Digital Camera Color to B&W

[dpanicc1]

What technique, plugin, action, technique or program do you use to achieve the best possible B&W conversion from digital cameras' color images?

[scottbergerphoto]

In PSE 2 when you convert color to black and white, try this:
1.Open up the layers palate. Window>layers
2. Click on the blk/white circle at the bottom of the layers palate and select a new adjustment layer, Levels. Click OK in the levels box once it opens. No adjustments yet.
3. Open up a Hue/saturation layer the same way. Drag the saturation slider all the way to the left to remove all the color and click OK.
4. Double click directly on the levels icon in the Levels adjustment layer.
5. From the pull down menu select each color (Red,Green,Blue) and adjust levels for each color. After you've done all three select OK.
6. Go to the Layers palate, select More> Flatten.
Thats it. It works better then Mode>greyscale.
(From The Photshop Elements Book for Digital Photography, by Scott Kelby)
Scott

[chris.bailey]

OR

1) Add layer>Adjustment layer>mode colour
2) Add layer>adjustment layer>mode normal
3) Desaturate layer 2 with the saturation slider
4) Adjust the Hue slider in the first layer to get the result you want.

OR

Convert to Lab mode and delete the a + b channels. this creates a passable B&W but to pep it up in terms of contrast duplicate the resultant B&W layer and use Multiply, Hard or Soft light as a layer mode and then fade that layer back to about 30% or so until it has the right degree of contrast.

OR

Look at the individual colour channels and pick the lightest and the darkest. Go Image calculations and in the resulting dialog box pick these two channels, set the blend mode to multiply and the opacity to 100%. This may well be too dark. Try other combinations of blend mode and opacity until you get what you want. When you do click on result and create a new document

There are probably 100's of others. I tend to try the three above and Scotts channel mixer method and see what works best.

In CS it is sometimes a good idea to add a filter to the photo first i.e adding a red filter and then converting brings out the sky etc.

[gmitchel]

If you visit my site, you will find a couple of tutorials, a PS action set, and a learning gallery that cover the topic of B&W conversion.

http://www.thelightsright.com/DigitalDarkroom/Tutorials.htm
http://www.thelightsright.com/DigitalDarkroom/PhotoshopTools.htm
http://www.thelightsright.com/DigitalDarkroom/LearningGalleries.htm

Cheers,

Mitch

[stardis]

If you visit my site, you will find a couple of tutorials, a PS action set, and a learning gallery that cover the topic of B&W conversion.

http://www.thelightsright.com/DigitalDarkroom/Tutorials.htm
http://www.thelightsright.com/DigitalDarkroom/PhotoshopTools.htm
http://www.thelightsright.com/DigitalDarkroom/LearningGalleries.htm

Cheers,

Mitch

Thanks. I bookmarked your site-- just what I was looking for.