Photoshop Tutorial: The Black & White Adjustment Layer

For those of us fortunate enough to have one of the latest two versions of Photoshop (CS3 or CS4), there is a new, more powerful and fun way to create black and white images and get a lot of control over color brightness. This is my favorite way to convert color images to black & white — I use it pretty much exclusively because it takes all the guesswork out of moving the sliders around and makes it easy to adjust complex colors. Ready? Load up your image and let’s go!

[Note: If you own an earlier version (CS2 or previous), don't fret — the channel mixer tool is almost as powerful. See the Channel Mixer tutorial if this is the case.]

1. Create a Black & White Adjustment Layer. The button for this is in the bottom of your Layers window, which the F7 key will display if you can’t find it (see image to the right).  You will see a small menu and you want to choose “Black & White” from the list.

2. Choose a filter that looks decent. The filters are in a dropdown menu which says “Default” at first. I chose the yellow filter for my image, because the red filter made the drink too bright. The yellow filter is still pretty bright, but it’s my best option for now. But this is where it gets fun. We’re going to fine tune the sliders, but we don’t have to even touch the sliders. 

Move your mouse over the image and you’ll notice that your cursor is now an eyedropper.CS4 Users: Click on the hand icon with the arrows in the top left corner of the black & white adjustment window. CS3 users don’t have to worry about doing this, it’s automatic.)

3. Click the part of the image you want to adjust, hold down the mouse button, and drag the mouse left (to make it darker) or right (brighter).

I used this to make the drink a little bit darker even than the yellow filter, since I wanted soome detail and depth to it. When I clicked on the pouring liquid and dragged, it moved the red bar a lot and the yellow bar a little at the same time. Very nifty, and quite powerful – sometimes it’s hard to figure out exactly which sliders to move to adjust certain colors correctly.

You can also tint your image from here; CS4 users click the “Tint” checkbox and select a color by clicking the little color box to the right of it, while CS3 users have two slider bars instead of the color box. And we’re done!