That seems to give me the same results as just going with Desaturate, and that's awfully flat.

For this original, desaturation in either CS2 or PSP gives about this, whereas by splitting into RGB channels and tweaking how I can recombine them I can get something more shapeful like this. And there are a number of different ways to tweak.

One criticism is the original image, but even if I tweak it so that I love the colours, it's not doing service to the B&W within. And I never had this much trouble exposing B&W on film.

eta: and enhancing using PSP's autocontrast option after the greyscaling isn't wonderful either.

I don't suppose there are any consumer B&W digital cameras... any non-consumer models?

ION, CES New: JVC adds iPod docks to LCD TVs

David Lynch on the iphone.

His whole rant would carry a lot more weight if he didn't shoot his films in SD video.

Anyone have an idea why PDFMaker would just stop working when attempting to convert files to PDF from Microsoft Word and Excel?

Nope, but I've used cutepdf for the last two years on everything and it's been flawless.

[link]

Problem is, it's my work machine and I'm just trying to put off calling desktop services.

This is a complete stab-in-the-dark, but are you logged in as a different user than normal? Have you tried rebooting?

What happens when you try to use PDFMaker? Does it fail? or is the option not available at all?

Is it something specific to a particular document? I've had a document crap out in the middle of conversion for some reason. I ended up cutting it into sections, which successfully converted, and then rejoining them in Adobe.

tommyrot, that gives me an idea. I may try logging in under a different username and see if anything's running. I have rebooted, but no dice.

What happens when you try to use PDFMaker?

It attempts to export, "prints" the PDF, and then the process just hangs up, churning for infinity.