Converting to grayscale
Jim, one of the readers of our book Publication Production using PageMaker asked:
I'm looking for a simple (read: cheap) photo editor that can set digital color photos to grayscale. Some have that tool, some don't; I'm considering Microsoft Picture It! but I can't discover if that has a grayscale tool.I replied: You seem to have hit the problem with a lot of graphics editing programs: conversion to grayscale isn't near the top of their list of wanted features so it is hard to check whether they do it or not. However, I'm sure I've seen a reference to the Picture It! series of programs accepting scanned images in grayscale so I would be surprised if it did not allow conversion to that. For several small newspapers I've suggested Photoshop Elements because, while that doesn't handle CMYK, it definitely does handle grayscale. It has the other advantages that anyone who knows Photoshop will be at home with it, and anyone who gets started with that can quickly switch to Photoshop. It also has the batch facilities of Photoshop, so it is easy to set it up to automatically change a folder full of pics to grayscale. There is a demo version on the Adobe web site but it is a fairly large program. I'd also look at PaintShop Pro and I've heard some good comments on EyeBatch but I'm not sure how that handles grayscale. At least you can try it for nothing. Can anyone confirm about Picture It!, or have any other suggestions?
1 Comments:
Can't seem to sign in with my pp-pm password. Anyway, I know Serif can convert to grayscale, though it does not handle images scanned in as grayscale from my Epson 5400. Those images are distorted as though a magnet had been placed in the upper left corner of the pic.
Serif also generates large files.
Serif is a free download but when it came time to register, the code numbers did not work.
I looked at Eyebatch but it is a 4.2 Mb download - maybe later, or what the heck, I'll just pay for Elements.
- Jim
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