I was watching some online CS4 training videos today and he showed a new way to do a b&w conversion. I gave it a try and really like the result. Basically, you open the color image in Camera Raw, go to the HSL/Grayscale tab, click on Grayscale...then, instead of playing with the sliders on that tab, you go back to the first tab, the basics page and do your adjusting there.
He said to push the whites all the way to the right just until they are clipped (the white triangle shows in the URC), then use the recovery slider to pull them back in to get the triangle back to black. Next, you drag the black slider to the left, taking some of your midtones over as well. Last step is to push the clarity slider up to about 75 to really fill in those midtones.
This creates a very dramatic high-contrast black and white conversion. I tried it but pulled the whites back a bit more and didn't do as dramatic a push on the blacks, either. I then tweaked it with a levels adjustment in CS4 and that was it - took about 3 minutes to create this. I could probably spend some time doing some burning and dodging but my eyes are too tired tonight!
