Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

268 Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

Method Two:

Removing Color from

a Photo

Now when you convert your photo back to black and white, each of these chan-

nels contains varying amounts of details from your photo, depending on the color

of your original subject. So, the green channel might have more detail from your

subject’s eyelashes, while the red channel has more detail from the bark on the tree

she’s standing under. (Remember, the color channels themselves don’t necessarily

correspond to the color of the objects you see in your final photo. Or, put another

way: your camera needs to use a mixture of red, blue, and green to create what

looks like bark to us humans.) Noise (see page 350) often happens much more in

one channel than the others, as well.

The buttons in the dialog box (More Red, More Green, and so on) let you increase

or decrease the presence of each color channel. So you can adjust how prominent

various details in your photo are by changing the importance of that color channel

in the complete photo. These adjustments can greatly change the appearance of the

final conversion.

That’s the theory behind those color channel buttons, but, fortunately, you don’t

have to understand it to use them effectively. Just be sure you can get a good view

of your photo, and click till you’re happy with what you see. If you plan to print

your converted photo, read the box on page 270 for some