When most people think
about black and white photos, the first subject that comes to mind is people. Portraits
can benefit greatly from the mood provided by grayscale images, but one can
only agree that black and white landscapes can be at least as magical as
colorful ones when looking at some of the photos made by, for instance, Ansel
Adams.
At the moment of
pressing the shutter, though, it is always a good idea to shoot in color and
only turn your images into black and white during post-processing. The obvious
reason for this is that, once you are at home, having the color image you can
always decide to keep it that way if, for any reason, you don’t like the way
your image looks in black and white.
The other reason is
that converting an image to
black and white can involve much more than simply reducing the
saturation of all colors at once.
Take for instance the
following image of the skyline of Atlanta, USA.
There are two
straightforward ways to convert an image to black and white in Photoshop. The
first one is to bring the saturation to a minimum by means of a
‘Hue/Saturation’ adjustment layer. The image below shows the result of this
process.
In general, we already
have our grayscale image. We could already start to make the final adjustments
to make our image look the way we want but, as you will see next, we are
missing invaluable information that can help us make local enhancements while
making the conversion.
Now let’s remove the
‘Hue/Saturation’ layer and create a ‘Black and White’ one instead. As you can
see in the following image, the newly created adjustment layers (inside the red
rectangle) contains several sliders, each corresponding to a different color
(Reds, Yellows, Greens, Cyans, Blues and Magentas).
What these sliders
will allow us to do is control the luminosity of the areas with the matching
colors in the original image. This provides an incredibly easy way to enhance
the contrast of the image on a local scale without having to undergo complex selection
processes. For the following image, I increased the value of the ‘Greens’ and
‘Yellows’ sliders to enhance the trees and the field (including the yellow
letters) and decreased that of the ‘Cyans’ and ‘Blues’ to darken the sky in
order to produce more contrast.
This last point is a
very important one to keep in mind when editing grayscale images. The fact that
you are not including colors in your photo anymore means that your image can
have a rather flat look and this has to be counteracted by carefully adjusting
the contrast. Actually, pushing the contrast much farther than you would
normally due when dealing with a color image will normally produce much better
results.
However, increasing
the contrast tends to produce dark images and that is why it is a good idea to
always make contrast adjustments together with brightness adjustments. For
this, simply create a ‘Brightness/Contrast’ layer and alternatively move both
sliders until you are happy with the result.
Since we are pushing
both the brightness and contrast to relatively high values, you can see that
some parts of the image will get degraded. The bright areas will tend to look
overexposed due to the increased brightness and the dark areas will look noisy
due to the increased contrast. Don’t worry about that right now. Simply focus
on the regions with intermediate brightness (the trees and houses in our
image).
Now you can simply
mask the areas that got degraded by painting with a black ‘Brush Tool’ over the
layer mask that is created along with the adjustment layer. This will depend on
the particular image you are working with, but I find that an opacity of about
20 to 30 % tends to work well and gives you more control than using a larger
value.
Another advantage of
keeping the color information while capturing your images is that you can also
play with selective color, which is nothing more than converting your image to
black and white while keeping specific colors in specific regions.
For instance, let’s
turn our image into black and white and keep the yellow tones of the letters in
the stadium and the roof of the skyscraper on the left. To do this, we take our
color image and create a ‘Hue/Saturation’ adjustment layer, where we completely
desaturate all the colors but the one we want to keep.
Next, we create
another ‘Hue/Saturation’ layer and bring the saturation to a minimum while on
the ‘Master’ channel. This will of course create a completely black and white
image. To recover the yellow in the areas we want, we simply mask out the
adjustment layer by painting with a black brush with a 100 % opacity. Since all
the surrounding areas were already converted to black and white with the
previous adjustment layer, we don’t even need to be precise when using the
brush tool.
And that’s it. With a
few steps, you can keep the color you want in any area of your image while
converting the rest of the image to grayscale. The truth is that some people
love and some people hate selective color and, from my experience, it can work
out pretty well in some cases creating interesting images and it can also
produce some ugly results when over-used, but in any case it makes sense to try
it and you might be gladly surprised with the final results!
Contributor Bio:
Dan Chabert is a self-taught photographer
currently based in Copenhagen, Denmark. His main interests are travel and
landscape photography; he currently works as the editor-in-chief at Sleeklens.
