Black & White Adjustment Layers in Photoshop

Excerpted from Creative Black and White:
Digital Photography Tips and Techniques (Wiley Publishing)

By Harold Davis

Black & White adjustment layers are probably the most effective and powerful way to create great creative monochromatic imagery in Photoshop. They’re easy, flexible, and powerful—although in many cases a single Black & White adjustment layer isn’t optimal for all areas in a photo. To resolve this problem, multiple adjustment layers can be used with different settings, each setting applied on a different layer, with the layers masked and blended to create the final results.

Even just one Black & White adjustment layer can be a powerful conversion tool. Part of what makes Black & White adjustment layers easy to use are the Presets—conversions to black and white using settings chosen from a list. These Presets mostly use the metaphor of applying filters in an old-fashioned darkroom, and are named after these filters.

Don’t get too caught up in the metaphor to film that the presets provide. As with everything digital, the analogy to old-fashioned process doesn’t always hold up. The best way to see what one of the black and white adjustment presets does is try it, and find out. If you don’t like it, you can always go back and try again.

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