Photoshop CS3: New Black and white adjustment layer.

Tutorial #2 is finally here. This is the best way I’ve found to convert color photos to black and white in Photoshop. It gives great control and it’s not overly difficult. First off you’ll need a color photo, then you are going to add a black and white adjustment layer by clicking on the half white/half black circle at the bottom of the layers palette. You can also get there by using menus if you like. Click Image–>Adjustments–>Black and White, but this doesn’t give you an adjustment layer and once you convert it to black and white, there’s no going back and tweaking it later… so don’t do it that way! Once you have the Black and White dialogue box open, you’ll notice there are a lot of color sliders that may make this seem daunting… relax, this is where my tip comes in handy. Once you take your cursor outside this dialog box and over your photo, you’ll see you get an eyedropper tool instead of your normal arrow. Try clicking on an area of your photo that you would like to see lightened or darkened and click and that area of the photo. When you click and hold your mouse button you will notice you get a finger cursor with arrows pointing left and right. That’s your cue in Photoshop that you can now change your color values by dragging left or right. Right to make that area darker, left to make it lighter. In these samples I’ve adjusted my son’s face to exaggerate the effect. Try it out on a few different areas… you’ll notice the color values in the dialog box changing. It’s that simple.