How to Convert to Black and White in Lightroom Classic – Day 19

The Art of Black & White

Dragging Saturation to zero is not a black and white conversion. It flattens every colour to whatever brightness it happened to have, and the usual result is a grey, lifeless image with no separation between things that were obviously different in colour.

A proper conversion decides how bright each original colour becomes. A red door and a green wall can be identical shades of grey or strongly contrasting ones, and that choice is yours. Day 19 covers the panel that gives you it, and finishes with a subtle sepia tone.

Converting Properly

At the top of the Basic panel, beside Auto, is a Black & White treatment button. Click it.

This does something different from removing saturation. It switches the file to a monochrome interpretation and unlocks a new panel in the right-hand column — B&W, containing the Black and White Mix.

The Black and White Mix

Eight sliders — red, orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue, purple, magenta. Each one controls how bright anything that was that colour becomes in the monochrome image.

Drag the red slider right and everything that was red turns pale. Drag it left and it goes near black. The colour information is still in the file; you are deciding how to translate it into tone.

This is where black and white contrast comes from. Two areas that were different colours but similar brightness will merge into the same grey unless you separate them here — and separating them is the whole craft.

Start with Auto, then go slider by slider

The Auto button in this panel gives a reasonable starting mix. It is genuinely useful as a point to react to, but it is not the finish. Working through each slider by hand, watching what moves, is where the image is actually made — lifting oranges alone can transform the contrast of a photograph.

The targeted adjustment tool

The small icon in the corner of the panel works exactly as it does in the Color Mixer: click it, then drag up or down directly on the image.

One thing to understand about it. It responds to the colour that area used to be, not to the region you clicked. Drag on a piece of metal and you are moving whatever colour that metal originally was — everywhere in the frame. That is a feature rather than a limitation, but it explains why other parts of the picture move with it.

Everything Else Still Works

The conversion does not lock anything. Go back to the Basic panel afterwards and Exposure, Contrast, Highlights and Shadows all behave normally.

Contrast is worth experimenting with in both directions. High contrast is the obvious choice for monochrome, and a lower-contrast, flatter treatment can look considerably more sophisticated on the right image.

Texture and Clarity also deserve a mention here. With colour gone, texture is doing much more of the work of holding attention, and black and white tolerates more of both than a colour image would.

Masking works normally too — a mask that lifts a subject, a gradient that holds back a sky, all unaffected by the conversion.

Adding a Tone Back

Here is the part that seems contradictory and is not: having removed the colour, you can put a little back deliberately.

The Color Grading panel still applies to a monochrome file, and tinting the tonal ranges is how sepia and split-toned prints have always been made. The method for each wheel:

1. Drag the centre point to the outer edge

   Full saturation, so the hue is unmistakable.

2. Rotate the outer ring through the whole circle

   Stop where it looks right. Warm yellows and oranges in the highlights give the classic aged look.

3. Pull the saturation back down hard

   Until it is barely there. A tone should be felt, not identified.

Warm highlights with cooler shadows is the combination that reads as a print rather than a filter. The sliders beneath each wheel adjust brightness for that range, so you can add contrast at the same time.

Double-click any control to reset it — useful when a wheel has gone somewhere you cannot get back from.

The eyeball at the top of the Color Grading panel toggles the whole tone, letting you compare pure monochrome against the tinted version. Both are legitimate; it is a taste decision.

Where This Usually Goes Wrong

Using Saturation at ?100 instead of the B&W treatment. You lose the entire Black and White Mix, which is the only reason to convert in Lightroom rather than shoot monochrome.

Accepting the Auto mix. It is a starting point. The interesting decisions are in the sliders.

Forgetting that colours you cannot see still matter. If two areas look identically grey, they were similar in brightness — find their original colours and separate them.

Over-toning. Sepia at anything above “barely perceptible” looks like a phone filter.

Assuming every photo suits monochrome. Images that depend on colour relationships lose their subject entirely. Black and white suits texture, shape, light and contrast.

Keep Exploring Lightroom

More free tutorials on tone and colour control:

• How to Use the Color Grading Tool
  The panel behind the sepia tone, in more depth.
• How to Create Lightroom Presets
  Saving a black and white mix you like for reuse.
• Adobe Camera Raw Explained
  The same conversion controls inside Photoshop.
• Editing Snow with the AI Landscape Tool
  Working an image that is already almost monochrome.

Take It From Here

Black and white is underrated, largely because most people arrive at it by deleting the colour rather than translating it. Spend two minutes in the Black and White Mix and a flat grey conversion becomes a photograph with real separation and depth — and the colour data is always still there if you change your mind.

Tomorrow we look at keeping several versions of the same edit at once: virtual copies in Lightroom Classic.