How many time have you looked through you images and thought 'wouldn't that make a cracking black and white picture'. Photoshop gives us several ways in which we can convert our colour images into monochrome...... but some methods work better than others.

The original image was taken with the Olympus E10. The first job is to duplicate the background by dragging it over the 'create a new layer' icon. You can now apply levels or make any other adjustments that might be necessary.

Don't forget you are looking for black right the way through to white.

One of the first things you can try is to convert the image to Grayscale as shown above. When working in layers Photoshop will open a dialogue box (shown below) you can then click on Flatten or leave your image in layers by clicking on the Don't Flatten button. Using this method Photoshop will discard all the colour information held in our image.

Although this method works well you don't have any control over the tonal range of the image and further adjustment may be needed such as 'curves'.

Shown above is our image after converting to Grayscale.

Another option is to desaturate the image. For this we can use either the Image > Adjust > Desaturate or call up the Hue Saturation palette (short cut Ctrl U). You can then move the Saturation slider to -100% (shown above). Using this method will allow you to keep the image as an RGB file, but it can still look rather flat and requires further adjustments such as curves or brightness/contrast. See below.

Finally we can try the Channel Mixer found under the Edit > Adjust > Channel Mixer menu. When the Channel Mixer palette is opened (shown above) tick the Monochrome box in the bottom left hand corner. This will convert your image to monochrome; the Output Channel setting becomes Gray whilst the setting for the Source Channels are set at the following values.

Red +100% and the Green and Blue channels set at 0.

You can now adjust the individual channels until you are satisfied with the tonal range of your image. As with most other Photoshop tools only a small amount of adjustment is usually required.

For the image shown below the Red channel was left at +100% Green +10% and the Blue channel was set at -2%. This will differ from image to image so try experimenting with the settings.

Finally a figure was added in the distance and the image is complete.

The Layer Palette