adobe photoshop problem with B & W

Archived from groups: rec.photo.digital (More info?)

I recently downloaded some old Matthew Brady stuff from the internet
and came upon a problem I've never encountered before. Some of the
images were a bit washed out, so I popped up Photoshop to work on
them, spruce up the contrast, and work on the various gradations, as I
do with my own B & W stuff. Strangely, I couldn't do it, all that I
could access on the menu were brightness and contrast scales. I
couldn't access any of the other functions I normally use, such as
selective color, saturation, etc - after a while I realized the
problem was confined to the particular images I had downloaded that
had 'gray' in brackets at the top, on the header line. They were all
jpeg. images by the way.

Does anyone know what is causing this problem, and how I can
circumvent it? I want o be able to use selective color so I can work
seperately on the white, gray, and black scales in order to bring the
images back to something resembling the Brady originals.

Thanks in advance......Tim

Archived from groups: rec.photo.digital (More info?)

tim wrote:
> I recently downloaded some old Matthew Brady stuff from the internet
> and came upon a problem I've never encountered before. Some of the
> images were a bit washed out, so I popped up Photoshop to work on
> them, spruce up the contrast, and work on the various gradations, as I
> do with my own B & W stuff. Strangely, I couldn't do it, all that I
> could access on the menu were brightness and contrast scales. I
> couldn't access any of the other functions I normally use, such as
> selective color, saturation, etc - after a while I realized the
> problem was confined to the particular images I had downloaded that
> had 'gray' in brackets at the top, on the header line. They were all
> jpeg. images by the way.
>
> Does anyone know what is causing this problem, and how I can
> circumvent it? I want o be able to use selective color so I can work
> seperately on the white, gray, and black scales in order to bring the
> images back to something resembling the Brady originals.

Simply convert them to RGB.

--
Regards

John Bean