The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers

Black-and-White Conversion in ACR

ACR offers tremendous controls for black-and-white conversion, and I'm going to show you a few of my favorites. Since all the work you do in this application is nondestructive, you could convert your original image to black and white knowing that you can always return to its original state by selecting Camera Raw Defaults from the Settings menu. These techniques work for raw, JPEG, and TIFF files. I prefer starting with a raw file for black-and-white conversion because of the rich tonality that raw files contain.

As part of this process, I also want to show you another technique for file management in Bridge. This works hand in hand with the image editing you'll do in ACR. While in Bridge, instead of converting the original image, make a copy of it. Select the picture and then choose Edit → Duplicate to create a digital copy of your original file. Now select both images—the original and the duplicate—and choose Stacks → Group as Stack. You've now placed both your original and your soon-to-be-grayscale pictures in a Stack. Click on the title of the duplicated image so that it highlights, and then change the word copy to B&W.

Figure 5-3. Group your original and duplicate versions together as a Stack. Then you can convert the duplicate to black and white.

The advantage to this approach is that you'll have both a color version and a black-and-white version ...