Nov 12 2008
Photoshop Video Tutorial – How to Create Black & White Images
In this Photoshop video tutorial, I’ll show you 4 ways of converting your color photos into black and white. I got the inspiration for this tutorial because of the recent Black and White Spider Awards results. This is an international photography competition with some amazing photos from both professionals and amateurs.
Since Christmas is not too far away, I thought I would also take a few minutes and recommend some great black and white photography books. They make great stocking stuffers! 
Advanced Digital Black & White Photography
The Art of Black and White Photography
Mastering Digital Black and White
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Great video, Yanik! There’s also another technique you could use, that is more advanced than the ones you brought up in the video. I found it about a year ago, and it’s called “The Rob Carr Color to B&W Conversion Technique”. It’s basically a method where you convert the image to LAB color mode and then play around with layer channels and adjustment layers. The results are fantastic
Check it out at Design by Fire.com (it’s about half-way down the page)
Pestbarn
Thanks for the tip! Another great way to convert to Black and White!
I only have Photoshop 6, but off the top of my head I’m thinking that you could put a saturation layer (set at 0%) above your colour image and then adjust the colour balance of the image to get the same effect as the filter in Photoshop CS? I dunno, just a thought
I did not that there were so many ways, I will be trying the channel mixer next time.
thanks Yanik
You have shown one more way to convert the images to black and white. Thanks for sharing
Great tips for b+w. FYI, I arrived at this video from your latest online lesson about Creating Mood with Gaussian Blur. Think the video link in the blur article is mistakenly pointing to your b+w lesson. Love your stuff! I am just learning CS3 and LR2. Keep up the great work. Tres bien fait.
Hi… its a great tutorial indeed… no doubt bout it.. but i have a li’l query.. i have an image which was taken in my house, but then the background in the image is like real bright which was a result of some real good sunshine reflecting from the wall behind me.. so whn i use the methods prescribed by u in this tutorial i don get a very clear black and white image. what do i do to reduce the effect of the bcakground and improve the black and white image that i’m presently getting?