Does anyone know if it's possible to change a colour photo to bacl and white using commonly available software e.g. MS Picture Manager or a download programme?

Thanks.

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A simple way is: Open your image in picture gallery (Vista, XP), click the "fix" button, then "adjust colour", move the "saturation" slider to the left. Play around with the levels a wee bit and you'll get it pretty good.

Gary

IrfanView

IrfanView - Official Homepage - one of the most popular viewers worldwide

Open picture, menu/options, convert to greyscale.

or ctrl+g on windows.

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Sandy
Carried it in full, then carry it out empty.

As the guys say, either convert to greyscale, or move the saturation slider all the way to zero, that's your basic B&W conversion. Once you've done that you can play with the exposure/brightness/contrast etc to make the pic more 'arty', this is a pic I took of the heavily pregnant missus on our Boxing day walk, then converted to B&W and mucked about with purely to be pretentious

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And if you really want to play properly then use split channels to vary R, G and B independently (and run a convert to LAB and split out the luminance channel for another layer to play with). Much better than "convert to greyscale".