Critique / Discussions

One difficulty that many experience when they enter the world of digital photography is the conversion of color images to B&W. The "one click" conversion, i.e desaturation does not do a good job, desturation simply converts all the three channels (red, green and blue) to grey scale by giving them the same weight. The result very often is a "muddied" image. Other methods are using the channel mixer and gradient map. Those methods, the channel mixer method in particular could sometimes be quite hard to use. However, with experience great tones and beautiful B&W pictures can be produced.
I just came across another technique which sounds easier to use and produces excellent images. That is the claim at least and I can't vouch for or against because I have not tried it--I will though and will report on that. The following link from Adobe explains this method which uses the Hue/saturation filters www.adobe.com/designcenter/photoshop/articles/phscs2mrblkwht.html
It would be nice if someone who might have tried this method can post or reply to this thread to share the experience.