So far in this series of tutorials on the many ways of converting color photos to black and white in Photoshop, we've looked at how to convert an image to the Grayscale color mode and how to remove the color by desaturating the image. In this third tutorial in the series, we'll learn how Photoshop's Gradient Map adjustment allows us to easily "map" the original colors in an image to the colors in a gradient. You could play around for hours with a Gradient Map coming up with all kinds of wild and crazy color effects, but for our purposes here, we're going to look specifically at how a Gradient Map makes black and white conversions a snap! (Get it? "Map", "snap"? It rhymes! Yes, I know, just get on with it. Geez.)

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Here's the image once again that I'm using throughout this series of tutorials:

Step 1: Reset Your Foreground And Background Colors

By default, Photoshop's Gradient Map adjustment uses a gradient that's based on our current Foreground and Background colors. If, for example, our current Foreground color was red and our Background color was purple and we applied a Gradient Map adjustment, we'd end up with a photo made up of reds and purples. While that may (or may not) be interesting from a creative perspective, it's definitely not the effect we're aiming for here. We want to convert our image to black and white, which means we'll want to map the colors in the image to a black-to-white gradient. So before we do anything else, let's make sure our Foreground and Background colors are set to their defaults, which, as luck would have it, just happen to be black (Foreground color) and white (Background color)!

Since black and white are Photoshop's default Foreground and Background colors, there's a good chance that yours are already set to black and white. You can check to see what your current colors are by looking at the Foreground and Background color swatches near the bottom of the Tools palette. The swatch in the top left represents the Foreground color, while the swatch in the bottom right is the Background color:

If they're already set to black and white as mine are, you're good to go. If they're set to other colors, simply press the letter D on your keyboard (think "D" for "Default") to reset the Foreground and Background colors to black and white.

Step 2: Add A Gradient Map Adjustment Layer

We're ready to add our Gradient Map. As with most of Photoshop's image adjustments, including the Hue/Saturation adjustment we looked at previously, the Gradient Map is available to us as an adjustment layer which is what we'll be using. Click on the New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette and select Gradient Map from the list of adjustment layers that appears:

If you're using Photoshop CS4 as I am here, the options for the Gradient Map will appear in the Adjustments Panel which is new to CS4. If you're using Photoshop CS3 or earlier, the Gradient Map dialog box will open on your screen. The main feature in the Gradient Map options is the gradient preview bar showing us the current colors in the gradient that's being applied to our image. As we mentioned, this default gradient is based on our Foreground and Background colors, and since we made sure to set them to black and white before adding the Gradient Map, we get a black-to-white gradient which is exactly what we needed:

Based on their brightness values, all of the original colors in the photo are now being replaced by the colors (or in this case, the shades of gray) in the gradient, and if we look at our photo in the document window, we see that the black-to-white gradient has converted the image to black and white:

It's not a bad start, but we can make some adjustments to our gradient to improve our black and white results. We'll look at how to do that next!

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