First Look: Inside Photoshop CS3
Posted 03/25/2007 at 1:43pm
| by David Biedny
It's All Black & White
The fastest way to convert color images to black-and-white in Photoshop has long been a simple matter of choosing the Grayscale mode from the Image > Mode submenu and allowing Photoshop to blend most of the green components of the image with a healthy dollop of red and almost no blue. Of course, that rarely results in a rich-looking image. Power users have tried a variety of other methods, including selecting a single channel from the Channels palette before invoking the Grayscale conversion, which forces Photoshop to utilize just that channel in the conversion process. Other techniques call up the mystical Calculations dialog in order to mix custom ratios of the main color components. The Channel Mixer delivered an expanded set of options.
CS3 offers a new Black and White mode that streamlines the process without leaving you with a flat-looking black-and-white image and allows you to choose exact percentages of any and all of the primary color components. There’s even an integrated tinting command, which essentially provides the Colorize portion of the Hue/Saturation color controls, for creating tinted versions of your grayscale images.

Custom-mix any color component to create rich-looking black-and-white images.
Next: A Better Way to Be Selective