Antiqued Lily Pond

I'm going to convert this one to b&w to see the results. I am anticipating that it will look great with some editing towards a b&w image.

Thanks Shawn...I know the sky is blown on this, but I loved the antique effect. I don't think I tried b&w. I love your b&w stuff.

This was a difficult photo to convert to black and white. Not only because of the white spot in the sky, but because of all the green tones in the image. I worked on it for almost one hour before I came up with what I think is a good conversion, but that hour includes my first failed attempt with which I had to start over again. I hope you like the results that I came up with because I do like the conversion. Here is that I ended up with:

After posting my b&w alteration I remembered that I once had some very good results when I merged a color image with the b&w one. The time that I had the best results with this trick was when the color image was mostly just one color tone, therefore I decided to go back to my editing software and see what I could achieve with your image using that additional modification. You will have to decide if you like the results of my doing this, I think I like the darker b&w version better. Here is what the merged color and b&w looks like:

Shawn, that's wonderful! How did you pull so much out of the sky? The one I posted is a RAW conversion with blown highlight recovery at 100%, and you've found something in that blown area. How?? I'd love to know what you did to get this!

LOVE!