There are probably 1,000’s of ways of doing this in Adobe Photo Shop, but a pretty fool-proof technique of converting a colour image to black and white is to use the built in filters within the Image Adjust menu

Within Photoshop

1.      Open your image,

2.      select Image\Adjustments\Photo Filter

3.      Then to improve the tonal range of the Black and White version, simulate putting an orange filter on your film camera and change the “filter” to be Orange.  Play with the density a few time to get the overall result you’re after

4.      Now select Image\Adjustments\Desaturate (<ctrl>+<shift>+U)

5.      You may choose to use the “Smart Sharpen” filter (Filters\Sharpen) to create a bit of texture to the image

6.      All this gets a more pleasing tonal range that doing a straight “desaturate”.

Once you’ve tried this a few times, you may wish to record an Action so you can create a repeatable result quickly without having to go through the steps above each time.