Photoshop Elements 3: The Missing Manual

Making Color Photos Black and White

Sometimes you may want to convert your color photos to black and white. If you can't imagine why anyone would willingly do that, consider that in a world crammed full of eye-popping colors, the understatement of black and white really stands out. Also, you may be planning to have something printed where you can't use color illustrations. And of course, for artistic photography, there's still nothing like black and white.

Elements gives you two fundamentally different ways to remove all the color from your image, but they produce quite different results. Figure 9-16 shows you why you need to experiment.

Figure 9-16.  Changing to grayscale can give you very different results depending on the method you use. Top: Each star in the original has a color value of 250. Middle: This shows the same photo with the mode converted to grayscale. Bottom: Using Remove Color causes a very different change.

Remove Color and Hue/Saturation make the same changes to your photo behind the scenes, so the results are pretty much the same with both. Convert Mode can give you quite different results. Here's what you need to know to use each method:

• Convert Mode. The simplest solution can be had by going to Image → Mode → Grayscale. This is the most straightforward way, but it's also a bit destructive. Many people prefer to use one of the other methods for important images. ...