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I was going to write this up as a mini tutorial, but haven't had the time :-|
So, here's a gem of PS information that you might find very useful, especially if you're on Photoshop Elements...
1. Take an image
2. Add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer
3. Turn the saturation right down
Yes, I know that's a terrible B&W conversion. But why? It's because Photoshop assigns the same weighting to each hue, so yellows of the same brightness as blues are converted to the same shade of grey. But that's not the way your eye wants to see a B&W... However!
4. Change the layer blend mode from Normal to Color!
Shazam! The black and white image turns to a perceptual version where blues appear darker than yellows etc. Interestingly, all those bottom four blend modes in the list use perceptual rendering, unlike all the other blend modes.
It's fairly close to the L of the Lab mode in the tutorial here: Converting colour to black and white using the Lab mode
(If you have Elements, this is soooo much better than just a desaturate. I find that a levels layer and a brightness/contrast layer on top will add a similar zing as the Lab mode in Photoshop proper.)
Hope someone finds this useful!
Matt
I tried your lab mode technique last night, very impressive, will give this a go too, thanks Matt! 
Just to add some techie info:
The Hue/Sat layer set to normal will use 1/3 of each channel as the mix (33%/33%/33%)
When set to Colour blend mode, the mix is the same as the luminosity information used in JPG encoding: Green 59%, Red 30%, Blue 11%.
So, if you have full PS, then you can accomplish the same thing with a channel mixer with those values (and of course you can tweak them further).
Still, if you only have Elements (which is still a fine editing package), then the above technique is much better than a straight desaturate... and it's much easier to remember than the percentages! LOL!
Matt
Yes, and there's also Hidden Elements that adds a whole heap more. There are plenty of freebie downloads there too (including layer masks 
But, this technique is still interesting because of its simplicity
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