Well, I use IrfanView to edit and sample pictures. It's a no-frills program, and you can use to easily re-size and resample photos, red-eye reduction and, using the colour enhancing options, you can make images black and white if you choose to (with various sliders and options).
It's a completely free program and doesn't have any nasty malware hidden inside it like a lot of free programs do. I've also found it very easy to use, and I'm useless when it comes to image manipulation, so try it out, you've got nothing to lose.
You can download it by going to
http://www.irfanview.com