There are a million ways to convert digital color images to black and white. I’ve been playing around with various techniques, and this book has been a wonderful resource. It’s fairly advanced and it assumes that you already know your way around various tools in Photoshop such as histograms, layers, masks, curves, levels etc. If you have a good understanding of those basics, you’ll be able to create some really amazing black and white images.
My newest toy though is Nik Software’s amazing Silver Efex Pro:
This software is an incredibly powerful tool that allows the most precise control over every detail of your image. You can selectively tweak tonality and contrast of every element of your image, emulate a bunch of traditional black and white films, determine grain, tonal curves, etc. It’s a blast and I’m still wrapping my head around all the possibilities. Here’s one image I played around with today. There is much room for improvement, so I’ll keep digging into my fun new toy. Click on the image for full size.
Lone Cypress Tree, Pebble Beach