The Digital Photography Workflow Handbook

Enhanced Black-and-White Conversion

First, create a new four-part layers group and create a new action for it—you will be needing this group fairly often. The layers should be set up as follows (from bottom to top):

1. Photoshop Photo Filter

2. Channel Mixer or (for CS3 and later) Black & White

3. The Curves panel with a classic S-curve

4. The Levels panel

Figure 10-8. The Layers panel after applying our action

The four layers function as follows:

Photo Filter •. We use this filter to simulate a traditional monochrome camera filter. Be sure to check the Preserve Luminosity option (Figure 10-9) to avoid darkening your image while applying the filter. Clicking the square ...