Trevor, I'm glad you took the time to go into such detail explaining the color channel mixer method of bw conversion. I know a lot of people (myself included) often need the visuals to go with the explanation to better grasp a new photoshop technique.

But what I think is really cool is that you not only got a decent result with COLOR DESATURATION, but didn't aurtomatically get a good result using my LAB method.

What that tells me is that different types of colors shots: different subjects or different lighting or different tonality MAY need to be converted using DIFFERENT techniques to get the best bw results.

So, in this sense it's smart to learn several of these techniques, and don't be afraid (or in my case too lazy) to take the time to compare the results using different methods.