Photoshop Tutorial: Changing the Color Tone of Your Photos

A Quick and Easy Tutorial for Beginners

Introduction: Sometimes basic colored pictures can be boring. This tutorial will show you how to easily change your photos to black and white in Photoshop and even tone them different colors to give them a creative and interesting edge.

Changing Your Photos to Black and White
Changing your photos to black and white in Photoshop is one of the simplest and most creative ways to enhance your photos if you're a beginner.

Step 1) Open up your canvas in Photoshop with the picture you want to work on. Next, go to Image on the top horizontal menu bar, then to Adjustments, then finally Desaturate. This will make your photo black and white, it may lack proper contrast, so it has more grays than crisp black and whites (like a black and white photo should have).

Step 2) Next, go to Image again, then Adjustments, and finally Auto Contrast. If using Auto Contrast doesn't make the picture look right, go to Image>Adjustments>Brightness and Contrast. Scroll through these bars until you get the right contrast for your photo.

And it's as simple as that!

Coloring and Toning Your Pictures
Toning is adding one color variation to your photo. For my example, I used a blue tone.

Step 1) Open up your canvas with the photo you want to tone. Next go to Image (on the top horizontal menu), then Adjustments, then Hue and Saturation. For my picture, I put the saturation level down to -50. This took some of the color out of the picture, but not all of it. Since every picture is different, you may have to adjust yours differently to a negative number. Click OK when you're done adjusting that.