Color conversion to B&W

Spectacular sunrise on Christmas morning. I created a panoramic image using Adobe Bridge. I'm only using CS3 here at home. At work I have CS5 but it's on a PC. Can't have everything. I haven't done much experimenting with merging files into panoramic images using CS5.  Might be a good thing to try this year.

Today I'm looking at converting a color sunrise image to B&W using CS3. How well will that work and will I run into any problems.

OK here is the color image and I will follow with some B&W conversions.

This was a combination of 5 images which were then cropped down to 10x30. I reduced noise, did a slight surface blur and tweaked the color.  I saved as a jpeg then sampled down to 5x15 at 150 dpi for this exercise. I made all conversions from this jpeg file. There was no banding apparent in the original file but there seems to be some introduced during the jpeg conversion.


All conversions were done using the a B&W Layer. Here is the first conversion using the preset conversion "none". Looks flat really looses the detail in the sky.

Here is the conversion using the red filter. More contrast and detail in the sky but the banding becomes very pronounced.

Here is the conversion using the Max Black conversion. Surprisingly I like this better than the Red filter. OK sky detail and less pronounced banding but at the cost of the vertical ray of light.

Bottom line I don't like any of these conversions. I think I could do better working a custom setting with the sliders. The banding is a real problem I will need to experiment with doing the conversion at full scale and then sampling down to a jpeg.

That's all for now. Hope you had a great Christmas. Looking forward to a fun New Year!  Don