playing with black and white

well i messed with this conversion in Photoshop for about an hour.
is it better or worse than the one below this?
it's less contrasty, which is more the mood of the original color version.
i used the B&W filter that comes with Photoshop, but was not thrilled so i made an extra copy of the background layer and deleted two channels and blended that with the original layer and left the B&W layer ontop. my photoshop is old, CS3, so your milage may vary.