Alpha Photography Blog

One of the beauties of digital photography is the flexibility.  No longer do photographers need to carry two SLR bodies around - one with colour film, and the other with black and white film.

With digital, you can take the photograph in colour, and convert it to black and white with a few keystrokes in Photoshop…

As with everything, there is always a catch.  To obtain true black and white, there’s no substitute for black and white slide film.  Negative film comes a close second, and then finally, digital black and white.  Still, the results that you get from the digital creation are good enough in most cases.

As with all things Photoshop, there are a few different ways to achieve the same, or similar result.  In the case of converting a colour photograph to black and white, each different way produces a varying outcome.

Here are the main techniques I use.

My personal favourite is Gradient Map, but it does depend on the subject, and the effect I’m going for.  I find Gradient Map the most natural looking black and white effect.

In Photoshop, the process - Image > Adjustments > Gradient Map > select the Black and White box from the drop down menu.  Here it is on an arrangement of flowers:

You really get the feeling of the different colours in the flowers, by the shade of light and dark.

The next technique is Channel Mixer.  To achieve this in Photoshop - Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer > put a tick in the Monochrome box.

This tends to wash out the depth in many of the flowers:

Finally, there’s the good ole Desaturated technique - Image > Adjustments > Desaturate.

This certainly takes the least mouse clicks, but not sure it yields the best result - in this case:

It’s all personal preference.  Photography can be very subjective, so it comes down to what you prefer the look of.

Now, for something fun - here is a variation on adjusting Hue and Saturation, to give the flowers a “different” look:

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 1:00 am and is filed under Photo Editing & Printing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.