Gordon's WebLog

Black & white photography, for many years the standard way of producing photos, has, in recent years, largely gone out of fashion with the ready availability of colour film, digital cameras and computer graphic software.

Whilst a brilliant colour photograph looks superb, there is now an increasing tendency to return to producing high quality black & white photos, especially as with modern software and printer inks the results can be equally superb.

So, how do we do it ? OF course, if you have (say) Photoshop or Photoshop Elements you can simply desaturate any image, but the results are likely to be a poor reflection of the original. There are many better ways of doing it than this, and here is a great tip that will produce striking results.

For this demonstration I will use Photoshop CS on the following image.

First of all open the image in Photoshop and choose menu item Image/Adjustments/Channel Mixer.

Choose the red output channel and make the red and green source channels +100% and the blue source channel -100%, leaving the constant at 0 and unselecting Monochrome.

Repeat these same settings for the green and blue output channel.

As you do this the image will be displayed in many different colours, but after finishing with the blue output channel you will have a lovely black & white image.

OK the result and then choose menu item Filter/Distort/Diffuse Glow. Set the graininess to 9, the glow amount to 2 and the clear amount to 16 - note that these are MY opinions, you can experiment with the settings to suit your taste.

OK the result and then choose menu option Edit/Fade Diffuse Glow and move the opacity slider to suit - I use about about 80%.

Save the result which should be a great contrasty image.

Here is my result.

Good luck.