The problem a lot of projects have when trying to use black and white images is the lack of control over the contrast within an image. Most of the standard settings to desaturate an image in popular photo editing programs, like Photoshop, give you very little control over your contrast without having to venture into the channel settings, creating a lot of feathered masks and taking more time than you had anticipated. Nik Software has come up with an ingenius little plugin for Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture called Silver Efex. This, like all plugins from Nik, offers a variety of presets to change a color image into a dramatic black and white composition, or, allows you to create your own customized settings. You can set control points within an image, adjust the radius of the area affected, work directly on color channels and have the output placed on its own layer so as not to disrupt the original image. This plugin is not so much a time saver (although it does work fast, if all you want to do is change a pic from color to black and white, the standard filters can do that just as quick) but more for fine adjustments to photography. I have taken images and greatly enhanced specific areas within the image while leaving the secondary subject matter untouched. You can download a demo of this great plugin at their website.
