This is probably my most used Photoshop technique. I’ve always been a huge fan of black & white photography. In Photoshop, the two most common ways of converting to black & white are by converting the image to grayscale or by completely desaturing the image. These two methods unfortunately lack contrast and tonal control. The following technique will give you control over both.

1. With your image loaded into Photoshop create a new adjustment layer. Click on Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation. Then just click OK, and then OK again. We’ll come back to this layer again later.
2. We are now going to repeat most of step one. Click on Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation. Click OK once. Grab the slider for Saturation and drag it all the way to the left (-100) to completely desaturate the image.
3. Now we need to change the blend mode of first Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. Using the Layers palette, target the first Hue/Saturation adjustment layer (Hue/Saturation 1) you created by clicking on the layer. This will select the layer. Change the blending mode for the layer from Normal to Color by using the drop down menu on the top of the Layers palette. By the way, if you can’t find your Layers palette simply click on Windows > Layers.
4. Now double-click on the Hue/Saturation 1 thumbnail to open the adjustment dialog box.
5. Move the Hue slider to adjust the grayscale values of the image. Move the Saturation slider to control the finer details of the image. In short, move the Hue slider for major changes and the Saturation slider for minor changes.
6. For even more detail you can adjust individual colors. On the top of the adjustment dialog box click the drop down menu and choose a color to manipulate it. For example, you would choose blue to adjust the color of the sky. Adjusting the blue color channel shouldn’t have an effect on skin tones or hair color of people in the photograph. Unless of course you’re a smurf. Likewise, adjusting the green channel will effect the tones and contrast of grass and trees but shouldn’t have an effect on the sky.

And there you have it. Pretty easy huh? What’s great about this technique is the flexibility and control it gives you over the photograph. There are other, even more complex and sophisticated ways of converting color to black & white, but this is a good starting place. Give it a whirl.