Black & White Photography - Google Photos Editing Tools

Google Photos has some basic editing tools which will allow you to convert a color photo to black and white, and it’s simple and easy to use for when you don’t want to spend a lot of time with Photoshop.

Upload the picture you want to edit into Google Photos on your computer.

Original

Then open the photo by clicking on it. In the upper right, the second icon, a pencil, is the Editing icon.

Google Photos has pre-selected color filter options for you to work from.  Several are already in Black and White, like Vista, Vogue, and Eiffel.

Also, again in the upper right, are 3 icons.   

The last icon  allows you to crop and rotate to suit. 

The first is color filters  . Even in B&W, if you move the blue slider bar in the middle of the left hand menu, you can adjust the intensity of the B&W.

The middle icon  is your main B&W adjustment tool here. Using the slide bars, adjust Light, Color, Pop.

B&W

Once you've got what you want, save a copy of your work for later download.

By the way, there's Done and there's Save A Copy. "Done" will overwrite the original, although you can go back in and undo the edits.  You'll likely want to Save A Copy, leaving the original alone.

And that's not all.

Instead of choosing a pre-set B&W color filter, you can work directly from the color image.

Select one of the Color Filters, leaving color in. Then edit using the slide bars   to adjust Light, Color, Pop to bleach all but some of the color out.

Bleached

Save a copy for later download.