RGB versus grayscale

[Savinder Bual]

Hi - can anyone help? I have just been working on an image that was an rgb tiff file which I saved as a grayscale tiff image by accident would I have lost image resolution by doing this (it was monochrome anyway). It is part of a series of works all rgb files and I don't want this one to be of a lower resolution. I hope that you can help me.


Savinder

[berko1021]

As far as I know you should not lose any resolution. I have found though, for my workflow, that I don't and images color mode unless absolutely necessary. I would rather find ways to make the image b&w in rgb mode, but like I said, I don't know your project specifically, so you might need your images in grayscale.

[mistermonday]

Savinder, welcome to Retouch Pro. If the image was already monochrome, then your R, G, & B channels all had the identical info and so removing two of the channels will have no effect on your image resolution or quality. The extra channels were just increasing the file size.
Regards, Murray

[Savinder Bual]

Thanks for replying so quickly? I did n't quite understand what you wrote. Could you clarify?
Thanks

[Savinder Bual]

Thanks mistermonday as well - very reassuring as my image was a 35mm black and white negs scanned as high res RGB file. So maybe I can convert all my images to grayscale and save file space?

[byRo]

Wlecome to RetouchPRO, Savinder.

Quick answer - Yes!

Slow answer.....
If you are dealing with perfect negatives and a perfect scanner, then the RGB channels will be exactly equal and you can just discard two of them.
However, as you are scanning negatives, I would guess that these are not brand new, and so they may have some marks or deterioration.
Your scanner may, especially if it has some automatic adjustment, also be introducing some distortion.
Before throwing away 2/3 of the channels, for your whole collection it would be a good idea to choose some sample scans and have a look at each channel in turn - just to check.
If there is any difference, just choose the best channel - or a good combination.
If not, then you can just convert to greyscale with no loss at all.

Rô