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Sure it’s easy to just open up a photo in Photoshop and press CTRL+Shift+U right? Well that loses much of the photographs contrast.
With this tutorial you’ll learn one method of taking a color photograph and doing a proper black and white conversion. The final product will look a lot sharper and brighter than if you just desaturated a color photo.

So let’s get started.

First we’ll open up the photo that you want to make into a greyscale masterpiece.

First of all make a Gradient Map, Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map… Use the following settings:

That will make your image greyscale and keep all of the contrast.

Again in the Layer menu, make a Brightness/Contrast layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Brightness/Contrast…)

Use the following settings, or what is needed to brighten up your image:

That’s it for this tutorial. You should now have an easy way to create a black and white from a color photograph without losing any contrast.

Posted on Saturday, August 26th, 2006 at 10:34 am in Basics, Photo Effects.