Been a poser freak for about 3 months now (what an addiction)
Anyhow, acquired some older V2 hair files that have Bum texture files that came converted to bum.jpg, however instead of being black and white and or shades of grey, they are green. Well actually they look closer to the color of pea soup. Thanks to WW I plan to make them fit V3, V4, S3P, A3 etc.

Do I leave these files alone or pull them into Photoshop and change to black and white? The renders with these products looks washed out and lacks detail. Not sure if it is me still learning proper render, camera and lighting settings or the fact the bum files are the wrong color.

TIA for any answers

poser 4 bumfiles are red-to-green. AFAIK changing 'em to greyscale won't work. we useta create greyscale displacement maps, then poser would convert 'em to red-to-green, based on the first derivative of change in brightness. hence one would wanna use the original greyscale map from which the bum file was generated. bum files don't work in anything but the poser 4 renderer (see manual).

I'd like to know what to do with these old BUMs too and how to convert them for more up to date use. Some older products had corresponding jpeg bums for those using pro-pack and above but many only had the .bums.

Quote - Do I leave these files alone or pull them into Photoshop and change to black and white?

Leave them alone, Poser will connect them to the "Gradient_Bump" channel.
(There actually is no way to convert BUMs back to the original B&W, see -> http://www.morphography.uk.vu/bumpmaps.html)

Your fuzziness may be due to Poser's texture filtering or to high a shading rate.

nruddock - informative and insightful link, but oh, too much hassle for me to convert one by one by one....  

therefore fantasy wishlist  item -  conversion utility for old BUMs on-the-fly the moment old PZ poses are applied. 
SIGH.

in regard to extracting the original greyscale displacement map from a Mac- generated bum file, it would be a case of calculating the integral of red-to-green transitions in the bum file. red is the rising edge, green is the falling edge, and of course it's beyond the scope of this forum. possibly an EULA violation as well, since it means reverse-engineering the fractal designs algorithm.