Triple T Tuesday!

Hi Everyone! Welcome to another Tips, Trends and Techniques Tuesday! I recently upgraded to CS5 from Japanese language PS6 (I know! HUGE jump!), and until this week, I had been doing B&W photos in a round-about fashion (with color overlays and layers!). This week, our very own Tracy shared a tutorial on using your Adjustments and Variations options in CS5 to create B&W with only a few simple clicks!! For PSE users, you can do similar adjustments using: Enhance-Adjust Color-Adjust Hue Saturation to change your photos to B&W. Give the tutorial a try and let’s see your best B&W photo layouts!

In Photoshop, open your photo and desaturate it
(Image – Adjustments – Desaturate) or Shift+Ctrl+U

Now, I like to tweak mine a little bit to give it a little more pop! Duplicate your desaturated photo (Ctrl+J) and set the top layer to “Soft Light.” Now, I usually bump the opacity down to somewhere between 40-60%. Do what looks good to you.

And finally, this is completely optional, but I like my B&Ws to have a little bit of a tint to them, ever so slight. So, first flatten your image (right-click one of the layers and choose Flatten Image). Then, go to Image – Adjustments – Variations.

Move your slider to the far left, one tick away from the “fine” end. Then click on More Yellow ONCE and More Red ONCE.

Finally, save your new B&W photo – see, pretty effect, right?

Here’s my layout, using Distinct Hush collab:

Here’s a gorgeous layout, using Quality Time, by Tracy!

Bree made this layout (with Owl Always Love You) using PSE! She Hue/Saturation and set Saturation to 0. Then followed the tutorial, but left the soft light layer as is. Then she used variations to get the look she wanted!