This isn’t anything new. In fact the concept goes back before Photoshop. But having worked with a lot of other photographers and graphic designers, I’m shocked at how many people don’t utilize this technique for creating black and white images. The channel mixer in Photoshop will open the doors to a whole new range of creative options when creating monochromatic images.

So, I’m going to dive right in and just explain how it’s done. If you’ve already tried using the channel mixer, bear with me as I’ve got a couple other creative tangents that may be worth exploring.

Start off with a colour image. First off, open the channels pallette and let’s have a look at each channel to see what it has to offer. Maybe pick a portrait as your testbed image as it will show a dramatic difference between channels. Chances are when you look at the red channel, the face is going to look very clean, and probably a little ghostly. Now have a peek at the green channel. Not so good. In a lot of portrait images, this is going to be the channel that showcases a lot of skin perfections, wrinkles and harsh lines. We may not want to kill the green channel completely as there may be some areas of contrast that add interest, but generally for a portrait we’re going to want to minimize.