Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

With RetroGrade you can lighten the trees, darken the sky, and mix any combination
of red, green, and blue to achieve a desired effect. There are controls for brightness and
contrast, film grain, color response, and tone and tint. It has a 16-bit mode for 48-bit
color images.
Comments
Steve Upham has packed more features into this low-cost plug-in than are available in
his freeware black and white converters (see the section entitled “Fotomatic” in Chapter
13, “Film Simulation and Effects”). Reviewers have found it particularly effective on
landscapes but almost as applicable to other photographs. The RGB Optical Filter sliders
give you good control over the tonal values derived from each color channel.
Version: RetroGrade 1.2 (2008)
Plugs into: Photoshop and compatible editors
OS: Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, and XP
RAM: 128MB
Supported file formats: Major formats
Price level: Approx. $8
Address: steve@cybia.co.uk
www.cybia.co.uk
Summary
Chapter 12 ■ Black and White Conversion 159
Many image editors offer excellent black and white conversion facilities, going beyond
simple color desaturation to provide more satisfactory ways of accomplishing the task.
Some of them provide complete channel mixing so that you can vary the contribution
made by each color channel to the final image. However, the specialist black and white
converters discussed in this chapter go even further in offering many more presets, some
of them having the ability to simulate the black and white response of different types of
film stock.