The Beginnings of Control- Mapping Colors

The truth is, Adobe doesn’t seem to think a straight mode change from RGB to Grayscale is much of a good idea either.  If you do that move, you’re going to get this default warning: <picture 6>  With CS3, you get an Adjustment called “Black and White”, and also have it available as an Adjustment Layer.  Here’s what that looks like. 

I’ve opened it up as an Adjustment Layer, as you can see, and it lets me take each basic color, Red Green and Blue, plus our secondary colors, Yellow, Cyan and Magenta, and adjust how light or dark we want them to be.  Essentially, going back to our gamut map visualization, this lets us track the individual colors across, up or down to exactly where we want them to be on that center column.

Introduction-

Probably the single most common question I get about working with digital Black and White is asking the best way to convert from color.  Like so many things about Black and White photography, this question is really very simple, but with a really complex answer.  It always makes me think of my electrician friend James.  He saw a show on Ansel Adams and told me he thought the whole thing was a scam.  “He took Black and White pictures of mountains!  Seriously.  How hard could that be?”

Before we get into the various methods, let’s look once more, in a slightly more visual way, at exactly what we’re doing.  Here are some gamut maps of a nice, colorful image, made with software called ColorThink.  This shows all the colors in the photograph, plotted on the CIE LAB color space. 

Here are three black & white images derived from a single Adobe RGB color file. Each monochrome shot was created using a different b/w conversion method.