Okay, been playing with the new CS3 beta and it has a very cool B&W conversion tool! It uses a new adjustment layer specially designed for B&W conversions. (Adjustment layers are great to work with because they are non-destructive to the original image -- IOW you can go back and change edits endlessly without altering your original file.)
This tool uses sliders much like the Channel mixer method described in the other thread here. (To be clear, the normal channel mixer is also a non-destructive adjustment layer.) However, it improves it significantly in one very handy area: When you activate the B&W layer, your default tool is the dropper. You can click on any grayscale tone in your image and drag left for darker or right for lighter! The slider or sliders corresponding to the color(s) on the underlying image you selected automatically track up or down as you work directly on the image. You can also save any of your slider settings as pre-sets to simply call up on future images. There are of course a handfull of Adobe presets for basic filters and efects. IMO this is a VERY cool new feature for anyone who wants to work in B&W and work directly on the image as opposed to indirectly by sliders
It should not be confused with dodging and burning since it affects the image globally, adjusting all of the tones within the range specified of your original sample color. Of course you can still dodge or burn locally as desired after these global adjustments. (FTR I dodge and burn on a 50% gray overlay layer as this is a non-destructive process too. If anybody needs more detail on how to do this, I can explain in another post.)
Cheers,
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