Those are some pretty great results for just a few seconds in the often overlooked Preview app that is bundled directly into MacOS and Mac OS X. Here’s a brief video showing a color image being turned into black and white with some adjustments made to improve the appearance of the resulting picture, from start to finish takes about 20 seconds:įor some visual comparison, here is the original color picture used in this walkthrough (the base image is one of the wallpapers from OS X Mavericks collection):Īnd here is the resulting black and white image with a few minor modifications to levels and other color settings: Though it’s a multistep process, once you get the hang of things the black and white conversion process can be done extremely quickly within Preview app. This is the setting that matters most for the conversion, with the other adjustments used to refine the appearance further. If you just want to move quickly, slide “Saturation” all the way to the left and the picture will be stripped of all color and turned black and white. When satisfied with the results, save as usual.Optionally, adjust Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, and Levels to improve the look of the black and white image.Slide “Saturation” all the way to the left to remove all color from the image and turn it into black and white.

Pull down the “Tools” menu and choose “Adjust Color” to bring up the adjustment tool panel.Open the copy of the color image you want to convert to black and white into Preview app (should be the default image viewer for Mac OS X, if not it’s always in /Applications/ or you can make a quick change to set it as the default again).Make a copy of the color photo you wish to edit, this is not necessary but it’s a good idea because of the auto-save feature in Mac OS X.How to Convert a Picture into Black and White on Mac using Preview

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