How can I make a photo black and white in Adobe Photoshop?

Question

How can I make a photo black and white in Adobe Photoshop?

I have made the changes in the layers but when I save the image, it saves it in color, not black.

Answer 1

There are many ways to turn a photo into black & white, depending on the type of effect you're looking for. The simplest and most natural way is to desaturate the photo, which you can do in Photoshop CS5 by going to:

Image → Adjustments → Hue/Saturation

and turning the Saturation slider down to zero.

But artistically, you may want the brightness of certain colors to be emphasized and the brightness of other colors to be de-emphasized. To accomplish this, you do:

Image → Adjustments → Black & White

and you can determine how much each hue contributes to the black & white photo, which gives you much more control.

(This is all assuming you're using Photoshop CS5, but the method is very similar in any editor.)