I have a strange question...(yes I know I seem to have lots of 'em!lol) I have started to post some black and white photos..but on my PSP it calls them "greyscale" is that a true black and white change over or is that ONLY grey? and if its only grey, how do I change them to black and white? My Nikon has a setting for it also..but I have some older photos I would like to turn into B&W...can anyone tell me please? thanx

Yes Verena it is. To be exact it is black and white monochrome.

well i know on photoshop there is the different colour settings such as
rgb
cmyk
and graytone

they call B&W graytone most of the time because there is gray in black and white photos

It just seems those photos are SOOOOO gray!! The look a bit washed out to me...they dont have distinct black or white, just a lot of shades of gray...is that normal?

Just increase the contrast until you get a result you are happy with.

go back in time .. before there was color in the world

well, sorry to disillusion you, but colour was there before black and white..lol

Verena, many black n white shots look better if you bump the contrast up.

In addition to Samatar's suggestion of increasing the contrast - you can also go to Selective Color - and adjuster the whites, blacks and neutrals. You can also go to Curves and adjust to taste. In addition, you could also go to the Channel Mixer - set to monotone and adjust the red,green and blue - higher green for less noise and adjust the blue and red down. Then - there is always the dodge and burn that you could use as well. Lots of ways to make a b/w photo jump out at ya.

"those photos are SOOOOO gray!!": The same is true if you develop color prints on black and white paper. Color prints have a tendency to be 'flat.' What do I mean by flat?? I'll explain in terms of film first. In black and white processing, you usually try to get a true black and a true white. If you don't have those, the picture tends to look 'cloudy' or gray which is considered 'flat.' Bumping the contrast with filters fixes or helps with this problem. Although color photos still need white balance correction, they don't require a black and white, because a color is assigned to every value that would be gray in black and white processing. Photos that would normally be really gray have interesting colors. So when you switch from color to black and white you have to account for this. All the colors go to gray and often appear to be the same shade of gray. The best way to switch to black and white is through the channel mixer. I won't try to explain all the reasons why or which channel is best in what situation mainly b/c my post is already too long and boring. (Although it is interesting reading for the studious) I will say that this allows you to grayscale through a red, blue or green filter, which separate the colors into different values of gray.

Contact Will known as brphoto! He has great advice on how to process a black and white image in PS

theres also a tutorial I posted a while back that covers a lot of what has been said here in Photoshop.

You could always put a channel mixer on as a new adjustment layer and then tick the 'monotone' option. then, if you wanted to, you could selectively brush some colour back in or play with the contrast or whatever (or just leave it).