I like black & white images very much.  I love how classic they look and how you can really focus on your subject and not their clothes.  It draws you into the detail.  I also love that if you have a photo with a strong color cast (it’s too red, too yellow, etc.), then you can convert to b&w to get rid of that problem.  Voila!  Fixed! 

So when you want to make a colored picture into a black and white picture, you just remove the color, right??

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

There is so much more to changing a colored photo into a b&w photo in order to make it pop!  Otherwise it just looks like a muddy photo with little detail.

Example:

Muddy tones Here is a simple conversion where all I did was remove the color using Picasa.  It doesn’t exactly pop off the page and say “Look at me!!”, does it?  Well, maybe it does…she is pretty darn cute!  Focus more on the tones of the picture and not the cuteness…it is what I would call “muddy”.  The white isn’t bright and it has a low contrast.

Good BW This one shows what you should be trying to achieve.  The white stands out and there is more contrast.  This is just a simple conversion, and you can get much better results with more detailed ones.  However, for today we will just start out with a simple conversion.

1. Defog

2. Screen

3. Virtual Photographer – > BW

4. Duplicate Layer.  Adjust Brightness/Contrast.  When doing this make sure that Brightness is always lower than Contrast.

5. Erase “blowouts”.  These would be the areas where they are completely white and should now be glowing.  Glowing is not good…it’s usually a photo killer.  So….take your eraser tool, dial down the opacity on it, and start erasing the blown areas on the top layer.  The original will show through.  This takes a little bit of skill at first to get the areas blended right, but with a little practice you will get it.

6.  Now this is an extra “make it pretty” step and something I just learned how to do.  First, flatten your image, then find the burn tool on the leftside toolbox.  It may be hidden under another one, so just go over the tools and right click until you find it.  I put the exposure at 50% and made the circle big and just went around the edges of the photo.  This puts your subject in a “circle of light”.

7.  Yes, I know, I didn’t follow the rule of thirds, but I couldn’t since I took the picture so close.  But, I think it works…what do you think?

Now this is a really simple way to turn a picture into BW, and there are tons of ways to do it that give better results.  In future installments I will show you how to do different conversions.