Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers Tutorials
Adjustments / Black & White
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers / Adjustments / Black & White)
The Black and White Adjustment is an excellent way to convert your image into black and white. The idea behind it is that you specify how light or dark each color range in the image should be when it gets converted into black and white. So, for example, you could make areas that were initially green turn very light and blues turn very dark for an infrared type effect. There are so many choices that it can be a little overwhelming initially. With the default choices this image doesn't look very good, but Adobe provides some Presets in the drop-down menu that can work as is, or can serve as starting points for you to customize. They're definitely worth checking out. The Blue Filter doesn't help this image at all. Darker doesn't do much. Green looks better, it might be a starting place. High-contrast Blue - not good. High-contrast Red is pretty interesting. It looks to me like there's come clipping in the Highlights that I would want to get rid of, but that one certainly has some merit. Infrared doesn't look very good on this image. Lighter definitely not; not Maximize Black, Maximize White not so good. Neutral Density - again, I've got clipping. I don't particularly like it. The Red Filter looks reasonable and it has a little bit less clipping than the High-density Red did, and the Yellow Filter, which is very similar to the Red. If you look at the numbers you'll see that just the greens and the cyans change a little bit. So I would think that I would want to start with either the Red Filter or the Yellow Filter for this image, and I may pull back just a little bit on some of the reds, and the blues I'm going to make a little bit darker, give a little more infrared feel to the sky, and add a little drama. If you forget which color was where in your image you could use the Visibility Icon and toggle it on and off to remind yourself, or you can click on the On-Screen Adjustment and then come over to the image and drag. Dragging to the right makes an area lighter, and to the left makes it darker, and when you do this Photoshop is automatically picking the color Sliders that need adjusting. That makes it pretty easy to work through your image. All pixels that are similar in color are changed accordingly. If you only want those pixels in a certain geographic part of your image to be modified you'll need to also use the Masks Panel and work with a Layer Mask which we cover in detail in another movie. If you get a combination that you'd like to save to apply to other images go to the fly-out menu and choose Save Black and White Preset. Give it a Name and then when you go to look for it, it will be in your Black and White Presets. Notice that there's also the option to Tint in the Black and White Adjustment. When you choose it, the image changes from black and white to a sepia tone and then you can adjust your Sliders accordingly. You can also click on the Swatch there to change the Sepia tone that's applied. After you've made you image into a black and white image, if you come back to the Layers Panel you have the option of reducing the Opacity of the Layer to partially reveal the color again. Now, I'm not sure that that's going to do anything wonderful in this image, but sometimes it yields interesting effects and it's worth remembering that you can reduce the Opacity of the effect to make it more translucent. The Black and White Adjustment is a very powerful way to convert your images to black and white.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers |
| Author: | Ellen Anon |
| SKU: | 34036 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-74-2 |
| Release Date: | 2009-09-23 |
| Duration: | 8.5 hrs / 112 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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