Photoshop Lesson 6 | From Colour to Black & White
It is a well known concept that even if your aim is to have your photograph in black and white, you should capture it in colour and then convert it to black and white using a photo editing program. The reason for this? Well it’s actually really simple!
When you take a photo in colour, you have thousands of tonal ranges, shadows and contrast levels. Your photograph will be rich with layers and layers of these aspects.
When you take your photograph in black and white, you will have a lot less of these tonal ranges and contrast levels. So it makes sense to capture the photo in colour and then convert all of those colour levels to black and white separately. This allows you to keep the quality and richness of a colour photo, but view it and save it in black and white.
So here is how we do this in Photoshop.
Open your image. At the bottom of your layers layout tab select your half black half white circle and from the menu that pops up you can select ‘black and white’.
This will do two things. The first is to add another layer to your image which is in black and white. The second is to open a little control window.
This control window is your key to the perfect black and white image.
With this window you will be able to set how dark or light (black or white) you want to set each different colour in the original photograph.
Once you have set the slider bars and the image is looking how you want it to look you can enhance these changes even more by adding some brightness/contrast to your image.
Press the half black half white circle again and select ‘brightness and contrast’ in the list that appears. Another layer will appear in your layers menu and a brightness/contrast control window will pop up – play with those scroll bars and when you are happy you can apply the change.
Now here is something extra. Lets say you like the brightness and contrast levels you have set, but some areas are maybe a bit overdone.
Click on your brightness and contrast layer – select the black paint brush – set it to the size you want and make sure the hardness is very light (less than 10% should be fine) – you can make these adjustments to your paintbrush by right clicking anywhere on the image when you have the paintbrush selected.
Now gently ‘paint’ over the areas where you want slightly less contrast.
Basically what happens with these layers is that your entire layer is ‘white’ in your layer menu, white means 100% there. When you paint over it in black – you are erasing bits of the layer and the layer beneath it will then shine through (in this case, your black and white layer) you can also do the opposite…if you have painted in black and you rather want to increase the contrast again, select white and ‘add’ it again. White adds, Black subtracts the effect.
(you can also paint with grey if you want to semi-add the effect)
Then save your now black and white image under a new name and you are all done!
[...] Step Two Take a look at your photo and make any fixes or changes you want to make before you proceed. (Lighting adjustments / Removing unwanted bits etc You will find tutorials on how to do this on our blog) Then if your image is not black and white you are going to need to convert it to black and white, reason being that night time shots have virtually no colour information except for a strong blue cast. We’ll add the cast later. (lesson on how to convert to B&W) [...]