Free Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Black and White Conversion for Digital Art
About this Photoshop Tutorial
There are many sources out there for black and white conversion in Adobe Photoshop CS including one of my favorites which is the channel mixer method. This tutorial however will take a different approach. Each image has its own best method for black and white conversion such as the one presented here. The main reason I didn't go with the channel mixer method for this photo is the large amount of green present in the picture which severely handicaps the usefulness of using 100% channels for conversion. The shot itself isn't bad, however its lacking that certain zest needed for presentation. Aesthetically speaking, the photograph's background crowds what should be the center of attention which should be the flowing vines.
Before
Step 1: Cropping for Visual Aesthetics
One often missed step in Photoshop work is cropping the photo. You can have the perfect picture but a bad crop will take away from the impact in a major way. Once again, each image is different and you have to pick the best crop for what you're working on. In this case we will crop out everything to the bottom left of the in-focus leaf which is causing a pretty big distraction. We also want to crop the photo in such a way as to frame the picture with the vines. Not only does it take away the distracting background but it brings focus to some of the detail in the leafs. Look at the image before and after the crop. Pretty big improvement eh?
Step 2: Some Background Removal and Contrast Sharpening
Now we begin our work. First we add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to, you guessed it, de saturate the image. We could have just done a simple mode conversion to black and white but it's good practice to use adjustment layers whenever possible. This makes our changes a little less permanent in case you decide to change something later. Now we add a level adjustment layer, we are only working in the RGB combined channel here. As you can see parts of the photo we want to keep are a little bit too dark so we take the middle slider and push it a bit to the left which will add some brightness to the mid tones. We then take the left slider and push it to the right to darken that ugly background and add some contrast sharpness to the detail areas.
Step 3: Aggressive Background Removal
Here's the step that photo purists might back away from since we are altering the pixels in specific areas as opposed to applying an effect to the whole image. I don't like to do a lot of spot correction myself but this photo just wouldn't become art without it. First we take the polygonal lasso tool and adjust the settings to feather 4 pixels and select the "new selection" option so it doesn't have to be done all at once. Now we make the original photo into a background layer and add a pure black layer below that one. If you haven't figured it out by now we are adding a layer mask to the main image. Now we select chunks of the background, close the loop and fill in with pure black using the paint bucket on the masked channel. It takes a while but the results are worth it. Once the background is painted out we go back and using a hard brush, paint in more black to remove the small spots that were missed or use white to un hide the photo where it may have been painted over.
Step 4: Finishing Up in Adobe Photoshop
Now that we have the photo pretty close to what we want its time to do some finishing touches. There isn't enough contrast to some of the bright areas so we bring up the Photoshop levels adjustment layer and move the right slider a little to the left to give it some punch. Finally we add some un sharp mask to the photo. The settings used here were amount - 173% and radius 1.9. Of course each photo will have its own best settings but this happened to work for this photo.
Summary
All in all this tutorial won't give you the best way to create black and white artwork from every photo but I hope this insight into the process for one picture will give you some ideas to use in your own Adobe Photoshop work. The final result is one of my favorite photos that started out as a mediocre shot that had potential.