In addition to being an amazing and efficient photo organising tool, it has excellent image tweaking tools, including great black and white abilities.
editing black and white photos in lightroom
Processing your black and white images is a huge topic in itself, and I'm no expert. There are many good programs to help you tweak and adjust your photo to give it a bit of extra punch in black and white - however I highly recommend Adobe Lightroom. In addition to being an amazing and efficient photo organising tool, it has excellent image tweaking tools, including great black and white abilities. Obviously how I tweak every photo is different, but the big secret in unlocking extra editing power for black and white images in Lightroom's 'Develop' screen is to click the 'black and white' tab in the 'HSL / Colour / black and white' section, which will instantly display the image in Black and White, but also present you with a set of colour sliders: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green etc. This is where it gets cool - grab the 'Blue' slider for example and slide it left or right, and you'll see just the parts of your image that were blue in the original photo become brighter or darker grey! It's astounding the control this gives you in creating a black and white image, drawing attention to the right parts of your image, dulling-down or enhancing certain aspects such as the sky, or the grass - whatever! If you don't quote know what colour a certain part of the image is that you wish to separately control (is that rock red, or orange?) then you can click the little circular target button in the top left corner of the box of sliders, which, as it says, lets you "Adjust Black and White mix by dragging in the photo". You can then simply click and drag (up or down) on a certain part of the black and white image to brighten/darken that precise original colour mix.