I just found this photo challenge. Black and white is challenging in the digital photography world. Traditional film b&w photography used a special type of film to enhance the contrast. I’m sure we all thought that colorizing old classic movies was a fun idea, but the execution wasn’t as cool as we hoped, because b&w really is a completely different medium from color. To get a somewhat close effect of true b&w, I bumped up both the contrast and saturation on this to the maximum before applying grayscale.
http://www.ceephotography.com/2013/10/09/cees-black-white-challenge-close-upsmacros/
nancy merrill photography 
Maximum contrast and saturation first. What a great idea. I have always struggled with converting to B&W. Thanks for the tip.
Oh yes. And a great photo, too 🙂
Thanks! It took a bit of experimenting to get it the way I wanted it to look. I used to love shooting on b&w film and slides. I was so disappointed the first time I converted a digital photo to b&w (grayscale). I was really happy to come across this method. Happy to pass it on!
Having my photographic “education” in the 60’s I was brought up on the new-fangled colour film. So I only started to try black and white just as digital was making a breakthrough, which meant greyscale, of course. I wish I had more experience with it.
Wonderful black and white photo! I’m glad you found me and thanks so much for participating!
Thanks! And you’re welcome!