The Imaging Factory's Convert to BW Pro 3.0
I'm not much in the habit of recommending photo tools, but for those of you doing black and white work in digital more than occasionally, I have to recommend The Imaging Factory's Convert to BW Pro 3.0.
Now, normally I don't go in for most of the filters and whatnot that are available to do stuff to digital images -- either I find them effects tacky, or I'm good enough of a Photoshop jockey to find the redundant, but this is an exception. I had been happy with the techniques I was using to convert color images to black and white -- pure channel mixing by hand, or Rob Carr's excellent method he developed for Greg Gorman. And I'm not sure that I couldn't get the results I'm seeing in Convert to BW Pro using those techniques -- but this is a lot easier, and works a lot more like the way I think than those other techniques do.
By way of an example, here's an image you've seen before, in the original and converted using their tool. I did no burning or dodging; the only thing I did outside their tool is to apply a bit of a split-tone effect. Like I said, it's not impossible that I could have done this without their tool... but it was much faster and easier. It's definitely worth the $99 to me, and definitely worth the 30 day trial to you to try out.
Check them out: The Imaging Factory.
(And thanks to Michael Reichmann for pointing me to it in the first place)