If you’re converting your color photos to black and white by using a simple desaturate (Ctrl+Shift+U), you may have been disappointed by the results you get. Black and white images created this way often look a bit murky and lacking in contrast. There are huge number of ways to get better black and white photos but here’s a really quick way to get a nice silvery look.

Here’s our starting image by andyi…

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The first step is to duplicate the layer (Ctrl+J) and then desaturate the duplicate (Ctrl+Shift+U). What you now see is the result of a simple desaturation - it’s black and white but nothing special…

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Next set the desaturated layer’s blend mode to Overlay which will bring back the colors and give you a contrasty image like this…

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So far the process has been the same as the first part of our 3 in 1 grunge effect tip. Now though we’ll add a Hue / Saturation adjustment layer and set the Saturation to -100 and we get a much better looking black and white image than our earlier desaturated image…

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Depending on the image, this can leave us with too much clipping in the darkest and lightest regions so I’ve added a Curves adjustment layer with a reverse S curve to recover some of those regions. If you’re not comfortable with curves, a Brightness / Contrast adjustment with contrast set to -50 can be used but with less control.
Here’s the final image which looks much better than the simple desaturation shown above…

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I hope you find this quick black and white conversion useful. If you’ve got a favorite black and white conversion method why not leave a comment to tell us how to do it.