You might think that creating black and white images in the digital age is as easy as loading your digital image in Photoshop and converting to greyscale. While that will get you a monochrome image it will be a pale imitation of the same photo shot with black and white film. But don’t despair, great black and white imagery is easy to obtain from digital images; you just need to know the best ways to process them. In this article Harold Davis goes into some of the processing methods you should be aware of.
Black and White for the Digital Era – O’Reilly Digital Media Blog