Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

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The Digital Photographer's Software Guide
Even if your original color image is dull, B/W Styler can turn it into a vibrant black and
white conversion, with options for adding color tones, simulating film grain, and adding
special effects. You can manipulate brightness and contrast, add soft focus and glow,
and put in some vignette blur and mist effects if you are so inclined.
Comments
This is an impressive black and white solution, with three user levels for inexperienced,
intermediate, and advanced users. Whereas the basic Photographer’s Mode gives you a
choice of presets within a single dialog box, the top Expert Mode has more than 100
controls and nearly 200 local presets. Like all the software from this vendor, it is well
conceived and delivers what it promises.
Version: B/W Styler Version 1.1 (Windows), 1.0 (Mac OS X) (2008)
Plugs into: Photoshop, Elements, Paint Shop Pro, PhotoImpact, Photo-Paint, Fireworks, and so
on
OS: Windows 95, 98, NT, ME, 2000, XP, and Vista; Mac OS X
Supported file formats: 8-bit and 16-bit RGB and grayscale images
Price level: Approx. $50
Address: Nuremberg, Germany
www.photocorrection.com
PR Black/White Studio
Vendor: PowerRetouche
Purpose: A “digital darkroom” for converting digital color images to black and white, in 8 or
16 bits per channel
Description
PR Black/White Studio is an extremely versatile converter of digital images from full
color to black and white. It offers masses of options: two pages of them in the Windows
version, three pages on Macintosh. It contains presets that simulate professional films
such as Kodak Tri-X and T-MAX, but it also lets you create your own light sensitivity
curves and then store them for later use. It has a full range of color filters that imitate the
effect of standard camera filters, plus full control over exposure, highlights, and shadows.
A set of zone controls lets you make adjustments to three selectable zones.
PR Black/White Studio is capable of matching all the multigrade levels of traditional photographic
paper, from 00 to 5. It even has an extra level at each end, proving, once again,
that digital photography pushes the boundaries in unexpected ways. There are highlight
and shadow alert options to warn you when you are losing tonal levels. The zone controls,
used in conjunction with an eyedropper tool, are particularly well implemented with
different colored crosses that remain in position to indicate the three selected zones.