Why is everything grayscale in photoshop

Yisela Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. JohnB JohnB Just to add to this answer, you will have to re-add any new images you dragged into this document now. Anything dragged in while it was Grayscale will have lost their color information.

Your mode is set to grayscale. Anything you put in there wil be gray. Change the mode to RGB. Lauren-Clear-Monica-Ipsum Anaminus Anaminus 21 4 4 bronze badges. In the world of software, a grayed-out or disabled Web link, button, menu item or tool can be like a nightclub bouncer denying you access through the doors.

Although the Adobe Photoshop image -editing software does have various occasions where certain options are grayed out, the Color Picker tool is never one of them. The Photoshop Color Picker is where almost everything related to painting, fills, drawing and shapes begins. Designers use the Color Picker -- enabling it by double-clicking the top of the two boxes that make up the tool -- to choose their paint colors.

You can only choose one color at a time from the Color Picker and that color appears in the top-left square on the Tools column. The chosen color, such as gray, remains in place until another is selected.

This color also appears even when Photoshop is closed and reopened. The Color Picker is located near the bottom of the Photoshop Tools column, positioned by default on the left side of the screen. If you do not see the column, click the "Window" menu and click the "Tools" option from the drop-down menu.

To convert the image to Grayscale, simply click on Grayscale in the list of color modes:. Photoshop will pop open a small dialog box asking us if we really want to discard the color information. If you're using Photoshop CS3 or later I'm using Photoshop CS4 here , Photoshop will recommend that you use the new Black and White image adjustment instead for more control over the black and white conversion, but since we're interested here in what the Grayscale color mode can do for us, click the Discard button:.

Photoshop instantly throws the photo's color information away and leaves us with its best guess on what the black and white version should look like:. It's definitely a black and white version of the image, but is it any good? Not really. Areas that should be bright are too dark, other areas that should be darker are too bright, and overall, it looks rather uninteresting.

Worse still, we had no control over the conversion. Photoshop simply stripped the color from the image and left us with black, white and various shades of gray in its place. However, was it fast? If we hadn't taken some time to understand how the RGB and Grayscale color modes work, we could have converted this photo to Grayscale in a matter of seconds, making it a good choice if we're creating some sort of special effect and need to quickly remove the color from a photo without worrying about image quality.

If we look again at the information along the top of the document window, we can see that the color mode is now listed as "Gray", short for Grayscale:. And if we look in our Channels palette, we can see that the original Red, Green and Blue channels have disappeared, which means that Photoshop no longer has any way of reproducing colors in the image. All we have now is a single Gray channel giving us our black and white version:.

Keep in mind that if you save the image at this point and close out of it, the color information will be lost forever. The full color version of the photo will reappear in the document window and the Red, Green and Blue channels will replace the single Gray channel in the Channels palette.

To quickly summarize, most images, by default, are in the RGB color mode.