B&W

I'm a big fan of B&W photography.  Perhaps like others I find myself immediately attracted to B&W when reviewing thumbnails.  This is pretty great since with digital photography we get a B&W as well as a color image.  All we need to do is throw away the color...de-saturate.  Turns out that in order to make a good B&W image it takes a bit more than that, quite a bit more actually.

Enter the iPhone and the formula changes once again.  There are many Apps which will de-saturate the images and several more that give us various controls over the process.  Each has strong points, none work perfectly in every situation and many are almost tedious.  None that is but an App Vint B&W.

Vint was last updated Feb, 2009, an Ice-Age ago in iPhone time, and hasn't been updated since.  The developer Erik Pettersson has other things on his plate evidently.  Time after time new B&W Apps are released that seem to be as good as Vint but soon show that they are not.  There are some cumbersome problems with Vint though, it's a camera only App, it doesn't work on saved images.  So if after working a color image I decide to look at a B&W rendition I can't use Vint.  It also is kinda slow and won't work in background.  Now I am happy to discover that a new App finally seems as good as Vint...Yipee!!

Simply B&W produces images that are pretty much as good as Vint, and the images are easily improved.  It's a camera but works on saved images as well, in fact it will save a B&W image as well as a color image if used as a camera.  It has 2 areas that it falls a bit short compared to Vint, Contrast and Vignette, but it's tones, shades mid contrast etc are very very good.  It has a contrast control that quickly makes up for the shortcoming in this regard and also has 2 additional features.  It will apply color filters, R, O, Y, G, B and it applies a thin border, either B or W which goes on the outside of the image...which is a cool feature.  The program I use to apply Vignettes recognizes the border and doesn't apply the darkening to it.

The combination of features and being able to work on saved images is what I had been hoping for.  The developer Mr B Ware has a great product.