Monochrome is boring

Simply taking a picture and making it monochrome (⌘+M) is really boring (see the middle picture). Seriously. There's a lot you can still do to a picture once you've desaturated it. First thing I do is I start going through all the color filters in the Monochrome Mixer. If I'm trying to highlight people, I prefer one of the warmer filters. Landscape for the cooler stuff. Once I've picked one that I like, then I start bumping up the contrast in the Enhance palette. For the picture on the right, I've got it set to a blue filter and the contrast at 0.25. Then to give my "black & whites" some variety, I'll sometimes then throw on some Color Monochrome action on top. For this picture, I just used the default color and lowered the Intensity to 0.4. I also added a Vignette, but I applied that to all three samples so that doesn't really count.

Here's the result. (Yes, I could have cleaned up the picture more, but you get the idea.):