Fast, High Quality Black and White Conversions In Photoshop

Step 4: Change The Blend Mode To "Color"

When you select "Fade Desaturate", the Fade dialog box appears. The Fade dialog box gives us two options - changing the opacity of the adjustment we just applied to the image and changing the blend mode of the adjustment. For now, we'll leave the opacity at 100% and only concern ourselves with the blend mode (see the 'Bonus Step' at the end of this tutorial for a look at how and why you may want to lower the opacity value).

Click the down-pointing arrow beside the word Normal to bring up a list of blend modes. These are the exact same blend modes we'd normally find in the Layers palette, but here, rather than affecting layers, they're affecting how the last adjustment we applied is going to interact with the image. Select Color way down near the very bottom of the drop down list.

This will cause our desaturation adjustment to affect only the colors in the image, not the brightness values, giving us a higher quality black and white conversion with more detail remaining in the image than if we had simply desaturated the image and left it at that.

Here's the result:

Using these quick and easy steps, getting a fast black and white conversion of a color photo doesn't have to mean poor quality. If you use the keyboard shortcuts, it's simply a matter of pressing:

Ctrl+J (Win) / Command + J (Mac) to duplicate the Background layer
Shift+Ctrl+U (Win) / Shift+Command+U (Mac) to desaturate the image
Shift+Ctrl+F (Win) / Shift+Command+F (Mac) to bring up the Fade command

Then simply change the blend mode from Normal to Color, click OK, and you're done!

Bonus Step: Bring Back A Hint Of Color

This "bonus step" as I call it is completely optional but it only takes an extra second or two and is a nice effect. With my Fade dialog box still open (before clicking OK to close it after changing the blend mode to Color) I'm going to bring back just a hint of color to my photo by reducing the opacity value of the desaturation adjustment using the Opacity option in the Fade dialog box.

I'll just click on the slider bar below where it says "Opacity" and drag it to the left with my mouse to lower the opacity value to about 80%:

Again, this is the same as if I was lowering the opacity value of a layer in the Layers palette, but here, I'm lowering the opacity of the Desaturate adjustment which will allow a little bit of the photo's original color to show through.

And here's the result: