Black & White Conversion

I’m sure most of you remember at least one old black and white film photograph that still stands out from the rest. Those old black and white photographs just had a magical look to them and you have probably tried recreating that look without any success. Don’t worry many people have been in your shoes.

Converting to black and white seems like a very simple task which in fact it is. The hard part is converting it the right way so that it looks WOW.

We have almost unlimited options when it comes to converting our photos to black and white. Today we will be looking how to achieve excellent results with a plug in for photoshop.

First off we have our normal color photo as seen here.

In this example we have a very basic black and white image done in photoshop by removing the saturation. As you can see it lacks contrast and just isn’t impressive at all.

Now this Images look better doesn’t it? This is because we converted it with the black and white tool in Photoshop CS4. This is the best result I managed to get with this tool but it looks almost surreal now in a way.

Lastly we have used Silver Efex Pro by NIK software. This software has been nothing but amazing since I got it back in 2008. There are many presets for you to choose from and also allows you to add grain and film effects to your photos to give them that real authentic feel. In my humble opinion there is no better software for black and white conversions