Also, the light-colored soils don’t show up that way and the sky is a bit anemic. Here is the resulting image.Īs you can see, the converted image is somewhat muddy looking at you could not tell that the season was fall and the Cottonwoods a clear yellow. Image → Adjustments → Desaturate will do it. Your camera uses some variant of desaturation to produce monochrome output. Each method offers different controls, and creates a distinct style of output. I can think of several ways you can convert a color image to b&w in Photoshop. You can do much better in Photoshop.īy capturing the image in color and processing in Photoshop, you can control the tonality of an image in many different ways to achieve results more in line with what you’d imagined in the first place. Worse, it is unlikely that the image looks like what you imagined in the first place. The output is a single channel grayscale image two-thirds of the image data your camera captured in the first place is gone and cannot be recovered.

Desaturation consists of interpreting each of three colors in the sensor image as a grayscale, and combining them according to some averaging technique. But if you start with a distinct personal vision of the image, you will often find the result to be disappointing, and almost impossible to change.īesides the fact that you probably don’t know where the stupid setting is in the first place, and you don’t want to spend time finding out, the in-camera B&W image is produced in the camera’s computer using an algorithm – usually it’s a simple desaturation. Some cameras will have a setting/button/mode etc., that instructs the camera to produce black and white images, and what you will get is a 16-bit grayscale image. You know that is how it will be printed, so how do you make the picture?

When you’re taking pictures you may see, in your mind’s eye anyway, the scene as a stunning black and white image.

Photoshop convert image to 16 bit