A good black-and-white image is so much more than just a color photo without color. Generally, just removing the color from a photo produces a pretty flat-looking, uninteresting image. A good black-and-white photo usually needs more contrast. You can create very different effects and totally different moods in your photo, depending on what you decide to emphasize in the black-and-white version.

Black-and-white conversion has traditionally been regarded as a pretty complicated process. When you do a Google search, you can find literally dozens of different recipes for making conversions. Fortunately for you, Elements makes it really easy to perform these conversions, and even to do sophisticated tweaking of the different color channels.

Just follow these steps:

While the different conversion styles have descriptive names, like Portraits and Scenic Landscape, don’t put too much stock in the names themselves. Instead, test out the various styles to see which best matches your photo. For instance, you may vastly prefer the way Uncle Julio looks when you choose the Newspaper style instead of the Portraits style. Basically, the names are just a less intimidating way of describing preset collections of settings to the color channels in your photo.

But wait a minute: changes to the color channels? That’s right. Back in Chapter 7, you read about how your photo consists of three separate color channels: red, blue, and green. What you may not realize is that, in your original camera file, each of these channels is recorded merely as variations in light and dark tones; in other words, a black-and-white image. Your image file tells the computer or printer to render a particular channel as all red, blue, or green, and the blending of the three monotone channels makes all the colors you see.

Now when you convert your photo back to black and white, each of these channels contains varying amounts of details from your photo, depending on the color of your original subject. So, the green channel might have more detail from your subject’s eyelashes, while the red channel may have more detail from the bark on the tree she’s standing under. (Remember, the color channels themselves don’t necessarily correspond to the color of the objects you see in your final photo. Or, put another way: Your camera needs to use a mixture of red, blue, and green to create what looks like bark to us humans.) Noise (graininess) often happens much more in one channel than the others, as well.

The Adjustment Intensity sliders in the dialog box (More Red, More Green, and so on) let you increase or decrease the presence of each color channel. So you can adjust how prominent various details in your photo are by changing the importance of that color channel in the complete photo. These adjustments can greatly change the appearance of the final conversion. The Contrast slider adjusts the contrast for the combined channels.

That’s the theory behind those color channel sliders, but fortunately you don’t have to understand it to use them effectively. Just be sure you can get a good view of your photo (zoom and, if necessary, move the dialog box around), and slide till you’re happy with what you see. If you plan to print your converted photo, read the box on Method Two: Removing Color from a Photo for some tips on how to get a good black-and-white print from a color inkjet printer.

Since one size never fits all, Elements gives you a few other, fundamentally different ways to remove the color from your image. Most times, you should follow the instructions in the preceding section to convert your photo to black and white. But if you want to drain the color from a particular part of your photo, or if you’re looking to do something artistic, like changing a color photo into a drawing or a painting, then you’ll probably want to try one of these three methods:

Figure 10-2. Uncoloring your photo can generate very different results depending on the method you use. Top: Each star, when first created, has a pure color value of 255. In other words, you’re looking at stars that are 100 percent blue, red, and green, with zero as the number for the other two channels. Middle: The same images with the mode converted to grayscale (Image → Mode → Grayscale). Bottom: Using the Remove Color command causes a very different change.

Removing almost all the color from a photo but leaving one or two objects in vivid tones, called spot color, is a very effective artistic device that’s long been popular in the print industry. (The term can also have a different meaning among those in the commercial printing business, where it refers to the use of special ink for a particular color in a multicolor image.)

Figure 10-3 shows an example of spot color. To practice the maneuvers you’re about to learn, download the photo (barn.jpg) from the Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com.

Figure 10-3. With Elements, you can easily remove the color from only part of an image. Top: Here, the photo is a regular color image. Bottom: The color is gone from everything except the barn. You’ll learn three easy methods for removing color in this section.

This section walks you through four of the easiest methods to create spot color. (The fifth way, explained earlier in this chapter [Method One: Making Color Photos Black and White], is to select the area you want to make black and white, and then use “Convert to Black and White”.) You can paint out color, erase your way back to color, change only a selected area to black and white, or use an Adjustment layer. With the last method, you’ll also learn how to edit the layer mask of an Adjustment layer so that you can change the area that the adjustment affects.

The end result looks the same no matter which method you choose. Just select the one you find easiest for the particular photo you want to change.

Brushing Away Color

Creating black-and-white areas in a color photo has never been as easy as it is in Elements 7. You can use the new Smart Brush to convert an area to black and white while making your selection (see Figure 10-4). In other words, you paint the object you wish to make black and white, and Elements selects and converts it—all while preserving the color in the rest of your photo. If you want to keep most of your image in color while converting only small portions of it to black and white, this method is definitely the one to try first.

Figure 10-4. With the Smart Brush, converting part of your photo to black and white is as simple as making a selection. It would be a nuisance to accurately select all the curly edges of the grass wreath on the table, but the brush does a fairly good job of automatically finding the wreath’s edges as you drag your cursor over it. The end result? A wreath that’s soon to be black and white, all without changing the color of the rest of the photo.

To paint away color with the Smart Brush:

1. Open a photo in Full Edit mode, and then activate the Smart Brush.

   Press F, or click its icon in the Toolbox, and then choose the brush from the pop-out menu. The Smart Brush puts its changes on their own layer, so you don’t need to create a duplicate layer before using it.

2. Choose the style of black and white conversion you want.

   At the right end of the Smart Brush options, you’ll see a small thumbnail. This is actually the pop-out menu for the Smart Brush presets (which Adobe calls Smart Paint). Go to the “Black and White” section, and then choose the thumbnail that looks most like what you want. (If you don’t like it once it’s applied, you can always change it later.) Elements has a number of different conversion styles, and the names don’t mean much, really. It’s best to go by the thumbnail preview when choosing a conversion style.

3. Drag over the object in your photo that you want to make black and white.

   The Smart Brush should select the object and convert it, all in one go. If you have a hard time getting a good selection, then go back to Elements’ main Toolbox, and use the Detail Smart Brush (Correcting color with a brush) instead. (That one works like the regular Selection brush, changing only the area directly under the cursor, so you’ll have more work to do, but you’ll get a more accurate selection.)

That’s all there is to it. If you don’t like the conversion style you’ve chosen, or want to change the area the brush affects, then just click the pin that appears when the Smart Brush is active; then make your changes. See Correcting color with a brush for more about how to fine-tune Smart Brush edits. You can also adjust the affected area by editing the Smart Brush’s layer mask, as explained on Editing a layer mask.

The Smart Brush is great when you want a photo that’s mostly in color with only a small area of black and white showing. If you want a photo that’s mostly black and white with only a small area of color, brush over the area you want to keep in color and then, in the Options bar, turn on the Invert checkbox, which reverses the area changed by the effect. The part of your image you made black and white gets recolored, while the rest of the photo (where you didn’t brush) turns black and white. You can also use one of the methods listed in the following sections.

Using an Adjustment Layer and the Saturation Slider

If you’d like to keep the option of easily changing your mind about which areas keep the color, and you don’t like any of the Smart Brush presets, it’s best to remove the color with a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer. This choice is the most flexible (though it doesn’t offer you the tone adjustments you can make when using the Enhance menu’s “Convert to Black and White” option). Using an Adjustment layer lets you both add and subtract areas of color later if you like.

1. Select the area where you want to remove the color.

   Use any Selection tool you like (see Chapter 5 for more about Selection tools). If you think it would be easier to select the area where you want to keep the color, do that. Then press Shift+Ctrl+I to invert your selection—now the area that’s going to lose the color is selected instead.

2. Create a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer.

   Go to Layer → New Adjustment Layer → Hue/Saturation, or click the New Adjustment Layer icon on the Layers palette, and then choose a Hue/Saturation layer.

3. In the Hue/Saturation dialog box that appears, remove the color.

   Move the Saturation slider all the way to the left to remove the color.

Why is this method better? Well, for one thing, you can always discard the Adjustment layer if you change your mind. But that’s not all. You can actually edit the Adjustment layer’s layer mask (see Layer Masks for more about layer masks) so that you can change which parts of your photo are in color, even days or weeks later.

Don’t want that tree as well as the vine on the house? Or maybe you wish you’d left all the window frames in color? You can easily fix everything by editing the layer mask. The next section tells you how.

Editing a layer mask

Elements lets you make changes to the layer mask of an Adjustment layer any time you want—as long as the layer hasn’t been merged into another layer and the image hasn’t been flattened. You may want to edit your layer mask if you think your original selection needs some cleaning up, or you want to make changes to the area the Adjustment layer affects. You can use this same technique to change the area affected by a Smart Brush adjustment, too, although usually it’s simpler just to click the pin in the image and activate the layer mask that way (see Correcting color with a brush for more details on how all that works).

Note

Remember that masking something means it won’t be affected by a change. So the area that shows up in black or red on your layer mask is the area that isn’t going to be changed by your adjustment. If you don’t see any black or red when looking at a layer mask, then the Adjustment layer is going to change your whole photo.

You can work on the mask directly, or make the layer mask visible and work on the mask itself. Here’s the simplest way to make changes to the area covered by a layer mask:

1. Make sure the Adjustment layer is the active layer.

   If it isn’t, then click it in the Layers palette.

2. Set your foreground/background colors to black and white.

   Just press D. If you want to paint with white, press X to swap the colors so that white (the background) becomes the foreground color.

3. Paint directly on your image.

   Use the Brush tool to paint on the image. Paint with black to keep an area from being affected by your adjustment. Paint with white to increase the area affected by the adjustment. In other words, black masks an area, while white increases your selected area.

   You can also use the Selection tools (the same way you would on any other selection) to change the mask’s area. Just keep in mind that what’s selected gets changed by the adjustment, while what’s masked doesn’t change. See Chapter 5 if you need help making selections. If you watch the layer mask icon in the layers palette, then you’ll see that it also changes to show where you’ve painted.

To make a layer mask visible, click it in the Layers palette. Elements gives you a choice of two different ways to see the masked area, as shown in Figure 10-5. You merely Alt+click the right thumbnail for the Adjustment layer in the Layers palette, and then you’ll see the black layer mask (instead of your photo) in the image window. Add the Shift key when you click to see a red overlay on the photo instead of the black-and-white view. Press the same keys again to get back to a regular view of your image.

Figure 10-5. Elements lets you edit your layer mask and also gives you two different ways to see it. Top: To see the masked area in black, Alt+click the right thumbnail for the layer in the Layers palette. Bottom: To see the masked area in red, Alt+Shift+click the layer’s thumbnail.

The black mask view shows only the mask itself, not your photo beneath it. This is a good choice when checking to see how clean the edges of your selection are. If you’re adding or subtracting areas of your photo, then choose the red overlay view so you can see the objects in your photo as you paint over them. You can use the method described above to paint in either view.

That’s all there is to it, but that’s not all you can do to edit a layer mask. You can use shades of gray to adjust the transparency of the mask. When you paint on your mask with gray, you can change the opacity of the changes made by the Adjustment layer. You can let a little color show through the mask, for instance, without letting the full vividness of the color come through. Figure 10-6 shows an example of how you’d use this technique. The lighter the shade of gray you choose, the more color shows through.

Figure 10-6. By painting with different shades of gray on the layer mask, you can cause the effect of the adjustment to be partially transparent. Here, a fairly light gray was used to paint over the tree so that a little green shows, but it’s not the bright, saturated green of the original photo. Only part of the tree was painted to make it easy to see the contrast with what was there before.

So far, you’ve read about ways to make all or part of a color photo black and white. But what about when you’ve got a black-and-white photo and you want to add color to it? Elements makes things easy (or if not easy, then at least possible). For instance, you can give an old photo the sort of hand-tinted effect you sometimes see in antique prints, as shown in Figure 10-7.

Figure 10-7. Top: If you decide to color an old black-and-white or sepia photo, put each color on its own layer. That way you can adjust the transparency or change the hue or saturation of one color without changing the other colors, too. Bottom: A very low opacity is enough for really old photos like this one if you want to give the effect of a print that was hand-colored.

You can easily color things with Elements. Before you start tinting a photo, first make any needed repairs. See The Clone Stamp for repair strategies. For fixes to the exposure, see Deciding Which Exposure Fix to Use.

You can also paint directly on the original layer. (Try switching the brush blend mode to Color for this.) But with that method, you’ll find it far more difficult to fix things if you make a mistake when you’re well into your project. Using the original layer also doesn’t give you much of an out if you decide later on that the lip color you painted first doesn’t look so great with the skin color you just chose.

The method just described is handy for when you want to use many different colors on a photo, but if you want to add only a single color to part of the photo, in Elements 7 the easiest way is to use the Smart Brush:

The Smart Brush works well if you happen to like one of the available color choices. If you don’t like any of the colors it offers, then use the new layer method described earlier in this section, which is much more flexible, since you can choose any color you want.

Tinting an Entire Photo

You can give an entire photo a single color tint all over, even if the original is a grayscale photo. Tinting is a great way to create a variety of different moods.

You have two basic ways to tint photos. Actually, there are a lot more than two, but two should get you started. The first method (Layer style) described here is faster, but the second (Colorize) lets you tweak your settings more. Figure 10-8 shows the result of using the Layer style method on a color photo. (For a more subtle effect, you can also use Photo Filters, described on Photo Filter.) Photo Effects also has some terrific monotone tint effects, as explained on Using Actions in Elements.

For either method, if you want to keep the original color (or lack thereof) in part of your photo, then use the Selection brush in Mask mode (The Selection Brush) to mask out the area you don’t want to change.

Figure 10-8. You can most easily create a monochrome color scheme for your photo with the Photographic Effects Layer styles, which are explained in Chapter 13. Shown here is the Gray-Green Tone style applied to the original color photo. It removes any existing color and recolors your image in one click. The downside is that you can’t edit the color once you’re done if you decide you’d rather have, say, orange.

Tip

Some of the frame effects in the Content palette automatically add a tint to your photo when you apply them. The Effects palette also has some handy monochrome tint effects in its Photo Effects section.

Using a Layer style

Although many people never dig down far enough to find them, Adobe gives you some Photographic Effects Layer styles that make tinting a photo as easy as double-clicking. You’ll learn more about Layer styles on Adding Layer Styles, but this section tells you all you need to know to use the Photographic styles. It’s a very simple procedure:

1. Create a duplicate layer.

   Go to Layer → Duplicate Layer or press Ctrl+J. (If you don’t create a duplicate layer and your original has only a Background layer, then you’ll get asked to convert it to a layer when you apply the style. Say yes.)

2. If necessary, change the mode to RGB.

   Go to Image → Mode → RGB Color. With this method, it doesn’t matter if your original is in color or not. The Layer style gets rid of the original color, and tints the photo all at the same time.

3. Choose a Layer style.

   Go to the Effects palette → Layer Styles → Photographic Effects. Double-click the style of your choice, drag it to the photo, or click it once in the palette, and then click Apply. You can click around and try different styles to see which you prefer. Undo (Ctrl+Z) after each style that you try.

4. When you see what you like, click OK.

   The drawback to this method is that you can’t easily go back and edit the color you get from the Layer style. When you call up the Style Settings (see Applying Gradients), you don’t see any active checkboxes, because these styles don’t use those settings. Instead, you’d need to use a Hue/Saturation adjustment (see Making Your Colors More Vibrant) or Color Variations (Using Color Variations) to go back later and change the Layer style’s tint color.

Additional tint effects from the Content palette

The Content palette includes some frames that automatically apply a tint to your photo, as shown in Figure 10-9. These range from simple all-over colors like Sepia, to fading gradients. (See Applying Gradients for more about gradients.)

Figure 10-9. Using the Content palette, you can apply elaborate effects, like this fading gradient, drop shadow, and frame, with just a double-click. The effect used here is the Color Tint Blue Fadeout 20px.

You can read more about using the Frames from the Content palette on Photo Collages. To tint your photo, choose Type → Frames, and then scroll down towards the bottom of the list of thumbnails.

The Photo Effects section of the Effects palette also has some very effective color tints. Read about how to apply Effects on Using Actions in Elements.

Using Colorize

You can use the Colorize checkbox in the Hue/Saturation dialog box to add a color tint to a grayscale photo or to change the color of a photo that already has color in it. With this method, you can choose any color you like, as opposed to the limited color choices of the Layer styles in the previous section. You can also adjust the intensity of the color with the Saturation slider once you’ve selected the shade you want.

Figure 10-10 explains how the Colorize setting changes the way the Hue/Saturation command works.

Figure 10-10. If you want to color something that has no color information in it, like a white shirt or a grayscale image, in the Hue/Saturation dialog box, turn on Colorize (where the cursor is here) to add color to the image. If you don’t turn on the Colorize checkbox, then you can adjust the hue, saturation, and lightness of white all day long—all you’ll do is go from white to gray to black because there’s no color info there for Elements to work with. Also, if something is pure white (that is, contains no color information at all), then you may need to darken it by moving the Lightness slider to the left before any color shows.

1. Make sure your photo is in RGB mode.

   Go to Image → Mode → RGB Color.

2. Remove the color from your photo, if necessary.

   Press Shift+Ctrl+U to remove the color. Do this if the photo has become yellowed or discolored (because of age, for example). If your whites are really dingy, then you might want to make a Levels adjustment (Using Levels) to brighten them back up before removing the color.

3. Colorize your photo on a new layer.

   Go to Layer → New Adjustment Layer → Hue/Saturation, and then turn on the Colorize checkbox. When you turn this setting on, your image becomes filled with the foreground color. If you don’t like it, that’s fine. You’re going to change it right now.

4. Adjust the color until it looks the way you want it to.

   Move the sliders for Hue, Saturation, and Lightness until you find the look you want, and then click OK. Figure 10-11 shows the results.

Tip

Want to turn a full-color photo to a monotone image in a hurry? Just turn on the Colorize checkbox—no need to remove the color first. Colorize automatically reduces your photo to just one color. The advantage to using the Colorize method (versus the layer style) is that you can use the sliders to create any color you want.

Figure 10-11. Here’s the photo from Figure 10-8. It was tinted with a purple tone by turning on the Colorize checkbox in the Hue/Saturation dialog box. The door was masked out so that it stays in full color.

If you selected and masked an area, then that part should still show the original color.

You can change your mind about the colorizing by double-clicking the left icon on the layer in the Layers palette. That brings up the controls for the Hue/Saturation adjustment again so you can change your settings. And you can also edit the layer mask, as described on Editing a layer mask, if you want to change the area that’s affected by the Adjustment layer.

When you’re done, if you merge layers (or press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E to produce a new merged layer above the existing layers), then you can use Levels (Using Levels), Color Variations (Using Color Variations), and the other color-editing tools to tweak the tint effect.