the Black & White adjustment from the Layers palette, Photoshop instantly converts your photo to black and white using those default settings. Here's my image as it appears so far with the default slider values:

The default settings for my black and white conversion are perfect! Or at least, they would be perfect if I wanted the man's shirt and the girl's dress to be the main focus of the image. Unfortunately, that's not really the result I'm going for, but that's okay because this is just a starting point. I can simply adjust the sliders to make whatever changes I need. To start with, I want the sky above the man's head to appear a little darker. Now, since I'm looking at the image already converted to black and white, I can't see what the original color of the sky was, but I know from memory and common sense that the sky was probably blue. So to darken the sky, I simply need to drag the Blues slider in the dialog box towards the left. The further I drag to the left, the darker the sky, as well as anything else in the image that contains blue, will appear. There's usually a lot of cyan in the sky as well, so I'll also drag the Cyans slider towards the left. There are no specific values to use here. It depends entirely on your image and the look you're trying to achieve, so as I drag the sliders, I'll keep an eye on my image in the document window to make sure I don't darken the sky too much. Making changes that are too drastic could also introduce banding, giving you ugly, harsh transitions between colors or brightness levels:

After dragging the Blues and Cyans sliders towards the left, the sky in the black and white version of my photo is now a little darker, which helps bring more attention to the main subjects in the foreground. To make it easier to see the changes, I've divided the photo into a "Before and After" view, with the default brightness of the sky on the right and the new, slightly darker version on the left:

Depending on the image you're working with, you may be able to get away with darkening the sky even more. In my case though, if I had tried to darken it any further, I would have ended up with the ugly banding problem I mentioned. Here's what the sky would have looked like. Notice all the harsh transitions between brightness values, especially where the trees and sky meet? That's banding. You definitely want to avoid it, so make sure you keep an eye on your image as you drag the sliders:

If you did go too far with a slider, you can undo the last change you made either by going up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and choosing Undo or, for a faster way, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Z (Win) / Command+Z (Mac). Of course, you can also simply drag the slider itself to undo the change.

Still scrolling through web pages? Download our Photoshop tutorials as print-ready PDFs!

Go to page: 1 | 2