The tone problem is actually in your printer/paper combination, not in the conversion process (a grayscale image really holds no color information at all). I’m seeing a similar problem with my printer, although my images have a more of a green tone instead.

There are two ways to go around this:

1)
Create a printer setting that will adjust tonality to give you actual black and white if the printer software allows it. I’ve chosen this method since that allows me to finish the image in PSE and not to worry about any printer/paper-specific adjustments. Once I’m ready to print, I select my custom setting for this particular paper and have the printer driver make the corrections for me. It takes a bit of experimenting to get the settings right the first time but after that it is my experience that this method works well.

2)
Create a set of adjustment layers in PSE that corrects the image and save them in an empty image with the name of the paper and printer. Once you have finished your image you open the file with the adjustment layers, copy them to your image and print as usual. This method will allow for more fine tuned adjustments than most printer drivers but it’s also the most cumbersome to work with.

In both cases you should be prepared to spend an afternoon creating small test prints to nail the settings but it is definitely time well spent – I get very decent black and whites from my cheap HP PhotoSmart C5180 All-in-one device while the results straight out of the box were hideous with an obvious green tint.

By the way, having a black and white photo created the old fashioned way (fro film) for reference may be a help since it will help you get the tonality right – sometimes your eyes may fool you into believing that an image is neutral while it is not.

As with Adobe there are several different ways to convert a black and white image. There’s a menu option to simply convert to black and white, or you can desaturate, etc… in addition to being able to adjust hue, color tone, contrast, saturation, etc. if you so choose.

This is what I use in Windows. Check out their website (http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1191272117978#versionTabview=tab1&tabview=tab0) If you’d like to try it before buying it, you can download a free trial version.

If you currently use Photopaint and want free support or advice, you can visit our YahooGroup at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cdug/ (CorelDRAW Users Group).

In Linux (or Windows), you can use The Gimp to do the same things. This operates in a more similar fashion to Adobe Photoshop. (http://www.gimp.org/) Of course, since it’s open source, it’s free. Very powerful program, though.

Some other methods I’ve used:
- Using the Channel Mixer, and the Monochrome Option. This can be done with a little bit of Idea about the RGB of your picture.
- Using the desaturate option

I can’t recollect others right away, but my question would be what is the advantage of this method over the others? One thing I can see, is the advantage of using a Layer for doing this, so we preserve the modifications to the layers, and can get desired results.