Ben's Black & White actions

Requirements: Photoshop
OS: PC and Mac

Every Photoshop user seems to have their own technique to convert colour images into dramatic black and white ones. Digital Camera’s Technique Editor, Ben Birchall has created actions of three adjustments he uses on a regular basis.

Minus blue channel

The blue channel is a CCD’s noisiest. Ditching the blue channel before converting to mono can help towards achieving a smoother image. The Levels and Curves are set to optimum, ready for you to fine tune.

Channel Mixer with selective colour

This is great for making blue skies go very dark. The selective colour function adds black to the cyans and blues to make them appear darker. Full tweaking and adjustments are then available in the Channel Mixer.

Calculations

This action makes a new document by blending the red channels to form an Alpha channel. It is then converted to Greyscale to allow full editing after opening the Levels palette for fine adjustment.

HOW TO DOWNLOAD
To use our actions, follow these simple steps:

1. Make sure that you have Photoshop installed (you can download a trial from http://www.adobe.co.uk)
2. Select the action set or action you’d like to install.
3. Click on the download link and choose to save the file to a selected destination on your hard drive.
4. Within Photoshop, go to Window>Actions to reveal the Actions palette.
5. Click the Load Actions option, follow the prompts to locate the actions and click OK.

The actions are now ready to use.

What is an action?

Actions are recorded sets of Photoshop commands and processes which can achieve the recorded effects with a single click. They can streamline common image-manipulation tasks and take a great deal of the donkey work out of your day-to-day workflow. Here, you’ll find some exclusive actions for you to download – they’re guaranteed to make your life easier!