[Gdal-dev] Conversion to Grayscale

[Chris Hodgson]

Do any of the existing gdal tools support converting a color (RGB or 
paletted) image to a grayscale image? I've been using ImageMagick 
"convert" for this, but it takes ridiculously long to do - ie. I can 
reproject the image faster than I can grayscale it - even without doing 
any histogram balancing. I'm guessing it would be relatively easy to 
write a python script to do this - however I know nothing of Python, let 
alone the gdal interface. Has anyone done this already?

Thanks,
Chris Hodgson