photoshop black and white effects
When I create a black-and-white image in Photoshop, a small part of me giggles like a schoolgirl. Something about the mood it radiates can be quite powerful. I’m swept back in time to my days in the darkroom. I can almost smell the fixer in the air (but thankfully not on my hands!).
Changing color images to black and white can have a dramatic impact on the feel, or emotion, of the image. Maybe you shot it for the sole purpose of converting it to black and white, or maybe a color image just doesn’t exude the emotion you intended. I’m going to show you how to tackle the latter case: to convert to black and white in Photoshop without just selecting the Desaturate option. I’ll go over how to stylize it with a few options using the Channel Mixer and Contrast adjustment layers, and by adding a grainy film effect using Noise.
Press Command + J to make a copy of your image. (Get into the habit of always working on a copy rather than the original.)
Select the icon at the bottom of your Layers panel (Fig. 1). You’ll
notice the color options red, green and blue, as well as Presets, Output Channel, Monochrome and Constant. Check the Monochrome box. The Output Channel now reads Gray (Fig. 2). Now you have a few options. You can play around with the presets, such as Black and White, Infrared, and different-colored filters. The presets are a great starting point.
