I’ve a lot of time on my hands with the lockdown hence the topic.

I use nik plugins with Lightroom for my photos, I find the silver efex black and white plugin especially useful.

But generally, I bump contrast and sharpening in the in camera settings and am happy with that.

For the iPhone , I just use the b&w filter.

Anyone got pearls of wisdom to share ?

I love Silver Efex Pro II. It does great B&W conversions, but you can also use it for improving color shots if you have Photoshop. The idea comes from Dan Margulis, though he didn't use NIK. Basically, I do all my cropping, color correction, noise reduction and global exposure correction in LR. Then I drop it into PS and create a second, duplicate layer, which I convert to B&W with Silver FX. I do all my contrast, structure and sharpening adjustments on that layer, then change its blending mode to luminosity. It sounds complicated, but using macros and scripts it's really quite fast. One side benefit is that I end up with color and B&W versions of every shot--sometimes it's not clear in advance which is going to turn out better.

Thanks for sharing the information regarding Silver Efex Pro II.

It was interesting to read that their algorithms have been designed to emulate my long time favorite film, Kodak Tri-X 400!

Actually, it has presets for about a dozen different film types, plus additional settings for grain and sensitivity. And you can roll your own with color filters and exposure curves.

Indeed, I read that as well!