Since quite some time I looked for ways to boost my B&W photography. Until now I used Adobe Lightroom for the conversion to B&W and for the tweaking of colors and tones. I believe some progress was made during the last couple years but I'm still not satisfied with some of the results. Many other photographers rave about NIK's Silver Efex Pro. I gave it a trial a little while ago (they have a 30 days trial version), and finally bought the software. I really liked it from the first moment on. The user interface is intuitive and you can find many good video tutorials on their website.
The image above was made on a sunny day earlier this month. We had snow on the ground and this mushroom on a fallen log caught my attention. Used a little fill flash for the shadows. I selected this shot for one of the first tests with Silver Efex Pro because it has many tonal values spread spread over the entire image.