Greyscale converting VS Channel Mix and Monochrome

[cjogo]

Have been taking extra time to use the channel mixer (checking-monochrome)and select each band's percentage ...to acheive a neutral B&W. Recently I have been skipping the procedure and a the end of all performances simply converting to greyscale and then direclty back to RGb....any loss of quality using this procedure? My lab only accepts RGB TIff files ( we are scanning B&W film and transferring them to our lab for analog printing)


http://fp2k.redshift.com/cjogo/gallery_fine_art.htm

 

[MindBender]

Personally I prefer the "jump to Lab, remove the a and b channels, jump to RGB" method myself. Fairly quick, actionable, and usually produces nice results. I can't speak to any data loss in the channel mixer method. Most grayscaling options in photoshop use averaging, which would be the only thing I can think would muddy things. What I would do is take a file and produce it the traditional way you do things and save your TIFF... then take that same original and do it the new way and examine the files. Visually and histogram. If things look okay, then don't worry about it.

$0.02

 

[cjogo]

Thanks Kinldy Mindbender :}