Video:Elements Tutorial: How to Convert Images to Black and White
with Pelpina TripBlack and white images give an average photo a little more style. Watch this About.com video to see how to convert and image to black and white using Adobe Photoshop Elements.See Transcript
Transcript:Elements Tutorial: How to Convert Images to Black and White
Hi, I’m Pelpina, here for About.com. In this screen cast, I’ll show you how to convert images to black and white in Photoshop Elements.
Convert to Black and White with Grayscale
A quick way to easily convert any image to grayscale, is by going to image, right up here, click convert, and then choose grayscale. When you choose this, you basically tell Elements to discard any color information- which means that you don’t have a lot of control over the conversion.
Customize the Black and White Image
If you do want to be able to fine-tune your black and white image, you have another option. Just go to enhance, right up here, and click convert to black and white. You’ll see the before picture on your left, and the converted black-and-white image here on the right. Here on the left, below the images, you can select a style: from infrared, to newspaper and scenic landscape. Every style you see here uses a different amount of the color channels of your original image - so every style gives a different look.
With the sliders you can adjust the intensity of the colors of the original image. So you won’t see those colors in the black and white version, they’ll just intensify the gray-or-blackness in the new black-and-white image. So if you intensify the color red, you’ll see that the area that’s originally red in the color picture becomes darker in the black and white picture. To convert your image, just hit OK - if you’re not sure and want to start over, you can click reset.
Use a Layer to Experiment
And then one final tip I can personally give you: if you want to experiment with converting to black and white, and still keep the original image within the same document (so you can go back and see the difference), just duplicate the original layer, and convert the duplicated layer to black and white. For more how-to videos on Elements, go to compute.about.com. Thanks for watching!