Photoshop Elements 4: The Missing Manual

Making Color Photos Black and White

Sometimes you may want to convert your color photos to black and white. If you can't imagine why anyone would willingly do that, consider that in a world crammed full of eye-popping colors, the understatement of black and white really stands out. Also, you may be planning to have something printed where you can't use color illustrations. And of course, for artistic photography, there's still nothing like black and white.

Elements gives you two fundamentally different ways to remove all the color from your image, but they produce quite different results. Figure 9-16 shows you why you need to experiment.

Figure 9-16. Changing to grayscale can give you very different results depending on the method you use. Top: Each star, when first created, has a pure color value of 255. In other words, you're looking at stars that are 100 percent red, blue, and green, with zero as the number for the other two channels. Middle: This shows the same photo with the mode converted to grayscale. Bottom: Using Remove Color causes a very different change.

Remove Color and Hue/Saturation make the same changes to your photo behind the scenes, so the results are pretty much the same with both. Convert Mode can give you quite different results. Here's what you need to know to use each method:

• Convert Mode. The simplest solution is to choose Image → Mode → Grayscale. This ...