Fast, High Quality Black and White Conversions In Photoshop
Learn Photoshop with Adobe Photoshop Tutorials at Photoshop Essentials.com
Written By Steve Patterson, Photoshop Essentials.com
In this Photoshop tutorial, we'll look at an easy way to get fast yet high quality black and white conversions out of our color photos. Normally, for high quality black and white results, we'd use something like the Lab color mode, the Channel Mixer, or a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, and if all we cared about was quickly removing the color from a photo regardless of image quality, we'd simply desaturate the color or convert the image to the Grayscale color mode. In this tutorial, we're going to combine that same desaturation technique, which normally gives us less than stellar results, with a couple of short extra steps to give us much better results with our black and white conversions while adding only a few extra seconds to the time it takes!
Here's the image I'll be using for this tutorial:
Let's convert it to black and white. For even more black and white conversion techniques, be sure to check out our complete Converting Color Photos To Black And White In Photoshop series.
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Step 1: Duplicate The Background Layer
Your first step when working on your photos and images in Photoshop should always be to duplicate your Background layer, since your Background layer contains all of your original pixel information and you don't want to lose it. So let's duplicate our Background layer the easiest way there is, and that's by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) or Command+J (Mac):
I now have a copy of my Background layer, which Photoshop has automatically named "Layer 1", that I can safely work on.
Step 2: Image > Adjustments > Desaturate
With "Layer 1" selected in Photoshop's Layers palette, go up to the Image menu at the top of the screen, choose Adjustments, and then choose Desaturate, or you can use the keyboard shortcut, Shift+Ctrl+U (Win) or Shift+Command+U (Mac ) to save time, since saving time is what this tutorial is all about. This will instantly desaturate all the colors in the image, leaving us with a quick and dirty black and white version:
Normally, if all we wanted was the color removed from our image, we could stop here, but these next couple of steps will give us better results while only taking up a few extra seconds of our time.
Step 3: Edit > Fade Desaturate
In order for this next step to work, you can't do anything else in Photoshop after that last step where we desaturated the image. We're going to bring up the Fade command, which allows us to fade the last adjustment we applied to the image, but only as long as we haven't gone and done anything else first. If we have, the Fade command will be grayed out and unavailable to us. So now that we've desaturated the photo, we need to go immediately up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and choose Fade Desaturate from the list of options, or use the quick keyboard shortcut, Shift+Ctrl+F (Win) or Shift+Command+F (Mac):
This option is really just called "Fade". It says "Fade Desaturate" because we just desaturated the image. If we had just applied the Unsharp Mask filter, for example, it would say "Fade Unsharp Mask".
If the Fade command is grayed out when you go to select it, it's because you've gone and done something else after desaturating the image before you went up to the Edit menu, so you'll need to undo your steps by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Z (Win) or Command+Option+Z (Mac) until you get to the step just before desaturating the image and then desaturate it again. Then, without doing anything after that, go up to the Edit menu and select the Fade option.
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