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CONVERTING COLOR TO BLACK AND WHITE WITH CHANNEL MIXER
by Jim Doty, Jr. |
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KATI in color |
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There are a lot of ways to convert digital color images to black and white. One of the simplest it to choose HUE - SATURATION in your image editing software and simply drag the saturation slider down to zero. This is quick and
simple but provides very little control. I prefer CHANNEL MIXER. Before I do the conversion, I want
to get an idea how the original image looks as a black and white in the three color channels: red, green, and blue. Choose the CHANNELS tab in your software and click on each channel to see how it looks. |
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In this particular image I like the red channel except it is a bit washed out for my taste, and the green channel is a bit too dark. I don't care for the blue
channel at all unless I want a dark and gritty look. I make a mental note to use mostly red and a little bit of green. With that preliminary decision made, I create a
CHANNEL MIXER adjustment layer in Photoshop (LAYER > NEW ADJUSTMENT LAYER > CHANNEL MIXER)
. This leaves my original image untouched. |
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