High Contrast Desaturation

[Craig Nicholson]

Just posted this in another thread but it's usefull so here it is in the correct section

When you want an accurate Desaturation, just desaturating is not always the best way. Here's one to try for a bit more contrast.

Change the mode of your image to Lab colour. Select the lightness layer and copy the whole image to the clipboard.

Change the mode to RGB and paste the clipboard individually to each of the Red, Green and Blue channels.

You should see a much more contrasted image than a straight deaturation.

Pic1 is the original, Pic 2 a straight desat and Pic 3 the Lab colour version.

[.Ray]

Hey nice! I usually use channel mixer, but using the lab colour actually gave better contrast in your example. Thanks.

[blindabyss]

Nice method, Craig, cheers for sharing mate! I desaturate 99% of my monos, I think it's totally underated, some people love to have more than one slider to fiddle with I guess. :)