Is there a right way to turn a picture black and white ?

smdevo wrote in post #3626827
It's not "wrong'. You just have no control at all over your tones. Photoshop and it's many avenues just gives you a little more control in order for you to make what your mind sees. Have a look at your Image>Adjustments menu. All your adjustment tools are in there.

Here is the deal though, when I do it in DPP and adjust the colors, the picture gets lighter or darker in that aread, right now when I do it in photoshop, the picture gains color and changes, even when its in black and white.

Or you can be lazy, like me, and use an action.

With Yervant's Color to Black & White action:

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Where can I get them at ?

The top two are no longer available. The last one probably came from www.atncentral.com. There are about 5,000 other Photoshop actions on the Adobe Exchange website, too, and most of them are free. Another place for a lot of free stuff is the Resources section of the Deviant Art site.

OK, here is a quick and easy mono conversion that will give the ability to adjust the tonal response without getting into channel mixer. I hammered it out in CS, so it should play in CS and above. I also suspect it is OK in PS7 as well.

Just to clarify, I DID NOT "write" this action in the sense of thinking up how it works. I read this method of mono conversion on some long forgotten Photoshop site years ago. If anyone knows where I read it, or who originally wrote it, speak up, as I will gladly give credit.

But when I used the technique the first time, I thought it would make a for a pretty cool "quick and dirty" conversion, and still retain a good deal of control, so I typed it up as an action and have been using it for a long time. One of the things that I like about it, is that it does not alter the global intensity - unlike channel mixer - you don't have to keep three sliders in balance to maintain brightness.

When you run the action, you will end up with two adjustment layers. One says "Use Other" - if that is not self evident, then nothing can help you.

The other says "Adjust Hue" - so you don't have to cipher out what this means:

Then just double click HERE:

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Here are some samples (No other adjustments were done):

Out of Camera:

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