[muscle750]

Anyone know of a good BW conversion using CS3 seen quite a few in a magazine in town but no way am i paying £13 for a magazine.
I know its the sales etc but £13 for a magazine is taking the proverbial.

[Dave]

Basics stay the same across the version of CS

Converting to mono using LAB mode
Converting colour photos to black and white using Photoshop

[fionaB]

you can also use the black and white conversion in CS3 which is similar to channel mixer but gives you more than the 4 channels, thats my prefered method anyway and then have a play with levels to make sure you have the full tonal range.

Fi

[silkstone]

If you shoot in RAW, it may be better to do the b/w conversion before you save as TIFF.

I'll stop here before I'm accused of advertising of advertising Bibble and the b/w conversion plug-in again. Oh, oops.

[JMitchell]

I either use the b&w tool which lets you play with the colour channels, or just create different desaturated layers and change blend modes

[Les Meehan]

Whichever method you choose pay attention to the final tonal range produced. Check histograms and stuff to avoid posterisation and loss of tones.

[Dave Canon]

You have two new choices in CS3. You can convert to B&W in the Raw Converter which is 8 channel at this point. This is certainly much better than 3 channel. One approach is the to move each colour slider from one extreme to the other to observe the effect. You will typically find that about 3 of the sliders willl have little or no effect because those colours are not represented. Once you know the effect of each slider you can plan the overall effect you require and set the sliders. Be careful not to overdo this and burn out areas or introduce excessive noise. Adobe RAW provides split toning for your mono conversion as well. Also remember that you can process TIFF and JPEG's in CS3 Adobe RAW now.

The other new alternative is the B&W conversion within CS3. This is similar to that in Adobe RAW except that it is only 6 channels. With my experience over the last 8 months, I have drifted away from converting in Adobe Raw towards converting in CS3 for two reasons:

a. I do like to create and store a colour conversion of each image even if I eventually produce a B&W.

b. Even with 6 channels typically only 5 do anything so 8 channels seems to be over the top in most cases.

Of course even if you do convert to a colour TIFF, you can still go back into Adobe RAW and use the 8 channel mixer on a TIFF file.

Dave

[Gary Petersen]

Since I got CS3 I've almost never used any method other than the B&W conversion layer. The best part is clicking and dragging in the photo. Want that sky darker? Just click and drag to the left and watch it get dark.

[j sotelo]

Theres many, many ways heres one Black & White with 2 Hues/Saturations