Colour to Black and White using the Channel
Mixer
by Tony Parkinson
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| Starting
with this colour image, the easiest way to produce a black and white
image is probably using Desaturate tool. However, this tends to
give a flat image and there is a far better way to achieve this,
namely the channel mixer |
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| 1.
After ensuring the Image is in RGB Colour mode, this is accessed
via Image -> Adjust -> Channel Mixer menu (see fig. 1 right). |
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| 2.
This will then bring up the "Channel Mixer" dialog box allowing
you to blend the colour channels (see fig. 2 right) |
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| 3.
Ensuring the "Monochrome" box is ticked, the sliders can then be
adjusted to determine the mix of channels. By applying varying percentages
of the Red, Green & Blue channels, the effects of using various
coloured filters with Black & White film can be simulated (but
try to keep the overall total %age around the 100 mark). In this
case, I wish to simulate the effect of using a red filter so I have
selected 80% Red and 10% each of Blue & Green (see fig. 3).
Ensuring the "Preview" box is ticked, the effect of moving the sliders
can be seen on the image and once this is satisfactory, "OK" can
be clicked. A quick tweak of the "Levels" and our image is complete. |
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| Here
are both the desaturated and our finished image ..... |
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