Converting to black and white

[QT Luong]

At the VC conference in Monterey, George de Wolfe said during his presentation: "I just drag the saturation slider to 0".

[Marko]

Finally, I tried the all black color blend layer method. This one is alos good and a slightly different paradigm to use, but shows some poterizations with extreme hue changes.

The posterization you are seeing is the consequence of using the hue/saturation control, which itself is not the most efficient or capable tool for the job, it is just the simplest one.

The beauty of this method is that it is very flexible. You don't have to fill the layer with black, you can fill it with any shade of gray. You can also fill it with any color. You don't even have to use an empty layer filled with color, you can copy the existing layer, apply High Pass filter of 0.1 (the smallest possible amount) and then change mode to Color.

Consequently, you can use Levels or Curves instead of Hue/Saturation. Or you can combine them with Photo Filter. All of these as Adjustment Layers, of course. Or you can use the Fill Layers, either solid or gradient.

The beauty of Photoshop lays in the fact that there are almost as many different ways to accomplish certain goal as there are practitioners.

So, yes, you are right, this method is not very intuitive if you are not already accustomed to Photoshop logic. But then again, you should be if you are using it, or your results will suffer.