Funny Face, BW or Color? How to Improve

[villenadecorte]

Better in Color or BW? What can I improve on this pic? (Granted, I dont know if I'll get that face again... haha). I used the fujifinepix 3800, 3.2 megapixel. I get great detail, but the pics are so large. How can I scale it down (as I did here) but not loose the quality?
Any ideas or suggestions would be great.

Thanks!

VillenaDeCorte

[Elysian]

Your conversion to gray scale is quite straightforward in my opinion.
I get your result when I do image/mode/grayscale in Photoshop and nothing else.
However... using different methods to convert to grayscale (channels is one of them) and using some extra tools like levels or curves makes the final gray scale image look much better. The same story with the colored version; I took that version in Photoshop, opened 'levels' moved the white slider and gamma slightly to the left and the image looked much better. Try it out yourself, most image editing software have some tools that give you these results.

[villenadecorte]

Your conversion to gray scale is quite straightforward in my opinion.
I get your result when I do image/mode/grayscale in Photoshop and nothing else.
However... using different methods to convert to grayscale (channels is one of them) and using some extra tools like levels or curves makes the final gray scale image look much better. The same story with the colored version; I took that version in Photoshop, opened 'levels' moved the white slider and gamma slightly to the left and the image looked much better. Try it out yourself, most image editing software have some tools that give you these results.

Thanks, I do have Photoshop and have played extensively with the levels as well as with the channel mixers and bits. not getting what i want. will take more coffee and time im sure
would like to see what you did with the pic, if you dont mind.