Paper Comparing Color Conversion to Grayscale Methods

[xpatUSA]

Yesterday I became interested as to the "best" method, naively thinking, for example, that CIE Y might be "better" than average-the-RGB-colors-for-a-pixel-and-set-them-all-to-that-number.

As in all things photographical, it ain't that simple of course

So, for those seriously interested in so-called Black&White images here's quite a paper with examples on various methods:

http://cadik.posvete.cz/color_to_gra...Evaluation.pdf

If that's too heavy, you can just look at the pictures here:

http://cadik.posvete.cz/color_to_gray_evaluation/

CIE Y didn't do that well . . . . and there may not even be a one-size-fits-all-scenes method.

[pnodrog]

Very interesting. I have always individually tweaked when converting to B&W to produce the aesthetic result I want without any particular interest in tonal accuracy.

The CIE Y method looks pretty good if you are totally colour blind... From an aesthetic and perceptual point of view for a normal sighted person it was pretty poor.

[xpatUSA]

Speaking of tweaking, I've looked at RawTherapee's options for conversion. I don't know what PS/LR/CC offers but RT's options would keep me quiet for a year or two. Not shown are the dozen or so presets which amongst others have all the classic "films" of yesteryear, plus oddballs like IR.




I sometimes think that RT is less used than others because of the sheer volume of options and choices. In later versions they've added a complete tab for wavelet de-noising, as if the billion existing NR options were not enough . . .