As much as I love Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 for black and white adjustments, I also keep trying to learn how to make black and white adjustments in Aperture or Photoshop.  I find it tends to get better results on shots featuring people. One of the counterintuitive but powerful tricks is to adjust colors after converting to black and white. For this image I separately adjusted the brightness of the Red, Green and Blue color channels, made a Levels adjustment to the separate Red, Green and Blue color channels. You can also use the Curves tool, and its ability to individually alter the Red, Green and Blue color channels to similar effect.