Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac: The Missing Manual

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 the high-quality black-and-white conversion in Elements. 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 illustrations. 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 colors 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 a color photo without color. Generally, just removing the color from a photo produces a pretty flat-looking, uninteresting image. A good black-and-white photo usually needs more contrast. You can create very different effects and totally different moods in your photo, depending on what you decide to emphasize in the black-and-white version.

Black-and-white conversion has traditionally been regarded ...