Looking for some help with waterfall

Can anyone give me some advice on how to process this to look more natural? I liked it at first, on my monitor, but printed it out and it looks terrible with all the lighter areas. It was converted to black and white, and my processing got away from me.

Can you be more specific about your goals for the image? To me, color always looks more "natural" than black and white, since that's how we see the world- what was wrong with the color print? Were the whites blown, or had some unnatural color, or something else? You may just need to calibrate your monitor. Where did you print it? You may need to calibrate your printer if you did it yourself, or you may need to go to a better lab (never trust CVS/Walgreens etc- I exclusively use Adoramapix).

At any rate, I do actually like the B&W (I'm on my phone, so I may just not be seeing any over processing you mentioned), there's a lot to look at but it just sort of all works for me.

I just found the greyish areas to look really bad, because they are so shiny.

Cut the contrast a bit. Your whites look blown.

Looking at this bigger, I totally agree that the whites look blown. You can try to pull them down- but if they're blown in the RAW, there may only be so much you can do. This is a perfect example of "check the histogram when you're shooting" and protect your highlights.

you could get a circular polarizer if you want to cut down some of the reflections off the wet rocks...doesn't help for this image, but may in the future

try luminosity masks to done down the whites to cut the contrast a bit

FarmerTed1971 wrote in post #17912313
Cut the contrast a bit. Your whites look blown.

this.

The wet rocks are very surreal in black and white.
I always underexpose when taking waterfalls because the white is always brighter than expected.

Can you post a link to the RAW file so we could take a crack a it?