Create great-looking black-and-white images in seconds
Produce a timeless, classic mono finish with custom-made effects for Photoshop CC
One of the easiest ways to ramp up the artistic appeal of an image is to present it in black and white. By removing the colour, you immediately inject extra depth and meaning into a photo, turning record shots into documentary stills and casual snaps into artistic statements. Nothing dramatic has actually changed in the content of the photo, but once you switch to mono, the viewer’s perception changes, and ties in the kinds of timeless and artistic connotations associated with black-and-white pictures.
On this issue’s CD or download, we’ve created a set of Photoshop templates that make it really quick and easy to convert any photo to mono. What’s more, you can add a range of different enhancements, one click at a time, giving a huge variety of different styles and treatments.
Whether you’re a newcomer looking for a fuss-free method or an old hand seeking a fast way to evaluate the mono potential of a shot, we think you’ll find our kit to be one of the handiest imaging tools in your creative arsenal.
1 Get started
Drag the Mono FX files from the disc to your hard drive. Select the picture you want to convert to black and white, and open it into Photoshop CC. Press Ctrl/Cmd+A to select it and Ctrl/ Cmd+C to copy it. Close it down with Ctrl/Cmd+W. Now open the Mono FX file that suits the orientation of the pic and the size you want. We went for ‘A4 Mono FX Horiz.psd’. Once it has loaded, look in the Layers panel, and select the layer at the very bottom of the stack. Now press Ctrl/Cmd+V to paste your image above this layer. To scale your image to size, press Ctrl/Cmd+T and pull the corner handles.
2 Explore the Mono Effects layers
There are a lot of layers in the file, so to make life easy, click on the four-line icon at the top-right of the
Layers panel, and select Panel Options. In the dialog box, select None under Thumbnail Size and your layers will be easier to view. Scroll up and down the layers, and you’ll see they are arranged into colour-coded groups called Vignette, Toning, Contrast and Mix. If you expand these layer groups, you’ll see the effect layers within.
3 Mix your mono and adjust contrast
Down towards the bottom, the Mix group is the foundation of making your mono pic. Pick one of these and click in the box to the left of the layer to switch on the visibility (eye) icon. Click again to switch off the effect, and take a look through each of the options to get an effect that works well with your image. Once you have a tonal mix you like, move up to the Contrast group, where you can increase or reduce the contrast in the same way. With this example, we picked the Light Red filter, and boosted contrast a little with the +Contrast Light option.
4 A dd toning and a vignette
To see how your pic looks with a colour toning treatment, activate one of the layers in the Toning group. There are six single-tone options and four split-toning effects, where the shadows and highlights have different colours. It’s also worth trying the final effect at the top of the layers stack, as the three options in the Vignette group darken the edges of the picture, and focus the viewer’s attention toward the centre. Once you’ve created the look you want (we used Split Tone 2 and Vignette Medium), go to File > Save As and choose the JPEG option as you save your new image.