Going Gray the Easy Way with Adobe Photoshop

Anybody with an interest in photography has likely experienced this moment of frustration. You are at Disney World or the zoo or a baseball game, and you have a choice, color or black and white. When you are at places like those mentioned above, worlds full of color, it is a place for color pictures the majority of the time, but there is bound to be the one photograph that you wish you had captured in black and white.

With digital photography, changing color photos to black and white has become a virtual snap. Using a program like Adobe Photoshop, there are a couple of different ways of changing your color photos to black and whites. But what if you are still a devotee of 35 mm? If you believe that all photos look better on film, it's still possible to get versions that you can manipulate digitally. Many developers offer CDs of digital prints made from your negatives, which can be pulled into a program like Photoshop and worked with in the same manner as digital photos. So, once you've got your digital photos for manipulation, you can use one of these two techniques to change your color photographs into black and white photographs, without losing quality. Both techniques are extremely simple, even for a Photoshop beginner.

When you Grayscale a photograph in Photoshop, it discards all color information, and leaves only the blacks and whites that are the basis of the photograph. Grayscaling is a quick and easy action. It can be found under Image/Mode/Grayscale. In using the Grayscale technique, Photoshop will automatically choose the tones for your photograph.

Another option in converting color photos to black and white in Photoshop is to Desaturate the photo. Like Grayscaling, Desaturating the photo pulls the colors from it, leaving the black and white base. Also like Grayscaling, Photoshop automatically chooses the tones and colors assigned to your photograph, and you have no control over the final output.

While there are other ways to change color to black and white in Adobe Photoshop, these two are the most straightforward due to the fact that the user does not have to input any extra information, something which can be intimidating for a beginning user. In using these techniques, I have found that grayscaling has a tendency to come out a little darker, creating more shadows, while desaturating is a bit to the lighter end of the spectrum, creating less shadow. As a personal preference, I find desaturating to be the choice way of going black and white.