Black & White: Greyscale or RGB color space?

[Madison]

Hi,





So I have this way of converting images to black and white, but the color space stays RGB. Is that a bad thing? Will prints look worse unless I convert the final mix to greyscale color space? Or will that flatten the image (something I try to avoid when using the channel mixer).





I wonder. I have to send off some B&W work to somebody and this problem never crossed my mind until now. (I do not work as a professional photographer).

[Colin]

I really don't know....


What does the histogram look like?


I'd think that an advantage of RGB would be that if you wanted just a slight tintor cast to the whole thing, you could have it...

[Madison]

But what about reproduction?


Are there advantages or disadvantages to keeping a black & white converted image RGB or greyscale? I could not find any info on it.

[Keith B]

Just because no one is really chiming in yet with a good answer I'm going to throw this out:


In the publishing world, it is advantageous to have you BW images reproduced in CMYK so that the blacks are richer and have more depth.


I'm pretty sure an ink jet will still try to print a grayscale image with all inks unless you select "black ink only" and if memory serves me, I recall that black by itself kind of has a yellow hue (maybe not an issue with high end printers).


So I'm going with leave them RGB.