I often look at some of Anton Corbijn’s photos and other great photographer’s work and really fall in love with the power of black-and-white images. One of the secrets is actually to identify the important parts and to bring contrast to the areas of interest. This tutorial will hopefully give you some help in achieving just that.
Preparation and necessary software
Although the tutorial is presented with Photoshop CS3 as the tool, CS2, CS, the new kid in town Pixelmator, and even Adobe Photoshop Elements in early versions are offering the functionalities to conduct the necessary steps to achieve the goal of converting your colour photos into vibrant and contrastful black-and-white pictures. This tutorial helps you to understand the basic idea and process of getting there, and offers an alternative way for Photoshop CS3 as well.
The conversion process
Step 1: Open the photo
Chose the picture or photo which you would like to convert and open it in your photo editing software.
Step 2: Create a hue/saturation adjustment layer
This tutorial introduces you to adjustment layers which are a great way to work on your photos in a non-destructive way. What does that mean? Well, you do not change the actual image data but rather the appearance of the image. You will see why that is of great help later on.
Step 3: Desaturate the photo
This first adjustment layer will simply take care of getting rid of the colour: reduce the Saturation to -100%. As mentioned earlier we are not destroying any image information but only modifying the look of it. To see the original data simply switch off the adjustment layer by clicking the little eye-icon on the left of the layer thumbnail. Clicking at the same spot again switches the adjustment layer back on. As you can see: Your photo is still intact.
Looking at the black-and-white version you might actually see a picture which is quite flat in contrasts and feels gray-ish and washed-out. A good reason to move on to Step 4.
Step 4: Select the background layer
Make sure to select the background layer with your photo on it before moving on because otherwise you might get mixed up.
Step 5: Create another hue/saturation adjustment layer
The new layer should be created in between the previous adjustment layer (Step 2) and the photo on the background layer. If this is not the case make sure to get this right before moving on.
Step 6: Increase the saturation
Often it makes sense to increase the saturation to get better results later on. +20% to +30% in the saturation settings is a good start.
Step 7: Change the blending mode
Now change the blending mode of the adjustment layer created in step 5 to Color. You will not see any difference yet but we have just prepared our adjustment layer to bring on the magic in Step 8.
Step 8: Adjust the hue settings
Now go back to the settings of this layer by simply double-clicking on it and start shifting the Hue-slider until you get a nice contrastful result in your photo. You might want to play around with the Saturation-slider as well to increase or decrease the strength of the effect.
Step 9: Create a curves adjustment layer
Last but not least you could push the contrast even more by adding another adjustment layer: This time choose Curves as the type.
Begin with settings similar to those in the screenshot and move on from there to get your best results. This step is optional. Decide for yourself whether you need to do this step at all.
Well done!
That’s it. Now you should have a photo with a nice vibrant feel to it and strong and powerful contrasts. Switch off the adjustment layers “curves” and the “color blending mode” to compare to a simply desaturation. The difference is probably amazing. Again, see the advantage of adjustment layers? Simply switch them on and off to check back to an earlier state.
Some general advice
In case you are working on your own photos and you have a digital camera which is able to take RAW format photos consider using that format in the future. The files are way bigger but Software like Photoshop offers amazing options to create black-and-white pictures from RAW files. If you are working on JPEGs or something similar make sure that the compression is not getting too visible when creating your black-and-white version. Some colour settings make compression artefacts turn out stronger than they are in the colour version.
The alternative way
Photoshop CS3 only
Photoshop CS3 offers a new Menu item for black-and-white photo conversion. Try to see whether you like to work with it or whether the above option is better for you. To some extend you have finer adjustment options but then again you are applying a destructive filter. To avoid that you could choose to create a smart filter which is only available in version CS3. More on that possibly in a later tutorial.
I hope you liked this tutorial and would love to see your pictures created using this method. Feel free to link them in the comments area if you own the rights to them. Questions, comments, and feedback is very welcome. Thank you for reading.
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