Best BW conversion technique

What are the best techniques of black and white conversion?

Thanks.

I've always found splitting channels to work the best. You can also convert to Lab color, and use the L channel, but it never seems to work as well for me...

I use Lightroom, but I believe the same/similar technique is available in CS3. In LR if you use the Grayscale menu the image will become B&W and you will see a bunch of sliders, one slider for each color. You can slide these sliders back and forth to increase or decrease the tonality of that underlying color in the image, but there is a better way. In the upper-left corner of the menu there us a little dot with a small up and down arrow above and below it. It's easy to miss so if you didn't know about it you might not ever see/use it. When you click on it your cursor now becomes a dynamic tool to use on the image itself. So now if you see a tone in the image you want to change it's just a matter of putting the cursor on that tone, hold down the left mouse key, and drag forward to lighten the tone or back to darken it. So now you just go around the image changing the tones in this manner until you get what you want. Notice that the appropriate sliders will slide back and forth as you do this.

From what i remember (I am not at home now so don't have access to CS3 or LR) you can do a similiar thing in CS3, in the grayscale tool I think the cursor is automatically in this mode so you just have to know to put it on the image and drag it around, but if i remember right it might be a little different in that instead of dragging forward and back you might have to drag left and right.

This is absolutely the best way to convert that I know of since it is 100% a visual way with as much control as you can have.

Alien Skin Black and White plug in! Allows you to choose from a whole load of template settings that emulate traditional monochrome film. With a bit of a tweak you can get amazing results!

Aside from that I use the channel mixer or sometimes even Hue and Saturation> Colourise to make a colour image monotone then reduce the saturation to nearly nothing.

Rodreguez wrote in post #5827204
Alien Skin Black and White plug in!

I visited the Alien Skin web site, but they do not show a "Black & White" plug-in. Are you using "Exposure 2"?