CC on this BW conversion

I came here because you all have such an eye for color and BW. I, however am still developing mine What do you think of this BW conversion? The pic is my oldest discovering a flower

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looks fine to me....

need more tonal range.

The image has already been processed into an unrecoverable situation. So, hoping that you still have the original file as it came from the camera, you might be able to re-do your adjustments and conversion for an improved result.

I first tried Image->Adjustments-> Shadow/Highlight.... A setting of 50 Shadow and 0 Highlight gave me exactly what I was hoping for everywhere except in her left sleeve. That area seems blown out. My first reaction was that I could possibly do better with "Curves". Then I immediately came back to earth and acknowledged that the sleeve area is probably blown out completely - in which case, nothing would save that. I checked all of the sleeve area for digital values using the Info palette and found that my worst fears were realized. That entire sleeve area is completely blown out.

The only possibility of recovery would be if the original is not also blown out in that area or if it was shot in RAW, there could be some recovery possible via the exposure slider. That is my only recommendation.

Thanks for the reply Bob. Any time I edit, I save the RAW and a high quality JPG and then edit a copy only. I'll play around with another copy. This BW converion was an action I purchased off Photoblast, and I wasn't sure how much I liked it. Thanks for the feedback!

with B&W is all about tonal range. the dark area(fence), its completely black. no details. The shirt (sleeves) is over blown; lost of details. Both requires some gradient shift to either side of the spectrum. With Digital B&W you need to do ALOT of dodging and burning, much more so than over film. Just the simple fact that B&W still has more DR than digital sensor.