How to Produce a mono makeover

Open an image

Choose File > Open. Browse to a photo and click Open. Our camera raw file opens in the Develop Persona. You can make it black and white by dragging Saturation to –100 per cent, but this creates a wash of greyscale tones.

Change workspace

Restore Saturation back to the 0 default. To access powerful conversion tools, switch to the Photo Persona (the purple icon near the top left). Go to View > Studio > Adjustment to bring up the Adjustment panel.

Play with presets

Click on the Black & White adjustment to desaturate the shot. A Black & White panel appears. Click on the preset thumbnails in the adjustment panel; the Warm preset blows out the tonal differences in our foliage.

Make manual adjustments

Click on the Default thumbnail to recover blown–out highlight detail. To darken the sky and make the clouds stand out, drag the Blue and Cyan sliders left in the additional panel.

lighten the brickwork

If you’re not sure what to adjust, click Picker (lower left). Click on an area to sample it and drag the picker right to lighten the color. Here we’ve lightened the reds to make the viaduct’s pillars stand out more in contrast.

Create a high contrast

Click on the Levels adjustment layer. Hold Alt and drag the Black Level slider right until white patches appear, indicating pure black shadows. Hold Alt and drag the White Level slider left until you see color patches.