Let's take another look at the black and white image Photoshop is using for the blue channel:

This image has a lot of very dark areas, especially in the bird itself, with the exception of the bird's head which is very bright. This should mean that the only part of the bird that should appear blue is its head, although its belly should also have a noticeable amount of blue, as well as its feet and the piece of wood it's standing on. Let's take a look:

Sure enough, the bird's head is very much blue, and we can also see blue in its belly, as well as its feet and the piece of wood. The rest of the bird has no noticeable blue areas, which is why it appeared so dark in the black and white image.

And that just about wraps up our look at how the RGB color mode and color channels work inside Photoshop, except for one thing. We still haven't seen where you can access these color channels. You'll find them in the appropriately-named Channels palette, which is grouped in with the Layers palette:

The Channels palette looks a lot like the Layers palette, except that it shows color channel information instead of layers. You can see that there's one for Red, one for Green and one for Blue, and each one contains it's own separate black and white version of the image, just as I've shown in this tutorial. The channel at the very top, "RGB", isn't really a channel at all. It's just the composite of all three channels, giving us the full color photo. You can click on any of the channels individually in the Channels palette to display that channel's black and white image in the document window.

And there we have it. We now know that Photoshop sees everything in terms of black, white and gray. We know that it uses the RGB color mode (by default anyway) to mix varying amounts of red, green and blue to create what we see as the full color image on our screen. And we know that it determines how much red, green and blue to use by looking at the black and white version of the image in each of the three color channels, and that it does this for every single one of the millions of pixels in the image, all so that you and I can see a full color version when Photoshop was perfectly happy with it in black and white.

And that's how we know that Photoshop loves us. We'll end it there.

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