Image Conversion: Black and White Techniques in Photoshop

So let's discuss how to convert images to black and white. There might be more to that than you to actually think, and also to remove lens distortion from images, and we'll also see more about making selections and layer masks along the way. So with this image here, I want to convert it to black and white.

Now there are the most basic way of converting things to black and white, which is simply going in and converting to grayscale. When you are in a file that is either RGB color or CMYK. RGB is destined for anything on screen, video, web, anything digital.

CMYK is for print. If we want to just throw away all of the ability to have color in a file, we can simply go to grayscale. And it does say, hey, there's other ways to do this that you might want to do because you have more control over that conversion.

But if you simply want to discard the color, you throw it away. And now, no matter what, I cannot create color in this file. Even if I go to create a new layer and I try to paint using a color, you will see that it just converts it to gray because this file is a grayscale.

You can see up here in the tab bar next to the file name, you see what kind of color it is. This file is incapable of having color. But I don't want that.

Actually, I'm going to undo here to go back to when it was color. I actually want to keep the color in the one of a kind text. And so I do want there to be able to be color.

And also, I want to be able to control the light and dark values of this conversion to black and white. So using an adjustment layer instead is going to give us more control. Again, when you do image adjustments, these things are once and done destructive things.

But if you do them as adjustment layers, then you have more control and you can go back and change things. Now, you can do them up here through the menu or you can come down here into this little button right here. And there is a black and white adjustment layer to convert something to black and white.

Now, if you have a selection first before you choose it, it would automatically add a layer mask only changing the selected area into black and white. But by choosing this with no selection, it converts the whole image. Where you have more control over this is still this file is a color image.

And when I look at it here, it's still an RGB image. So it still has access to the color layers underneath. And we can say, well, where that layer is, let's say blue or pink or the skin tone here, the red of the tongue, we can use those underlying colors.

Let's say, for example, blue here. And I can adjust the luminosity, how light or dark that blue is. So I get control over how it converts it to black and white.

So what you could do is simply go through all of these and just start adjusting. Now, they do have some presets here that you can choose if you want to play with them, but you can simply just drag back and forth and see what change, if any, there is. So here we can see that the reds, which there's red in the skin tones, gets lighter, darker.

So, you know, what do you want that? You can choose. You are in control over this. There's also some yellow in her skin tones as well as some other places.

So again, this changes her skin tone and we can change this. Now, there's not much of the image. There's a little bit down here at the bottom right that is green, but not much of this image is green.

There is more blues. So do you want those whales to be more prominent or less prominent? You know, if I want people to look at her face, maybe I want those to be less prominent there. Actually, I could even invert them to make them lighter, which I don't think looks very good in this case.

But maybe I make them very subtle here, almost to the point where they almost go away. You know, look at that. Look at how prominent they were before and now how I look more at her and not the background.

So you are in control. Do you want people to see those or do you not want people to see those? And finally, the magentas here, which affect her tongue. So I kind of like her tongue being a little darker here.

And so I can adjust there and you can see the before and the after. So you have more control over this as an adjustment layer. The other cool thing about the adjustment layer is I can say, you know what? I actually don't want to change all of the layer to black and white.

I want to keep some of it being in color. So this one of a kind, I want to bring that back. So that means I need to put black here on the mask, because if I paint with my paintbrush here and I'm going to go in and choose a big paintbrush and I'm going to choose black, wherever I paint, it brings back the original color because I'm hiding this adjustment.

And remember, when you don't see the adjustment, it doesn't do the conversion to black and white. So I'm going to undo my layer visibility and undo my brush tool to go back to having a solid white. I need to select this one of a kind.

I'm not going to paint brush this too difficult. So I'm going to go to my original background here. And there's a couple of ways we could do this selection.

There's not always just one perfect way that you always make selections. There are lots of different types of images that we work with, where, you know, let's say you were blonde on a blonde background, that would be more difficult to select that hair versus blonde on a black background, for example. So there can be color, there can be contrast, there can be all sorts of different ways of working with things.

And for example, the object selection tool, if something's a distinct object, maybe it can select it. Now it thinks I want her, but maybe if I drag over the one of a kind, it can select the one of a kind, which it actually does a really good job. But we've already taken a look at this particular selection tool before, and it doesn't always work for everything.

So I want to show you another way to do things. I'm not saying that this new way is always the best way, but you want to see a variety of different approaches. So yes, the object tool works great.

Yes, I can actually drag over a certain area and say, just select what's in that area. Works great. But what if it doesn't? Are there other options? Yes.

In this case, when we think about our original thing, that color here is very distinct and different from everything else. So color is a differentiation. And if I use color to figure out, hey, the thing with that color I want to select, which is different from everything else, that might be a nice way to make that selection is based on color.

So I'm going to choose that layer. And if we want, we can actually hide that adjustment layer just temporarily if we want to. We don't have to, but I'm going to go and select and I'm going to make a selection based on a color range.

And using this, I can choose which color do I want to select and I can click on a color and it selects that color. So if I click on blues, it's going to select blues. Now there's a fuzziness amount, which is thought of as like a tolerance amount.

If you've ever used the magic wand, the magic wand has a tolerance. This has a fuzziness amount, but how close does it have to be to the exact color you click on? So if you are not tolerant of anything else, you are only the exact color you clicked on, but there's lots of different shades. So the higher the fuzziness, the more it can be similar, but not exactly the same shade or exact color.

Now there is the eyedropper here, which is the singular color, where if I click on something, it chooses one color. And then when I click on another one, it just switches colors. But what if I want to choose a color and that's close, but sometimes if you increase that fuzziness, a couple of things happen.

That color has other things that are similar, like her tongue, like her skin tone has some pinks in it. So a couple of issues with this is I really don't want to work with anything outside of this area. So I'm actually going to cancel this.

One little tip to make this thing work better is to make a pre-selection where I can select an area with any selection tool just to limit the power and say only work in this area. If it would be easier to not have any of her skin, I could also use the lasso and say, let me just loosely select this area to say, I only want to work with stuff in this area. Then go in and make your color range.

And now you will be limited to only working in that area and it won't accidentally get anything elsewhere outside of that. That's a good tip there. But still, you might need to click on, let's say, a darker color and we can zoom in here actually.

Command plus or on Windows control plus can zoom in. We can still use our space bar to navigate around. I get this nice preview here.

So if I click on, let's say, a darker color, it goes to the darkers. If I click on a lighter color, it goes to the lighters. We can add more colors by going to the plus or we can hold shift.

So if we want to stay in the tool, we can hold shift, which is the same thing as choosing the plus tool. You can also use the minus tool if you want to subtract any colors as well. But we are just going to add.

So what you can do with this is you can have a lower fuzziness and then drag over the colors you want to add. And again, drag over those colors you want to add. So that way, you know, if that fuzziness is too high, it can sometimes select some other things that you didn't mean to select.

This way you can just add the different colors and keep that quite low. Now, another tip here is that this preview is mighty small and it can be an image, the original image, or the preview of the selection that you're getting. But this preview over here, you can zoom in on it.

You can make this much bigger. The preview out here is controlled by this. There is no preview out here.

So I can say, let's switch this to grayscale. Let's make that this. And then maybe this one is the original image here.

And you can click in here or you can click out here. But having a nice big preview out here, notice as I change things, this is now your preview. This is a much larger, much more accurate preview.

And so I'd much rather have that be the preview to give me a sense because I want to make sure that I don't have that too high, that I'm including some of that background, which I don't want. So something like that I think looks pretty good. I'll hit OK.

And now I have the type selected. I'm going to go show this layer, select the layer mask, and I want to fill that with black because black will hide. So I'm going to say to edit, fill, and fill that with black.

And now if I deselect, we can see the type and look at that. So now that type has come back because it is not being changed to black and white, whereas everything else is. Nice.

OK. Now, let's say I think I'm done, but then I realize, you know what? Her face kind of looks a little bit big, almost as though there's like some lens distortion. When you use a wide angle lens and you get really close to something, it kind of makes that foreground kind of distort.

So the sides kind of get small and the center gets large, kind of this fisheye kind of look. And as you get used to shooting on wide angle lenses, which do allow you to get very close, you might start to notice this lens distortion. And I want to get rid of that lens distortion that's there.

So let me go ahead and save this before I get any further. I'm going to save this as a Photoshop file to maintain all of my layers. And so I want to remove that lens distortion.

So there's a filter for that. And I'm going to select this. Now, I'm not going to convert for smart filters just yet.

I will in just a moment. But I just want to show you what this filter does. And I want to show you a problem when we have multiple layers for this.

So just bear with me for a second. I will eventually convert to smart object so that I get an editable smart filter. So I'm going to select this layer because it's the thing that has the lens distortion.

And I'm going to go into filter and there is a lens correction that we can do. Now, when you go into lens correction, it is possible that it will know the camera model, the lens and so forth. If there is metadata stored from the camera.

Now, this was something that I downloaded as a stock image and stock images sometimes have their metadata stripped from them. So they don't have that metadata. And I was not the photographer on this.

So I don't know what lens was used, what camera was used. If you are taking these pictures yourself or if whoever gave you the picture allows that metadata to remain in that image, then this filter will automatically use that and knows the various amounts of lens distortion based on certain camera makes and models and lenses. And it would automatically compensate for that.

So if you did happen to know what this was, but the metadata was just stripped out, it's not there. You could go in and say, oh, if I know this was shot on a Canon that was, let's say, you know, a EOS RP with a specific lens, you know, you could choose that and then it would compensate for that lens distortion. But that's not the case here.

So I'm not going to choose that. So I'm just going to revert this. Okay.

So that means that in, in this case, since I don't know what this was shot with, I'm going to do some manual correction. So here I can either increase the distortion or decrease the distortion. So here you can see, this is what it looks like with the lens distortion where the center gets really big and that's what we want to compensate for.

So this is in, this is the kind of the normal, and I actually want to remove that so that her face gets a little less distorted here. So I think something like that, I think looks good and I'll hit okay. Now here's the before, here's the after, removing some of that lens distortion.

One of the problems we see here, which is what I wanted to show you, is that I only changed this layer. I did not change this layer, but I don't want to change just one layer. I want to change them both.

And I want to do it non-destructively. So let me go back before I did that lens correction. And I want to take both of these layers, not just the one.

So I'm going to click on one, hold shift, click on another to select them both. And then I can say convert for smart filters, which is the same thing as converting to a smart object. And all of this inside are both the layers.

So if I double click, inside are both layers, but it kind of merged them into one Photoshop document. Then I'm seeing a preview up here and together as a grouped set of objects, if you will. I can go in and do this lens correction and it does it to the final image with the type.

So this way I don't have that issue. I can remove the lens distortion, hit okay. I can still double click on that smart object to go into it, to see the original unfiltered layers that have the original lens distortion on them, make any changes.

Should I need to, you know, if I need to go in and tweak anything here, if I want to make those whales pop out more, I can do so. And then I can save, close it. And it reapplies that lens correction with the whales being more prominent.

So when we create these smart objects, we can put one or more layers. We can put as many layers as we want into a smart object. And sometimes you need to really think about putting all of it there.

So you're doing these across all of those layers, all in one shot. So now let's say I want to do one final thing here. Maybe that color, I want to make that even a little bit more pronounced here.

I could go in and technically you could do that here afterwards, but I think maybe we do that inside here with all the other layers. So that if I'm doing anything with this, as far as, you know, all the other layers, I'm just going to double click on this to go in and see all of my layers here. I've got my conversion to black and white.

And let's say I want to do one more adjustment here. There is a vibrance layer, which is a really nice way to add color saturation. I know there is hue saturation, but what I don't like about hue saturation is it only has color saturation.

It could do other color changes, but in terms of saturating colors, making them more intense. Vibrance has both saturation and it also has vibrance. And what I like about this layer is saturation is a very kind of strong effect with saturation, but sometimes it can be a little unnatural.

Vibrance can be a little bit of a lesser effect, but it's a more natural effect. So the way that it chooses to intensify the colors, it is more subtle, but it's also more natural. And so you have a choice.

You can choose one or the other, or you can do a little bit of both. Maybe vibrance is good, but you need a little bit of extra boost with saturation. You especially see this if you're dealing with skin tones.

So let's say if I go to zero here, if you do saturation on skin tones, they look very yellowed and that's not a healthy skin tone with saturation. But vibrance is much more natural. The way that it saturates things, it does not change your skin tones as much.

It leaves them much more natural. And so it is more subtle. It's not as pronounced, but it is more natural.

You can still boost a little bit if you need a little extra saturation, you can still do that. But I like that I have the flexibility with this vibrance layer to do both. That way I make that color just a little bit more saturated, give it a little more oomph to it.

And then I can save that work, come back, and it still is applying that lens correction, even though I edited what is sitting inside of that. So if you want to try this out yourself, go ahead in the book and do exercise 4a.