There are few things more frustrating than a program that doesn’t respond the way you want it to, and that goes double for complex photo editing software like Photoshop. If your Photoshop document is only displaying grayscale tones and refuses to let you work in color, you can usually fix it by changing your document’s color mode.
To turn off Grayscale mode, open the Image menu, select the Mode submenu, and select one of the other color modes. If you don’t know which color mode to use, choose RGB Color, which is used for all images that will be displayed on a screen.
The CMYK color mode is used when preparing images for printing, and the rest of the color modes are typically used for specialized or technical purposes.
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Check Your Adjustment Layers
If your image mode is set to RGB or CMYK, but you can still only see grayscale tones in your document, then a misbehaving adjustment layer might be responsible for the problem.
Adjustment layers are great tools for making non-destructive edits, but it’s possible to lose track of how each one is interacting with your document, especially when you’ve got quite a few different layers in your document.
In the Layers panel in the bottom right corner of the Photoshop interface, scroll through the layer stack and check to see if there is an adjustment layer that is causing the problem.
There are several different adjustment layer types that can turn your entire image into grayscale even when using the RGB color mode, including Hue/Saturation, Vibrance, Black & White, Channel Mixer, and Color Lookup.
You can find the layer responsible quickly by toggling the visibility setting on and off for each adjustment layer in the layer stack.
To show or hide a layer, click the small eye icon next to each layer in the Layers panel. If you want to show or hide all other layers, hold down the Option key while clicking on the icon (use the Alt key if you’re using Photoshop on a PC.)
Setting Color Mode for New Documents in Photoshop
If all of your new documents are being created using the Grayscale color mode, you don’t have to change back to RGB or CMYK each time you create a file – you can set the color mode in the New Document window.
When creating a new document, look for the Color Mode dropdown on the right side of the window, as highlighted above. Change the setting to RGB Color or CMYK Color, and Photoshop will create the new document with that color mode.
Keep in mind that this setting is specific to each document preset, so be sure to check the color mode each time you create a new document!
Color Mode Basics
Color mode is the most important factor when determining how your Photoshop document will handle color information. Photoshop has several different color modes available, including Grayscale, RGB Color, and CMYK Color, which are the three most commonly-used modes.
Most color images that you see on your computer are saved as RGB files, which have three color channels: Red, Green, and Blue. These three channels are combined to create all the colors that your monitor can display.
Technically, each color channel is a grayscale image, but the white pixels in each channel are displayed as the corresponding color for that channel.
White pixels in the Red channel appear as red, while white pixels in the Green channel display as green, and white pixels in the Blue channel appear as blue. Grayscale tones in each channel allow for partial color transparency and color mixing.
If your image is in Grayscale mode, as shown above, then the document is actually incapable of storing color information because the image only has one channel: Gray.
A Final Word
Congratulations, you’ve successfully turned off grayscale mode in Photoshop – and hopefully, you’ve learned a bit more about how color modes work too! Color modes and color channels are some of the most fundamental factors that control how color information is stored in your Photoshop documents, so it’s a good idea to have a basic understanding of how it all works.
Enjoy the freedom of a full-color spectrum!
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