Converting to Black and White

While converting to black and white can be done in one step in Photoshop using any of several methods, the results are not always satisfactory.

While the deep blue skies in the photo above were nice for the color photo when converted to black and white the dark sky was not very appealing. This first conversion was created by simply desaturating the photograph.

Although the leading lines are still pointing to the people who were an important part of the image this method all but made them invisible. On my next attempt I decided to use the black and white setting in Image Adjustments. Here I was able to tweak it so that my focal subjects where still visible, however this resulted in a lot of noise in the sky.

 So I decided to go back to the start and adjust the levels on the original photo thus lightening the sky and then going into the black and white setting in Image Adjustments and tweak only the yellow and red. While the sky is smoother my focal subjects once again have faded into the image and worse yet the boardwalk is blown out.

Since I was happy with the sky in this last conversion and the foreground in my second conversion I decided to merge the two images to achieve the effect I desired. Here is my final image.

As most of my photography is done in color and I am not often  called upon to convert to black and white I thought taking part in Black and White Wednesday's would give me some needed practice. Any and all critique is welcomed so please let me know what you think and do hop over and check out what others are sharing.


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