turning color photo to B/W

a few people like these steps in another section so i thought i would add it here.

this is partly a darkroom trick translated for photoshop use.

in the dark room when making B/W prints from color negs we use Panalur paper in order to get all the proper tones from the color neg.

Sooo in PS in order to do the same thing you cant just click B/W and expect to get proper tones.

here is a good starting point to solve problem

With an open picture go to IMAGE then ADJUST then CHANNEL MIXER then choose a +75 red then a +25 Green (leave blue alone most of the time then check the Monochrome box you can also do it before hand if you wish.

you can adjust red and green to get the best tone value but i always start there +75 +25 and when i get the photothe way i like it i then convert to GRAY SCALE the tone value you picked will be preserved of course.

(this is something i have to do everyday at least a 100 times so and action is what i use to get the ball rolling)

have fun ...........its nothing new.

I was bored, so I did a comparision.

thats a very good example of what it does
esp. on skin tones . in the early days of Photoshop i was always frustrated with translating color to b/w like use to do in the darkroom with Panalure paper. (that was untill i found out about that trick.

PS name and phone### of the girl? (shhhhhh done tell my girlfriend she will hit me over the head with her Miss Fitness USA trophy!!!

Her name is Victoria Silvstedt. She's a Sweedish model. Her site! I don't know her but I have some pictures of her.

But sometimes , I can't figure out the Default B&W better or the " A Wolf" one better . Give me your ideas plzzz , thanks

since there is so much info to list on the subject i can PDF it, and if Alpha can insert his cool side by side by side comp. to it that would make a great how to and explain all the how's and why's

there are about 7 pages .........

how about it Alpha?

the long and short of it is when you just hit RGB to Grayscale it averages the three together with a preference for the green channel, to create a single channel 8 bit grayscale image.

when you use channel mixer you are re- neutralizing each channel (i always leave the little box unchecked so i can see effect in color)

look at Alpha examp. again hair skin etc. sparkle in the eyes



as you can see i dont get out much and spend all my time reading LOL