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[OM] Commercially printed B&W

Subject: [OM] Commercially printed B&W
From: Chuck Norcutt <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2008 07:40:43 -0400
This is really a PS CS3 question (I think) but it's related to 
commercially printed B&W images.

Until a couple of days ago I had never attempted to have digital B&W 
prints done by a commercial lab.  I had taken a lot of photographs of an 
extended family which required a moderately large number of prints.  For 
one of the sub-family groups I got a specific request for B&W.  When 
processing the raw file in CS3 I converted to grayscale using CS3's 
wonderful set of color sliders which is like having an infinite variety 
of color filters.  After conversion to grayscale I noticed that a patch 
of dappled sunlight on the father's forehead looked more like a horrible 
skin disease than dappled sunlight so I spent some time touching up the 
grayscale version to make him look more natural.

Then I uploaded all the images to mpix.com for printing.  Much to my 
surprise the B&W images displayed as totally corrupted after the upload. 
The image was not actually corrupted but the display software assumes 
that it's displaying an RGB image and doesn't even recognize grayscale 
JPEGs.  Now I knew that MPix (as do most commercial labs) only supports 
sRGB for color prints.  What I didn't realize is that the same pertains 
to digital B&W.  They'll print as B&W on Ilford digital B&W paper but 
only from an sRGB image.

Bummer.  I had to go back to the original color version to do the 
retouching and resend the image as sRGB.  But the worst part is that I 
lost all of the subtle tonal variations I had introduced in the original 
grayscale conversion using CS3's color slider controls.

So, the question is:  How could I have maintained the effect of CS3's 
grayscale conversion while retaining the full color image?  Is it possible?

Chuck Norcutt

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