Digital BW, The Print

David,

Sorry for bombarding you, but I thought of one more good approach for
printing 4/C B&W that will maintain neutrality on press.  

Do a standard RGB to CMYK conversion, using one of the industry
standard CMYK profiles (US Web Coated SWOP, Euroscale Coated, etc). 
This will give you a full 4/C conversion with too much color to
guarantee neutrality on press.

To solve this, create a new Selective Color adjustment layer.  Set the
Method to "Absolute" the select "Blacks" from the drop down menu. 
Nove the Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow Sliders to the left in equal
amounts to a figure like -40 or -50.  Make sure they are all adjusted
by the EXACT same percentage.  This will take color inks out of your
blacks in equal proportions.  With your mouse cursor positioned over
the darkest black portion of the image, read the "K" value in the Info
Palette.  If it is currently reading 90K, move the Black slider in
Selective color to to the right to increase the back ink.  Don't go
past 100% K, and keep an eye on shadow detail to prevent blocking up.
 It is probably better to be conservative and keep the K value between
93 and 96% or so.  This selective color adjustment will change your
file so that black ink greatly outweighs color inks throughout for
neutral blacks.  

For further refinement, you can even use the "Neutrals" drop down box
in Selective Color and play with those settings in a similar fashion,
but you probably won't need it.  This approach will be more like
creating a custom profile with ProfileMaker or Monaco Profiler, since
you still will have a little color in the highlights, but a lot more
black than color.

Finally, you can tweak the black channel after this adjustment for the
best shadow detail and tonal range, but leave the CMY channels alone.  

Lou