Can anyone give advice on B&W in PS

[ChrisH]

Hi there

Help!! Pretty new to digital photgraphy and I have just bought the PS CS2 package and I keep lapsing back into my much easier PS elements package - though I keep getting tempted back to patch tools etc etc.

My main question here though is whether there are any rule of thumbs/tricks of trade I should be applying when using channel mixer to create B&W shots - I do child photography and in the studio shoot on a white backdrop. I keep driving myself mad re what looks best - when I look at some other shots I just think my B&W looks awful...

Another thing which is driving me nuts is in my old system to delete previous actions there was a simple historic undo button, however there seems only to be one chance on the Control & Z function, then it is faffing around on the history panel - I hate it and hate books too - is there an easier way??

Any help or advice gratefully received!!

Thanks

 

[dmccarty10]

There are a lot of ways to convert to B&W, but one way that I like (and not always by any means, you have to play around) is to convert the image from RGB to LAB then select the LIGHTNESS channel. From there, convert to grayscale. It tends to work well when there are a lot of colors that end up translating your b&w image into something very dark.

I'm sure you'll get a lot of other replies. Good luck.

 

[Nikon Fan]

Lots of ways to do the black and white thing...I like the channel mixer for high contrast, but not sure that's what you'd want to all your portraits. another way would be to add a hue/saturation layer and desaturate, then add a levels, and brightness/contrast layer and adjust them both to your liking. If you're into actions I'm sure you could find some bw actions that would work nicely