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Original Image

If you’ve been taking photographs for any length of time, you’ve surely come across the technique of turning color digital photographs into black and white photographs. Doing this to some photos can really add a level of drama and impact that would not be there if the photo was in color.

But sometimes you have a photo that you don’t like in color. But you don’t like it in black and white either. It’s a no-man’s-land photo, and you need a way to save it. Desaturating the color without completely blowing it away may be a good option.

I’ll show you how to make this simple change to your photo in Photoshop. Any photo editing software should do just fine though if you don’t have Photoshop. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open up the image in Photoshop.
2. Create a new adjustment layer, choosing the “Hue/Saturation…” option.


Create Adjustment Layer

3. When the Hue/Saturation box pops up, adjust the saturation slider so that the value is less than zero, but more than -100. Somewhere around -50 is probably about right to take a lot of “punch” out of the color but still leave some intact. Choose a value that you think looks best.


Hue/Saturation Dialog

4. That’s it. Click OK and you’re done.


Final Photo

To contrast this technique with making images completely black and white, I made an additional image by adjusting the saturation slider all the way to -100. Which version you like better is of course completely subjective. I like the desaturated color version myself. Here is the B&W image for you to compare to the desaturated color version.



B&W Version