From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Converting to B&W and color toning with Gradient Maps - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Converting to B&W and color toning with Gradient Maps

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- [Instructor] While you can convert your images to black and white and add color tints using camera raw in Lightroom, you can also use adjustment layers in Photoshop and then customize that conversion by changing the opacity and the blend mode and use the adjustment layers mask. Let's take a moment to look at the black and white adjustment layer to customize our conversion from color to black and white. And then we'll use the gradient map as another way to add a color toning effect. From the adjustment panel, I'll click in order to add a black and white adjustment. There's several different presets that we can try. For example, the blue filter or maybe the high contrast red filter, or we can click on the auto button to have an auto conversion. Or we can use any of these sliders to customize the way that the colors in the original image are converted to a gray scale value. So for example, we could drag the red slider or we could use the onscreen controls. So if I wanted to click and drag in this area to lighten the yellows or darken them down. Similarly, I could go up here to what used to be red and increase or decrease the reds in order to add contrast. And we could go in the sky area and just decrease the blues a little bit to make those a little bit darker. We can also add a tint using the tint option. Click in the color swatch. That'll bring up the color picker. And then you can select a color to tint your image. If you like these settings and you want to reuse them, you can use the flyout menu and then you can save this as a preset. For now, I'm going to remove the tint and let's hide the black and white adjustment layer. Next, I want to add a gradient map adjustment layer. So this is a great way to unify images like in diptychs or even in a composite when multiple images are taken at different times with different lighting conditions and they need to work together. So before I add it, I'm going to tap the D key to select my default colors and then tap X in order to exchange them. Because when I add my gradient map, it's going to base it on my foreground to background color. Now the gradient map is going to remap all of the values in the image from black on the left to white on the right, because that was my foreground and background color. We can always go in and choose from any of the other presets if we want to, or we could reverse it, in which case we would get an inverted image. If we wanted to add a color into the midtones, I could click inside the gradient here. That brings up the gradient editor. I'll click to add a color stop and then double click in order to bring up the color picker. Now we can add some color. Let's say I want a blue color with very little saturation. If you want the tonal values to remain the same, meaning that you don't want to lighten or darken any of the tonal values when you add this color stop, you can look at the location where the stop was placed and then make sure that your brightness was set to that value as well. Alright, let's accept that color and click okay. There are also some color toning presets that we can load using the gradients panel. So if it's not showing, use the window menu and show gradients, then use the flyout and choose legacy gradients. As we scroll down, we'll now see a number of legacy gradients, and in here is a folder called photographic toning. Now we're not going to apply the gradients from the gradient panel. We're going to apply them from the properties panel. I'll click the downward pointing arrow, scroll down where we see those legacy gradients, scroll down to the photographic toning, and then we can see a number of different presets. Here we can click on any of these presets in order to apply them. I'll just make this a little bit larger so we can see more at one time. One thing that you might notice is that some of these presets are rather strong, but that's okay. We can make adjustments to them. We can also view them by a small list. So if you want to know the traditional processes that they're emulating, you can see those right here. Alright, I'm going to pick this copper one, I like that effect. And then in order to make it more subtle, I'm going to decrease the opacity of the gradient map layer on the layers panel, which will enable me to see some of the color from the background below. Now, if I only want the toning, I can toggle on that visibility of the black and white adjustment map. But in this case, I like the effect of seeing through to some of the colors from the original. So there you go, a great way for converting your images to black and white and adding a color tint to create a vintage look.

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