Time was when you had to decide before you took the picture. Now even if you intend to create a monochrome image with digital photography the place to start is a colour file. You may just find that colour works better after all. You may find that you want both colour and black and white. If you start by shooting everything in colour you have every possible option and you have more control over the final picture. If you convert the picture to monochrome instead of leaving it up to your camera, you get to decide on contrast, brightness, etc.
In Corel Photopaint, split the channels of RGB and just keep the red channel for an infrared look, you’ll get very light skin tones. Or convert to LAB and then split the channels, keep L – O for a more natural skin tone. That is how this black and white was created. In Adobe Photoshop, use convert to black and white. This allows you to adjust the amount of each colour individually, to gain optimal control of you final picture. You may want to punch the contrast up as a finishing touch, just make sure you have kept detail in the highlights and the shadows for whichever media you are going to use for the final presentation.
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