Photoshop Channel Mixer

If you've been following along from one tutorial to the next in our look at how to convert color photos to black and white in Photoshop, you've seen how to instantly remove all the color from a photograph by converting it to Grayscale mode. You've seen how to use a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to easily desaturate all the colors in an image and leave you with black and white. You've seen how to use the Luminosity blend mode on a layer in the Layers palette to hide all the colors in an image, and you've seen how to separate the lightness and color values in a photo by converting it to the Lab color mode. You've also seen how to tweak the final result using either the Multiply or Screen blend mode on a duplicate layer.

Each of these methods of converting a color image to black and white has one serious drawback though, which is that none of them gives you much of anything in the way of control over the result. If you're a professional photographer, chances are you want more control over your images than what these methods offer.

Fortunately, there's a much better way of converting color images to black and white, one that gives you complete control over the process and allows you to customize the black and white conversion to your liking. What is it that gives us this control? Photoshop's Channel Mixer.

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