Photoshop How To

Everyone who has done a lot of shooting knows that some images just look better in black and white. And that includes certain portraits and street photos as well as different types of landscape imagery.

One way to make a monochrome image is to select your camera’s b&w mode before capturing the shot. Many of us, however, prefer to shoot the image in color, and convert it later during post processing. That way you’re giving yourself a choice to either use the image in color, convert it to b&w, or have two versions of the same shot.

 in this tutorial you’ll learn what image-editing expert Anthony Morganti considers the best approach to use. And he demonstrates exactly how to accomplish the task in barely eight minutes.

Morganti actually discusses four different ways to convert and process images into b&w, and he explains the pros and cons of each. And while the approach you take often depends upon the image in question and the look you’re after, Morganti identifies which two of the four methods he considers equally good and which one he says you should avoid.

The most obvious approach is to begin by clicking on the B&W heading in the upper right corner of Lightroom’s basic tab. This immediately converts the image to b&w. The advantage of this method is that you then have a full range of sliders available to adjust the luminance values of all the colors that were in the original image and can precisely adjust the tones in a way that looks best in b&w..

Another option is to start with the color image and apply one of several profiles available. For example you could select a profile for monochrome with a red filter. The advantage here is that you can quickly achieve a look that would be difficult to duplicate with the other conversion methods he describes. So watch the video, learn the other two techniques discussed, and see if you’re taking the best approach or if it’s time to try something different.

You can find more helpful tips on Morganti’s YouTube channel, and in another of his tutorials we posted in which he demonstrates Lightroom cropping tricks you may not know.