CONVERTING YOUR IMAGE TO MONOCHROME - Finding the best approach to black & white

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All images © by Jon Davison 2007.

There are a number of ways to convert a colour image into monochrome, (black & white) and whats more, they all work. It just depends on what visual information within the image you need to bring out. Below, we have 9 variations (including original colour)
on how this image (The University of Western Australia) has been converted to monochrome. I don't think there is a 'right way', whatever you need to bring out within the image should govern your approach, or method. For instance any information that is
red or yellow, will appear white when viewed in the red channel. By simply desaturating (3) or converting to greyscale (4) will not neccessarily bring this out the way you see it in colour, you may need another approach.


1: Original colour frame.Note the orange/yellow areas.
2: Split Channels plus selective erasing (Channels-Split Channels).This command creates 3 new windows, one for each channel. Simply drag two into one window to make 3 Layers, then Eraser areas on each layer until you are happy with the content.


3: Desaturate (Image-Adjustments-Desaturate). This keeps the colour mode but removes colour information.
4: Greyscale conversion (Image-Mode-Grayscale). This changes the mode, you cannot use color controls now.


5: Red Channel (Channels-Split Channels). This command creates 3 new windows, one for each channel.
6: Green Channel (Channels-Split Channels). This command creates 3 new windows, one for each channel.


7: Blue Channel (Channels-Split Channels). This command creates 3 new windows, one for each channel
8: Channel mix (Image-Adjustments-Channel mixer). This allows you to mix between the channels but in one window

9: Calculation method (Image-Calculations). This is a bit trickier, but it can produce very good results.