Convert to Black and White?

Click on the Create New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel (it’s the fourth one from the left; its icon looks like a circle that’s half white/half black), and choose Black & White from the pop-up menu. When the Properties panel appears (shown above left), your image is already converted to black and white, but you can tweak that conversion by moving the color sliders in the panel, and you’ll see instantly onscreen how adjusting those colors in the color version of the image affects the black-and-white conversion. At the top of the panel, there is a pop-up menu with a bunch of presets you can try (some are pretty decent, but of course, it all depends on your image, right?), and there’s an Auto button below for an auto black-and-white conversion (it’s worth clicking on—if you don’t like what it does, just press Command-Z [PC: Ctrl-Z] to Undo it). Camera Raw has a similar black-and-white conversion feature, if you prefer to do it there. Open a color image, then go under the Filter menu and choose Camera Raw Filter. In the Camera Raw filter window, click on the fourth icon from the left, under the histogram, to access the HSL/Grayscale panel (shown above right). Now, turn on the Convert to Grayscale checkbox at the top of the panel to make your image black and white. You can also use the sliders below to tweak your image, just like you would in Photoshop.