As much as I loooooooovvveee bright colorful photos, sometimes a good strong black and white conversion is just what the doctor ordered.
Most digital cameras these days can actually create black and white images on their own; however, the best monochrome results are still produced by converting a color image using Photoshop or another editing software.
^^I love this photo SO much — it was taken by Jer’s mom (edit by me) on one perfect day at the beach back in Naples in early 2013.^^
By starting with a color photo and then converting it to black and white in Photoshop, you have complete control over the conversion. And there are more than a handful of ways to convert a photo to black and white, but today I’ll just walk through one of the best and simplest ways available — one that still affords you the additional control of fine-tuning your conversion.
Using a Black and White Adjustment Layer in Photoshop
Using Photoshop’s black and white adjustment layer is an easy and effective way to achieve professional quality results with monochrome conversions. The black and white adjustment layer gives you more control and flexibility by using six color sliders to “tweak” your conversion.
Simply go to Layer >> New Adjustment Layer >> Black and White. The toolbox that appears in the Adjustments Palette is where you can move the six color sliders right or left to brighten or darken respective tones in your photo. Sliding a control to the left darkens that color, while sliding to the right brightens it. You can also choose from the presets in the drop-down menu.
You can make very targeted adjustments to your photo by selecting the finger icon in the upper left corner. It allows you to make targeted adjustments withouth having to think about the color sliders. Simply click on the image wherever you believe that it should be darker and drag to the left (brighten to the right).
Simple, right??? :)))
I recommend playing around with this method or any others you already know of to really evoke the true magic of monochrome.
Happy Photo Friday!
*I’ve started a regular “PHOTO FRIDAY” series on the blog. You can find all of my photography series posts >> here.
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