A book I recently got: "The Photoshop Book For Digital Photographers" by Scott Kelby describes several detailed (and relatively easy) methods for conversion to b&W, one very similar to what zhounder described above. The author claims his methods produce far better results than a simple conversion using the "desaturate" command, for example. The methods are too long to rewrite, but I encourage folks to check out the book. It's probably available in many libraries.