Question on converting to greyscale..

[Fazools]

First off, great site!

I am very much a newbie to all of this. I have been playing around with some older family photos, circa 1920's. Most have a sepia tone or tint or whatever the term would be and obviously have scratches and such on them. I am looking to get them back to greyscale. Now to my question...

In terms of procedure, using Photoshop CS2, should my first step be to change the mode from RGB to Greyscale? If not, at what stage would you change it to greyscale or would you keep it RGB and manipulate the channels so that it appears greyscale?

Again, great site, I look forward to learning a ton here.

Thanks in advance.

[RooB]

Generally, when I am working with something that I feel should be black and white-- I just de-saturate and stay in the RGB colorspace.

[Flora]

Hi Fazools,

Welcome to RP!

Beside RooB excellent tip, you could try the methods described in this Tutorial...

Another very easy way is to
* create a new blank Layer on top of your Background
* Fill the new Layer with 50% Grey
* Change the new Layer Blending to Color

Hope this helps ....

[Kraellin]

just to supplement what roob and flora said, you generally dont want to actually convert to grayscale. this is a limited format and you'll lose some tools to work with by doing so.

Craig