Functionality of Desaturate in Photoshop

Desaturate is a command that sucks all the colors out of a colored picture and makes it look like a Grayscale image. In order to find this command you are supposed to get inside the Image Menu and select the option named Adjustment. In the side menu of Adjustment you can find a host of commands along with Desaturate. Though,  desaturated RGB, CMYK and Lab  images look like  Grayscale images but the difference is that you can render awesome look to desaturated images by adding colors in different parts of these images using different tools and commands ( e.g. Brush Tool, History Brush Tool, Hue and Saturation, Fill and Pattern Stamp Tool etc). But as far as the Grayscale images are concerned, there is no way to add any color  other than black, white and different shades of gray in those images.

Desaturate makes a colored picture looks like a Grayscale image

How to transform a colored picture into black and white without changing its color mode into Grayscale

In order to understand how this command works follow the instructions given below.

First of all open a colored image, preferably RGB, in Photoshop (as RGB is the most suitable color mode for image editing) according to the picture below.

RGB image before being desaturated

Then, in order to desaturate that image, just get inside the Image Menu and select the option named Adjustment. As soon as you will select that option, there will be appeared  another menu containing various adjustment options including Desaturate.  Out of those options select Desaturate either by clicking on it in the menu or by hitting CTRL + Shift + U on the keyboard.

/Desaturate in the side menu of Adjustment

 As soon as you will do so, the image will turn black and white having lost all the colors according to the picture below.

Image on the locked background layer has been desaturated

As in the  image given above, you can see that it was the locked background layer that contained the image we have desaturated and after applying the command, we have lost the original image.If you want to keep the original image intact,  don’t apply the command named Desaturate on the locked background layer. Just create a duplicate of the background layer by hitting CTRL + J on the keyboard and then apply the command named Desaturate on that duplicate instead of the background layer according to the picture below.

Two locked layers in the layer palette

There are many ways through which you can add different colors in the different parts of  desaturated images and give awesome look to  those images. Some of such ways I intend to explain in  my oncoming tutorials.

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