Convert My Image to Black & White?

Like with many of the other effects in this chapter, there are a number of ways to convert to black and white (we covered another method for this in Chapter 7), so I’ll show you the way I do it: Go under the Filter menu and choose Camera Raw Filter. Click on the HSL/Grayscale icon (the fourth one from the left) beneath the histogram, and then turn on the Convert to Grayscale checkbox. Now, click back on the Basic icon (the first one from the left) beneath the histogram to return to the Basic panel—this is where you’re really going to make your conversion to black and white sing! To me, what makes a great black-and-white image is lots of depth and lots of contrast. So, what I do here is drag the Contrast slider quite a bit to the right, then drag the Clarity slider a bit to the right, as well, to enhance the texture in the image. Of course, things like adjusting the Exposure and Whites and Blacks settings all depend on the image, but if I know what I’m going for is a very high-contrast look, I know I’m gonna spend most of my time making sure the image looks very contrasty—mostly by using the Contrast and Clarity sliders. But, also by making sure the blacks are deep and rich enough by dragging the Blacks slider to the left until they’re good and black.