In this tutorial I will cover how you can create a vivid 2-tone black and white image, the result should look something like this.
First take a picture of yourself or find something from the web, just make sure its not a really low resolution.
Import your photo into Photoshop and begin by clicking on the small black square icon over the white square to set your colors to default as shown here
Next go to Window -> Swatches and make sure this is checked, if not check it. When your swatches panel is visible hover over it and you should see a paint bucket icon, click on an empty place as seen in the picture below to drop the color white:
Repeat this process for the color black by clicking on the double arrow next to where you originally clicked the boxes to set the default colors, this will switch the places of the colors.
Once you have both colors in the swatches panel go to edit -> preset manager and for preset type select 'swatches', hold down ctrl and left click on each of the colors then click the "save set..." button as seen in the picture below
Name it something relevant like "blackAndWhite", next go to Image -> Adjustments -> Brightness and Contrast, Turn contrast all the way up to get the biggest different between your colors as possible, and turn brightness up to something like a 100 and hit ok. Your image should look something like this:
Next to go to Image -> Adjustments -> Levels and adjust it as you see fit, just don't go too bright or too dark.
For the final step go to Image -> Mode -> Indexed Color you should see a dialog box pop up like this:
Select the pallete drop down box and go down to custom another dialog box should pop up, click "Load..." and navigate to your swatch, make sure for the "Files of type dropdown that you select "swatches" click load or double click and hit ok on the color table dialog box, make sure Matte and Dither are set to None and hit ok again. Now you should have your result looking something like this
Feel free to ctrl-alt-z if you want to experiment with the settings until you get it just the way you want it.
This is my first tutorial, I hope you enjoyed it, and check back for more soon!
