B&W Pictures

[Dawn Patrol]

What do you guys use to remove the color information from pictures? My Black and whites never come out that good.

[TeleHoar]

In photoshop you can go to Channels and use only the red channel, discard the RGB info. Makes a nice B&W.

[BigKuba]

Two ways I tweak it in Photoshop:

1. Channels as TeleHoar mentioned above, but use the Channel Mixer or Calculations to dial in different proportions of each channel and the way they are mixed (e.g., Multiply).

2. Add two Hue/Saturation adjustment layers on top of the image. In the topmost layer, turn Saturation to zero. This will give you the basic B&W image. In the second layer, move the Hue slider around and observe how that affects the conversion.

I think #1 is technically better but I find #2 more intuitive.

[Tippster]

http://powerretouche.com/Black-white_plugin_introduction.htm

Almost as good as shooting and printing it Old-School Style.

[k trials]

Photoshop CS3 - New B&W tool is nice.

[truth]

I do my B&W conversions with the RAW image using Adobe Lightroom. Amazing and simple tool set for B&W conversions. I then use photoshop to add a few filtering layers. Lately I've been playing with a sepia filter set to 100%. I set the layer properties to "multiply" and use the opacity sliders to dial in the intensity of the filter.

If you haven't done a curve adjustment somewhere along the way the image will almost always be very flat.