Channel Mixer in Drag

I always believed if you're going to teach something to somebody that's technical that you have to have fun with it. One way to do this in digital photography is to use the wild and wonderful images that you can find from day to day.

This one is a photograph of a drag queen in Palm Springs.

The best way to convert in Photoshop is the by using the Channel Mixer.

You could just desaturate (Image>Adjustments>Desaturate), but you have more flexibility by using the Channel Mixer's sliders.

Here's how you do it.

1. In Photoshop use Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Channel Mixer
2. Click okay in the New Layer dialog box.
3. Click on Monochrome in the Channel Mixer dialog box.
4. Tweak the slider bars till you get good contrast.
5. Use Layer>Flatten Image