Awesome stuff :)
Pro tip for black and white :-)
Colour balance, temperature affects the black and white values too.
If your using Raw photos and lightroom or DC raw there's a set of calibration sliders that can also help with black and white and general skin tone management.
Especially the Blue primary saturation.
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.
Nice tips something I do with my digital at times. Yeah tweak syndrome is a thing I'm affected by too, black and white is strange as images that work with colour don't always translate to black and white well even with tweaks.