By: Erik Vlietinck
Sun, April 29, 2007 - 6:33:00
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Photoshop has good black and white conversion capabilities, but if you want to go the extra mile, you’ll need something more powerful. While DxO Labs’ FilmPack 1.1 is available as a Photoshop plug-in, FilmPack 1.1 is mainly aimed at providing a film look-and-feel to any photograph, including colour images. B & W Styler, however, does only that: convert a digital photograph to monochrome. And it does a splendid job.

We have had the pleasure of reviewing The PlugInSite’s excellent Photoshop filters before on IT-Enquirer. And every time, these plug-ins keep surprising me, both in terms of capabilities and quality. The B & W Styler Filter is no different. This is a filter that gives you the ultimate control over a monochrome conversion from a digital photograph.

Just as with the LightMachine plug-in, it has various user levels, ranging from the very simple to the expert-level. To be honest, I am still coming to grasps with LightMachine’s Expert level settings, of which I keep forgetting what all the settings and sliders stand for. Luckily, these plug-ins all come with a live context-based help system, which means that hovering your mouse over an item, reveals the complete explanation of how it works.

B & W Styler is a bit like LightMachine in that it has so many options, settings and methods to convert colour images to monochrome, it becomes absolutely necessary to keep an eye on the live help feature. Luckily, B & W Styler is somewhat less complicated in its effects: you see the changes you apply much better than when you have 16 million colours in your field of vision.

If all you need is a monochrome converter without any frills whatsoever, then B & W Styler is probably overkill, although I particularly liked the Easy setting, where you can choose to set the basic contrast and brightness levels with more subtle results than in Photoshop. THe plug-in really comes into its own when used in one of the higher level settings. 

In Expert level mode, you can choose to convert using one of several methods, including a basic one, but also one that gives you complete slider-based control over the colour channels of the original digital image. Tampering with these sliders, you will soon learn that the blue channel brings about a lot of noise, but also that you can create very different monochrome images starting from the same original.

The plug-in will analyse your photograph and will enable you --in another tab-- to fine-tune the amounts of colours present in the photo, by adding their “influence” in the black and white result. I’m not going to discuss all these capabilities in detail, but I can assure you it’s not difficult to spend a whole day with B & W Styler and come up with a dozen good-looking, but all different monochrome results. One of the options, for example, enables you to set local contrast and brightness in the three tonal areas of an image—shadow, midtones, highlights.

Film Grain

The monochrome result can be further enhanced by applying a mask, including a vignette, and by adding film grain. Although there are a couple of pre-defined film grains available, I found it a bit too difficult to get a result that resembled a real film that I remember from my own black and white photography days. In the film grain domain, DxO’s FilmPack definitely rules.

However, for all your conversion to monochrome needs, I don’t think you can do better than with B & W Styler. It’s simply so powerful there’s no competition.