yeah... the B/W above is processed from RAW and not just de-saturated but taken through a channel-mixing process. I'm quite comfortable with that to chose the color ranges for brightness that I need...

I think it's more an aesthetic struggle than a technical one, I find it incredibly hard to make up my mind as to where the final "range" of brightness and contrast should be. I either see it as blown out and burnt or just a grey mush... if that makes any sense.

since we're talking about pro-tips: I often process B/W by taking each colour channel individually and layering them with "multiply" and/or "screen" processing. With some feathered masking it gives you wonderful control over highlights, grain and contrast... (also works great with color images btw)

But still, I often find myself playing with it for ages, never feeling fully satisfied with it, eventually just giving up and letting the files rot away on my backup drives.