Ok I've had a play & attached is the version that I've come up with.

To explain a bit how I've got there...

I'm not sure if you worked your B&W conversion from the image you posted or if you converted to greyscale direct from RAW, but my first thought looking at the image you posted was that a) it's very blue & b) its quite dark & lacking in contrast. So the first thing I did was open the jpg in camera raw & hit auto white balance to get rid of the blue cast. Then added a bit of recovery to get a bit more detail in the cloud, some fill to brighten the alleyway & added a bit of contrast & saturation - screen grab of my settings attached.

I then added a Black & White layer & tweaked the sliders until I was happy. With most shots involving sky thats going to mean reducing the blues & cyans to get a moody sky & balancing the other sliders accordingly. In this case lifting the reds lightened the wall but reducing the magentas put some texture in the brickwork.

This made the path in the alley very dark so I added a curves layer with a mask to lighten it up. I also added another curves layer with a group mask to just add a little light on the bike itself. (I also cloned out the bit of angle iron on the top of the wall as I thought it was distracting)

Hope that's helpful - let me know what you think

Wow Gidders, that's amazing. It shows how far I have got to go. I have very little understanding of layer masks and do struggle somewhat with photoshop. You did a good job.

Thanks. Most of my skills are self taught by messing about or from books.

Have a look at this thread http://www.worldphotographyforum.com...ead.php?t=1398 for some good text books