Tutorial on Black and White Images from Colour
This question seems to have been asked a bit recently. This is just my technique for doing so. I use Photoshop CS, but it should translate into lower versions of the program.
Today we are going from THIS to THIS
I'm using Kate Beckinsale as my subject for this tutorial because she's a lovely subject to work with. I do not mind if you use another subject, but this is just an example.
We begin by opening our image. Play around with various crops/angles to create something unique. I, however, just copied and pasted my image into a blank 500px by 300px canvass and moved it around until I was happy with it.
This is not sharpened or anything at this partiuclar point in time. In fact, we don't sharpen it until much later on in the tutorial.
Navigate the mouse pointer to "Image", or, if you're lazy like me, hit ALT+I and then select Adjustments>Gradient Map.
Ensure that your background and foreground colours are White and Black respectively. You should have a box come up that looks like this:
Hit ok.
You should now have a black and white-appearing image. However, that is not the final step. We're a long way from finished :D
Mine looks like this so far:
Our next step is to go back to Image>Adjustments>Hue and Saturation.
Drag the Saturation slider down to -100.
I can hear you shouting: "That's not any different than how it looked before", but I assure you, all steps are relevant.... :D
We should now have something that looks like this:
Third step:
Image>Adjustments>Chanel Mixer
A note about using the chanel mixer firstly: In order to keep the quality of the black and white image, one must remember that it is best to click the "Monochrome" checkbox and then leave the "Red" chanel slider alone.
The chanel mixer settings I used can be seen in this example:
.
Once you have played around with that, you should have something that looks like this:
You could, if you wanted to, leave it at that. However, I'm going to sharpen the image once
Then, I'm going to duplicate the layer, and whack a gaussian blur of 5.4px on this layer.
Fliters>Blur>Gaussian Blur
Set this layer to Hard Light and there.... the final result is there:
I hope that's helpful to people! If you have questions, I can try and answer them to the best of my ability.
Today we are going from THIS to THIS
I'm using Kate Beckinsale as my subject for this tutorial because she's a lovely subject to work with. I do not mind if you use another subject, but this is just an example.
We begin by opening our image. Play around with various crops/angles to create something unique. I, however, just copied and pasted my image into a blank 500px by 300px canvass and moved it around until I was happy with it.
This is not sharpened or anything at this partiuclar point in time. In fact, we don't sharpen it until much later on in the tutorial.
Navigate the mouse pointer to "Image", or, if you're lazy like me, hit ALT+I and then select Adjustments>Gradient Map.
Ensure that your background and foreground colours are White and Black respectively. You should have a box come up that looks like this:
Hit ok.
You should now have a black and white-appearing image. However, that is not the final step. We're a long way from finished :D
Mine looks like this so far:
Our next step is to go back to Image>Adjustments>Hue and Saturation.
Drag the Saturation slider down to -100.
I can hear you shouting: "That's not any different than how it looked before", but I assure you, all steps are relevant.... :D
We should now have something that looks like this:
Third step:
Image>Adjustments>Chanel Mixer
A note about using the chanel mixer firstly: In order to keep the quality of the black and white image, one must remember that it is best to click the "Monochrome" checkbox and then leave the "Red" chanel slider alone.
The chanel mixer settings I used can be seen in this example:
.Once you have played around with that, you should have something that looks like this:
You could, if you wanted to, leave it at that. However, I'm going to sharpen the image once
Then, I'm going to duplicate the layer, and whack a gaussian blur of 5.4px on this layer.
Fliters>Blur>Gaussian Blur
Set this layer to Hard Light and there.... the final result is there:
I hope that's helpful to people! If you have questions, I can try and answer them to the best of my ability.