How To: Quality B&W Photos

Here's a quick tutorial on getting the best black and white image from your digital photos: tone control + less noise than grayscale or Lab methods.

First of all ALWAYS shoot in color. I know cameras have B&W settings, don't use it - you can never get the color back if you change your mind.

This Tutorial is written using Photoshop CS, but you can do most of this in Photoshop 7 or Elements.

1. On the Layers window, choose the Adjustment Layers icon (circle with two halves), and pick Selective Color from the pop-up menu. When the next window appears, just click OK (we'll change those settings later).




2. Click on the Adjustment Layers icon again, but this time pick Channel Mixer from the menu. Set all 3 sliders to equal about 100 (I'm lazy and just type in 33). Don't forget to check Monochrome at the bottom. Click OK to close.



3. Now we're ready to fine tune our new B&W. Double-click the Selective Color Layer and play with the sliders for each color. If you push the colors too far image noise (speckles) will show up so be careful. Greens are the worst for this. When you're done click OK to close.



You're Done!

Extras. But, adjustment layers have the added benefit of masks, the white box to the right of each layer icon. Think of these as layer stencils. White is opaque, black is transparent. Soooo ... you can do anything to a mask you can do to your image: paint on it, select areas and fill, blur, adjust curves or levels, sky's the limit!

Here I've done a quick selective color reveal. The channel Mixer layer is the one that turns the image B&W, so by painting on it's mask I can reveal the layers below. If I paint with gray or lighten the mask the reveal becomes less visible.



Why Work Non-destructively?
Once you edit an image and save you're stuck with it unless you want to repeat all your steps. By using adjustment layers and masks you can do quite a bit without ever altering your base image. This is very useful when you decide to make changes or variations of the same image.

The exception to this is dodging/burning and effects filters. Although even these can be done on duplicate layers, just in case.