Photoshop Actions and Tools for Black and White

Here is a quick little comparison of some various techniques for converting to black and white in Photoshop (CS2).

Here I've started with a straight out of the (point and shoot) camera shot of Mike, my great-uncle six times removed (or however that works) on the maternal Italian side. He did not want me to take a close-up, much less make it public, but that's what he gets for being a cheeky. If you never hear from me again, just assume Big Mike sent me to sleep with the fishes. :)


Alright, let's start off simple. This is a basic Image > Adjustments > Desaturate. Looks fine right? It's black and white, what more could you want.

Another quick tool for converting to black and white is the Channel Mixer. Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer and then tick the 'Monochrome' box at the bottom of the pop-up. The results are often more interesting, though on this picture don't look so great.


The Channel Mixer option gives obviously a different result from a Desaturate, but you can also quickly and easily adjust the values... play around with the RGB and Constant sliders for a different result, which makes this a much more powerful and useful tool.


I'm going to skip some more complicated stuff and move on to actions. One set I have been using a lot is by Alice_In_Underland from Deviantart. This action set can be downloaded here. This first one is the Professional BW action.


Another action from the same set, this one is Professional BW Grain. I usually prefer this one (on people), but on this photo it came out too dark and would need further adjustments.


Moving on to the Pioneer Woman's Actions, which I wrote about last time and can be found here - this is from her first set, called PW's B & W. The other Black and White action in this set is lame-o, it's basically the same as just clicking Desaturation and then upping the contrast a teeny bit.


And from Pioneer Woman's second action set, found on the same link as above, is one I like called Heartland. Technically, this is a sepia-tone and not a black and white, but let's take a look anyway.


And I'll finish off with one action that I LURVE and want to use it on everything. I think I'll make another post about it, but for now here is the Gum Bichromate Print action by Rawimage, again from Deviantart. It takes a while to run and requires some following of instructions. And make sure your colors are set to black/white before starting. (I actually don't usually bother to import the background when it suggests doing so, I just click stop.)

Photoshop Actions

I used to spend a lot of time tooling around in Photoshop making my photos look perfect, or crazy. That was all well and good, but with the appearance of Bobo on the scene, my Photoshop time was drastically decreased. I was never really into actions before, but once I realized how fun, controllable and quick they were I was a convert.


If I just want to quickly slap a picture up I usually just resize it and optimize the Levels, and call it a day (like the picture above). But, if I want it to look fancy, which includes a lot of the pictures I put up here, I run and tweak a few actions on them.

There are free actions all over the place. I could make my own but I haven't had much time to play around with that. I can't imagine people paying for them, but there are lots of 'artists' who sell their actions. Stupid if you ask me. Just google them, or even better head on over to Deviantart and search for Photoshop (your version) actions, and voila... a bunch of great free sets. The pics above and below are just a single action, 'Missing Mile' from Alice_in_Underland 's Photoshop Color Actions2 set I found on Deviantart. Awesome.


When I have a blurry or otherwise poor quality photo but I still think its cute, a way to salvage it is to run a bunch of stuff on it and make it more conceptual than about the caliber of the focus. The one below was super blurry, so after I sharpened the heck out of it until it looked nasty (worse than this, trust me), I threw a bunch of actions at it. Still not a great picture, but I wanted to preserve the nose-picking moment for all time. AWWR.


And if you want to get really weird with your stuff you can just call it photo art and people will nod and smile.


Oh, when I don't have a lot of time to find the perfect action, my standby is using one of Pioneer Woman's actions. They aren't fancy or professional or the best out there, but the names are intuitive and they have a nice range of effects. You can download them... oh fine let me get the link. Here, this will get you to both her sets as well as show examples of what each one does. It's a good place to start. And, super easy ... she explains the whole deal.