Camera Raw BW 1

HSL / Grayscale

To begin converting to grayscale in camera raw, navigate to the HSL / Grayscale tab which is 3 tabs down from the basic tab.

Convert to Grayscale

Once in the HSL / Grayscale tab, click on "Convert to Grayscale" and your image will be converted to black and white. There's an Auto feature and a Default feature. Feel free to begin with either and then adjsust the sliders as you feel necessary. The sliders work by color. For instance, in the sky of this image, if we adjust the Blues slider to the left, the sky will get darker. If we slide it to the right the slider will become brighter. The neat thing about this is that it only adjusts the sky because thats where all the blues are contained in this image.
A little note, if you go too far on any of the sliders, you can double click on the slider triangle itself and it will default back to it's original zero position. Also another neat trick is to highlight the number in the number field for the sliders, and use the arrow keys on your keyboard to increase in slow increments.

Clipping

A good idea when working a little more with a grayscale is to turn on your clippings. You do this by navigating to your histogram and turning on each clipping for both the dark and light sides (shown in red in image).

Finding clipping on your image

On the image itself, the clipping is showing you where your true black is going to be by displaying it with blue dots (labeled 1 on image). The true white is shown in red (labeled 2 on image). Here we've displayed just a couple places on the image where clipping is being displayed. Each image will vary.

Grayscale Mix

Now with clippings on, adjust the Grayscale Mix sliders to your liking. In this image, we've bumped up the Yellows, Greens and Aquas. We've also decreased the Blues and the Reds and Oranges slightly.

Back to Basic Tab

Be advised you can always jump back between the HSL / Grayscale and the Basic dialog in order to keep playing around with your Grayscale image. On this image, we've bumped up the Recovery slider just slightly to minimize the true blacks, and brink back some details in those very dark areas.

Luminance

By checking and unchecking the Preview button towards the top of Camera Raw, we're able to see a before and after of our image to see what adjustments we've made. In this image, we noticed there was a lot of noise in the sky, so we've bumped up the Noise Reduction via Luminance in order to reduce some of that noise. A good way of doing this is to zoom into your image at 100% so that you can see the noise being reduced as you move the slider.

Blue Link

Next we want to click the blue link at the bottom of Camera Raw in order to make some changes to our file.

Default Workflow Options

The default here when you've worked with your grayscale image is the Gray Gamma 2.2. Feel free to click the drop down arrow there and change it to the standard and prefered Color Space of
Adobe RGB (1998). Also take a look at the other options. You can change the Bit Depth of the image, the Size of it (depending on how many Mega Pixels your camera is capable of shooting in), and the image's Resolution. Lastly an option for Smart Objects at the bottom is available. Click this is you want to use Smart Filters, which we'll discuss later. Once your happy with those settings, hit OK.

Save Image

Lastly, you have a few options for finishing up with this file that you've been working on. You can hit Done on the far right, and it will save the updated image and the changes you've made to it as a Camera Raw file. You can Open Image which will open it directly into Photoshop. You can Save Image which will give you the option to save the image as a .psd, or you can simply Cancel and delete all the work that you've done.

*End Tutorial*