There are many ways to convert a color photograph to black and white with Adobe Photoshop. I am going to show you 2 ways. One is very easy, one is a little more complicated — but it gives you more control over the look. We'll start with the easy way first. This tutorial has screenshots from Photoshop CS4 running on Windows 7, but the process is similar in other versions of Photoshop, Windows, and Mac OS X.

The first thing you need to do, once you have Photoshop loaded and ready, is to open the color photo you want to convert to black and white. You can do this by going to the "File" menu and choosing "Open."

Browse to the photo you want to open on your hard drive and double-click on it to open it.



Now here we have our color photo, ready to be turned into black and white.



All you have to do to turn your color photo into black and white(grayscale) is to do the following. Go to the "Image" menu and choose "Adjustments", then slide over and move down to "Desaturate" and left-click it.



And now, our formerly color photo, is now in a format of black, white, and many shades of gray — in between. That was simple, wasn't it? Yes, but you lack some control over the look with this method. This is probably fine for most people. For everyone else, I'll show you another method.