We've had slightly better and more impressive sounding ways of converting to black and white, like switching over to the Lab color mode to separate the color from the lightness values in the image, but even then, we had no control over the results. Sure, there's been quick and easy ways to go about it, like simply desaturating the image or converting it to Grayscale, but these methods gave us no control over the process, leaving Photoshop to throw away color information any way it saw fit, and the results were usually less than spectacular. For most of Photoshop's lifetime, converting color photos to black and white has left many people feeling blue.
