Digital BW, The Print

Maybe Channel Mixer becomes straightforward with a lot of experience, but I 
find Convert B/W Pro to be immensely intuitive after 30+ years of black and 
white film exposure, developing and darkroom printing.

For example, the color filter adjustment is a continuous slider that goes 
from 0 (red) all the way round the color wheel to 360 (red again) with 
another slider that lets you apply the selected color filter from 0 to 
100%.  "Exposure" is held constant while you adjust filter color, so you 
simply watch the gray tones come and go as you slide across the filter 
bar.  Separate sliders adjust "negative exposure", "print exposure" and 
paper contrast grade (continuous in 0.1 steps from -1.0 to 5.)  Another 
section of the control panel lets you select color response and gamma to 
match the color sensitivity of five common black and white films (by name), 
or "linear" response, or "Photoshop" response (not sure what that is,) or 
set the color response manually at a half dozen points across the 
spectrum.  The gamma slider is graduated from -100 to +100.  Finally, you 
can apply color, either sepia or blue, either as "tint" (which seems to 
apply it across the whole print) or "tone" (which seems to be proportional 
to the density in the print, with more effect on shadows than highlights) 
and either of these are applied with a slider that goes from 0 (no tone) to 
100 (way too much.)

All changes are visible on a preview image, which can be zoomed and 
panned.  The underlying file is not changed until you click OK.  Filter 
settings are remembered from one image to the next, so you don't have to 
start over from neutral each time.

I'm sure all of this can be done directly in Photoshop with one or more of 
the tools available, but to put it all in one panel with sliders that match 
the way I have thought about black and white film and prints for decades, 
made this particular filter well worth its cost TO ME.

Cheers,
Kip

At 12/2/2002 06:47 AM +0000, Mark Hahn wrote, in part:
>I can't help you since I use Photoshop, but during a recent general
>surfing session I came across someone selling a "pro" B&W converter
>plugin for PS and was baffled why anyone would need one with the
>Channel mixer being so straight forward to use.  The big selling
>point was that you could select Channel Mixer settings that
>correspond to specific B&W filters and I could not help but wonder
>why anyone would want to limit themselves to just the standard filter
>sets... like going into the digital domain with its almost limitless
>possibilities and then limiting your possibilities to those that
>existed 50 years ago... hmmm.