Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [171]
Camera Raw black and white conversions
You may already have noticed that you can use Camera Raw to convert images to black and white. However, you are limited in that you can only use the Camera Raw method to process raw, JPEG, or TIFF images (providing the TIFF is flattened).
The extra color sliders
Camera Raw provides you with more sliders to play with than the Black & White adjustment. These allow you to adjust the in-between color ranges such as Oranges, Aquas and Purples. The Oranges slider is useful for targeting skin tones and the Aquas is useful for adjusting things like the sea. Having these extra sliders provides you with extra levels of tone control.
If you go to the HSL/Grayscale panel and check the Convert to Grayscale box, Camera Raw creates a black and white version of the image, which is produced by blending the color channel data to produce a monochrome rendering of the original. Clicking ‘Auto’ applies a custom setting that is based on the white balance setting applied in the Basic panel and if you click ‘Default’, this resets all the sliders to zero. You can manually drag the sliders to make certain colors in the color original lighter or darker, or select the target adjustment tool (circled in Figure 6.4) to click and drag on the image to make certain colors convert to a darker or lighter tone. The overall tone brightness and contrast should not fluctuate much as you adjust the settings here and this makes it easy to experiment with different slider combinations. For example, if you want the sky to be darker, you would do as I did in Figure 6.4 and drag the Aquas and Blues sliders to the left. I would also suggest sometimes switching over to the Basic and Tone Curve panels to make continued adjustments to the white balance and tone controls there as these can have a strong bearing on the outcome of a black and white conversion.
Figure 6.4 In this example, I clicked on the Convert to Grayscale button and made some custom slider adjustments to increase the tonal contrast.
HSL/Grayscale conversions
If you set all the Saturation sliders in the HSL panel to −100, you can then use the Luminance sliders in the HSL panel to make almost the same type of adjustments as the Grayscale mode. One of the chief advantages of this method is that you can use the Saturation and Vibrance controls in the Basic panel to fine-tune the grayscale conversion effect, which you can't do when using the ordinary Grayscale conversion mode.
Pros and cons of the Camera Raw approach
In my view, Camera Raw Grayscale conversions have the edge over using the Black & White adjustment in Photoshop. This is because the slider controls are better thought out and the addition of the in-between color sliders (see sidebar on page 386) makes it possible to target certain colors more precisely. The target adjustment mode correction tool in Camera Raw also performs better than the one found in the Photoshop Black & White adjustment. The other important question is ‘when is the best time to convert a photo to black and white?’ If you do this at the early Camera Raw stage it limits what you can do to a photo should you then want to retouch the image later in Photoshop. I find it is usually better to carry out the black and white conversion at the end, just prior to print, and have the adjustment be reversible. This is not a problem in Photoshop, because if you add a Black & White adjustment layer, it is easy enough to toggle the adjustment on or off. An alternative approach is to take a Photoshop-edited image back through Camera Raw again. This can be done, but you are limited by the fact that any non-raw image you process through Camera Raw must be a JPEG or a TIFF (PSD won't work), and a TIFF image must not have any layers. This means saving a flattened duplicate of the Photoshop-edited master image and then opening it up via Camera Raw. It's quite a convoluted procedure to go through just to access the Camera Raw controls and also costly in terms of adding to the edit time and