How to Create Optimized Color-to-B&W Conversions in Photoshop

There's an adage among artists that goes, "If you can't make it good, make it big. And if you can't make it big, make it red." There's an awful lot of truth behind that statement, which I won't get into right now, but whenever I see photographs with big eye-grabbing pops of color, that pearl of wisdom always comes to mind.

The same cannot be said about black-and-white photography. Color elements do not exist in B&W photographs. In their place are infinite shades of gray, book-ended by whatever measures of pure black and pure white exist within the scene. Red is reduced to a shade of gray in a black-and-white photograph. It no longer screams out at you as its former color self once did. If you want to lighten or darken the tonality of the red channel of the image, you can filter it, and this is where converting color images to B&W starts getting interesting.

Photographs © Allan Weitz 2020

What makes B&W photography so interesting—at least to me—is that not having color as a background chorus off of which to play, the challenge is to take a photograph in which the image's composition and the way the varying gray forms within the photograph play off one another and make the picture work visually. The image is either powerful enough to engage the viewer for more than a few moments, or it's not. Speaking for myself—the photographs I most often come back to are black-and-white photographs. And this holds true for my own photographs, as well as photographs taken by others.

There are many ways to convert color photographs to B&W in Photoshop, but I'll cover two: the easy way and the more hands-on way, or as I refer to them: Automatic and Stick Shift. The Automatic method of converting color image files to B&W in Photoshop is easy-peasy. Simply open a color file and go IMAGE > ADJUSTMENTS > BLACK & WHITE. Boom—your picture instantly converts to a generally pleasing black-and-white photograph. A new sub-menu featuring sliders for the RYGCBM color channels also comes into view. We're going to come back to these sliders in a few moments but, for now, let's talk about the top dropdown menu—the one labeled "Presets."

The Quick & Easy Way to Convert Color Image Files to B&W in Photoshop

When you click on the Preset field (the top dropdown) you get a menu that offers a dozen filters commonly used when taking conventional B&W photographs. Included among them are red, green, yellow, blue, ND, and IR filters. When you click on a filter, your photograph transforms into an emulation of how the original color scene would appear if captured with a similarly filtered film camera.

When you click on the Preset dropdown, the color image automatically converts to monochrome. You also you get a new sub-menu containing a dozen digital filters that emulate the look of traditional red, orange, yellow, green, and other filters commonly used for black-and-white photography. When you click on a filter, the tonality of the image shifts to emulate the look of the image as if filtered traditionally with a film camera. Depending on the color palette of the image, the image takes on a totally different feel with each filter. Some work, some don't, but each affects the look, feel, and mood of the image.

If the photograph features a blue sky with white clouds, a red filter will darken the blue, which in turn causes the clouds to seemingly pop out of the frame lines. Orange and yellow filters produce the same effects to a progressively lesser degree, depending on your personal preferences. When photographing foliage, green filters lighten the tonality of green leaves and grasses. Which filters work best or create the most dramatic effects? That all depends on the color palette of the image and your choice of filtration.

The Advanced, More Detailed Way to Convert Color Image Files to B&W in Photoshop

Applying filters via the IMAGE > ADJUSTMENTS > BLACK & WHITE drop-down menu is a quick, easy, and quasi-traditional way of filtering black-and-white photographs. A more interesting set of tools for converting color photographs to monochrome can be found in the same BLACK & WHITE dropdown menu we used for the previous exercise. Just below the Presets we previously accessed are six color sliders followed by two additional Hue and Saturation sliders.

If you prefer driving stick over an automatic transmission, you're particularly going to enjoy this process.

These sliders enable you to adjust the tonal response of both additive and subtractive color channel systems of the original color image. Tweaking the color channels in this manner and collectively combining the results into a single, optimized black-and-white photograph has long been my go-to method of creating black-and-white conversions in Photoshop. The Hue and Saturation sliders should also be incorporated into your grayscale adjustment workflow in each color channel.

There are a few things to keep in mind when converting color image files to black-and-white. If you have experience filtering film images, you know every film reacts slightly differently to filtration. The electronic filter emulations created in Photoshop are similar in that the results you get from the PS filters may not be exactly as you remember them to be, but they're pretty darn close.

I also encourage you to go back and forth between sliders when optimizing an image because one filter adjustment can easily counter or change the effects of earlier adjustments. Like many things, it's a matter of striking the right balance between the channels. The Hue and Saturation sliders should also be used when adjusting each of the color channels.

The following is a selection of color-to-monochrome image files converted to black-and-white using the more advanced method of adjusting the individual color channels.

An interesting aside is that in the process of converting many color photographs to black-and-white over the years, I've learned to appreciate—and in many cases actually prefer—the black-and-white renditions of many of the photographs I've converted from color.

Have you tried converting color images to black-and-white? If so, how do you go about converting your image files? Know any good tricks? If so, we'd love to hear about them in the Comments field, below.