Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

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Chapter 10

chapter

10

Removing and Adding

Color

If you love classic black-and-white photography, or if you yearn to be the next

Ansel Adams, then you’ll be over the moon with Elements 5. For the first time, you

can easily do a high-quality black-and-white conversion in Elements. (Previous

versions of Elements let you remove the color from a photo, but as art photogra-

phy aficionados can tell you, there’s a world of difference between just dumping

the color from a photo and creating a true work of black-and-white art.)

If you can’t imagine why anyone would willingly abandon color, consider that in a

world crammed full of eye-popping colors, black and white really stands out. Also,

you may be planning to have something printed where you can’t use color illustra-

tions. And of course, for artistic photography, there’s still nothing like black and

white, where tone and contrast make or break the photo, without any pretty col-

ors to distract you from the picture’s underlying structure

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to make a color photo black and white, and how

to create images that are partly in color and partly in black and white. You’ll also

learn how to colorize a black-and-white image, and, along the way, how to use and

edit layer masks, an important technique for advanced Elements work.

Method One: Making Color Photos Black and

White

A good black-and-white image is so much more than just