My thoughts: Black and White conversions

So I know I posted this in the previous post, but I love it. And it brings to mind black and white conversions. Black and white conversions are key when you're trying to achieve a certain look, add an artistic flair, and it's also an escape if your colors are off in your photograph. Black and white is very forgiving for skin tones or color casts. The problem is that I suck at black and whites. If you just convert your color photograph to black and white (grayscale or desaturated), it looks blah. And all my black and whites look blah. They will look very flat, very gray. You have to adjust it to get deep blacks and bright whites and add in interest. I couldn't for figure it out for the life of me. I added blacks but the skin still just looked gray.

My last post had tons of black and white, cause I found an action I really like. I downloaded a free set of photoshop actions from Pioneer Woman http://thepioneerwoman.com/photography/2008/04/actions/. She has two black and white conversions, but I found I like to use the "soft and faded" action and just turn off the sepia "tweak" layer. So awesome, I just select, hit play....and voila. I do adjust the "soft and faded" layer which is a screen layer (lightening layer). And then after I flatten all the layers into one image, I use selective color to bump up the blacks a little. Still working on it, but at least my black and whites are finally showing improvement.