Expert: LizaL - 4/8/2006

Question
Hi, I'm new to photoshop. RIght now, I have an image and I'm trying to turn it into black and white or make it like old fashioned. How do I do that? thanks

Answer
Hi Jay,

Your best bet is to open your color image, go to the Image pulldown menu, and select Mode. From the submenu once you've chosen Mode, choose Grayscale. You'll be asked to confirm that you want to take all the color info out of your picture. Say OK, and you'll have a black and white picture.

Now, to make it look old-fashioned, go back to that same Image pulldown menu and select Mode again. This time choose Duotone.

A duotone is an image that has -- for ease of explanation -- usually black and another color layered on it. This is how sepia and similar-type images are created, digitally.

Anyway, select Duotone, and you'll see Black come up as your default color. In the row below Black, click in the blank box below the black box. Up comes your color picker, and you can choose whatever color you like to complete your duotone.

If you click on the Duotone popup menu within the dialog box, you'll also see that you can create a Tritone (three colors) and a Quadtone (four colors).

Take a look at this -- I created a Grayscale out of my color image, then made a Duotone. You can see me stepping through Tritone and some of the other options, too.

http://little-works.com/all_experts/duotone.mov

(Let me know if you have problems playing this little movie -- it loaded kind of slow for me. If it won't play online for you, I can email it to you.)


Another thing you can do, just to create a black and white image from a color image, is to select Desaturate from the Image pulldown menu, then the Adjustments submenu. However, this will only give you a black and white picture; you can't create a duotone from a desaturated image. If you want to create a duotone, you need for your image to be a grayscale.

Hope this helps!

Lisa