Hello and welcome to another exciting installment of… well not an installment of anything, BUT! we do have a great tutorial for you today. We are going to show you how to take that boring drab color photo into a dramatic black and white.

Now, I know what you’re thinking… “Why can’t I just convert to gray scale and call it a day?” Well I’ll tell you. By converting to gray scale, you are disposing of all the color information in the photo. I know, I know, - “But Drew, isn’t that what we want to do?” Yes and no, by retaining the photos color information, we have more control of the output of the photo and won’t have to worry about clogging our blacks when we send to print. So let’s get started.

1. Let’s open up the photo we want to convert to black and white. For this tutorial I’ll be using a photo I took in Seattle.

2. Now that we have our photo open, create a duplicate of it in our layers pallet.

3. While we are still in our layers pallet, we are going to select the circle with black and white halves. These are our adjustment layers. You can add these adjusments from Image > Adjustments but you won’t have control of it after the adjustment is applied. So click the adjusment layer icon in our layer pallet and we are going to select “Gradient Map”

4. A dialog box will appear with a gradient, click the gradient and you can now customize your gradient map. I’m going to use a very dark brown to white gradient to give our image a bit of tone. Once you are satisfied with your gradient click ok. I would like to add that you can now adjust gradient maps opacity as you would any other layer if you want to leave a tiny bit of color in.

5. Ok, next are a few tricks which aren’t mandatory but i find make a better image. Back in your layers pallet, select the adjustment layer icon and select “Curves.” A simple S curve will bring out the highlights and add some dramatic lighting. Again, since this is on an adjustment layer we can adjust the opacity of the layer.

6. Next I like to add a bit of focal point to the image, so let’s select our copied image in our layers pallet the go to Filters>Distort>Lens Correction. The lens correction window will open and here we can add a vignette. Adjust the sliders according to how much vignette you want to add. I am going to set the amount to -80 and the midpoint to +24. Click ok. You can adjust the opacity of the affected layer.

7. Last step. I like to sharpen my images a bit so I will show you the sharpening technique I use on a frequent basis. With our copied layer selected, ( the one we just added a vignette to) and go to Filter> Sharpen> Unsharp Mask. Use these settings. Amount: 20%, Radius: 50.0 px, Threshold: 0. Click your preview check box on and off and you can see the difference.

And there you have it.. you should have a dramatic looking black and white photo now.

Tags: photoshop