Face to Face: Rick Sammon's Complete Guide to Photographing People

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When you remove the color from an image and

create a black-and-white image, you remove some

of the reality from the scene. Removing some of

the reality can create a more artistic image. What’s

more, a black-and-white image can, but not al-

ways, have more impact and look more dramatic

than a color photograph.

In Photoshop CS3, it’s easy to create a beautiful

black-and-white image.

In this lesson, I discuss techniques for creating

a black-and-white image from a color file, and

more! To illustrate these techniques, I’ll use a pic-

ture of a holy man whom I photographed in the

Kingdom of Bhutan.

I used Adjustment Layers (LayerNew Adjust-

ment Layer) for my enhancements, as I recom-

mend to all my workshop students when making

adjustments. However, to save time and to save

having to write LayerNew Adjustment Layer

for each adjustment, I will go right to the Adjust-

ment.

Let’s go.

The photo above is the original image. Sure, I like

the saturated colors. However, as I do with all of

my favorite images, I experimented with black-

and-white imaging for creative possibilities.

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Subtle colors are the opposite of saturated colors—

the kinds of colors we used to get when shooting

super-saturated films. For a softer, subtler image,

I used the Hue/Saturation adjustment in Photo-

shop CS3 and moved the Saturation slider almost

all the way to the left.

As you can see, I still have a color photograph, but

the less-intense colors produce a softer image.

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With my full-color image opened once again,

I used the Black and White adjustment and ad-

justed the sliders, one for each tone/channel, until

I was pleased with what I saw. Experiment with

these sliders. They give you total control over the

color channels in your image. That’s unlike using

ModeGrayscale, which changes all the channels

in one fell swoop!

Even with all those channel sliders at my finger-

tips, I felt that the image looked a bit flat. So, I

boosted the contrast using the Brightness/Con-

trast adjustment. You’ll find that, by boosting the

contrast of your low-contrast images, such as the

one I am sharing in this lesson, your pictures will

look stronger and brighter.

Here’s the black-and-white version of my color

image after applying all of the aforementioned ad-

justments.

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Other creative enhancements are available to you

in the Black and White dialog box. Click on the

Tint box and you can change the hue and satura-

tion of the image.

After checking the Tint box, I played around

with the Saturation slider to create this sepia tone

i m a g e .