Going Digital

Thanks George, much more descriptive. Sometimes I'm a bit economical with words.

Ratcatcher, A simple way to see your colour image in B&W is to import it into Photoshop or similar. Find the colour saturation control and set it to zero (IE: no colour) you are left with a B&W (greyscale) version of your image. This saturation adjustment can (and arguably should) be on a separate layer which you can then turn on & off as you prefer.

I'm no expert user of Photoshop but I think you can also switch channels to view only the B&W content or there is menu option somewhere to convert your image to B&W. You'll have to experiment to find out which suits you best.

For fine control in Photoshop, there's something called the Channel Mixer. You can use it to convert to black and wihite by choosing how much of each color channel contributes to the mix. The default is 100% R, 0G, 0B, but a mix can imitate your favorite black and white film.

There is a checkbox in the dialogue box for "convert to monochrome" or something like that.

Channel MIxer is indeed the most effective conversion - greyscale on its own renders colours that are different but the same brightness as exactly the same, which is not helpful and gives flat results.

There is in addition a quick way to evaluate the R, G and B channels. Select channels in the dialog box bottom right of your workspace (assuming the default position) and simply click the channel you want to look at. If any of the channels is what you want then just go Image>Mode>Grayscale and it will ask "Discard other channels?" to which you say yes and you ens up with the one colour channel as a mono image.