Digital BW, The Print

There are lots of different ways of converting colour digital images to
black & white. Some use Photoshop's own functions like simple conversion to
grayscale, and there are also some third party plug-ins available.  I've
played with a few plugins prior to spending any money but not done any
printing yet and am interested in members' views.

These are the ones I've tried - there may be others.
"Convert to B&W Pro" for $99.95 from imagingfactory.com  
"Black and White" from silveroxide.com. This has various options, and I
tried out the Tri-X "Enhanced" for $55.Interestingly, they say their Tri-X
demo doesn't work on XP but it worked fine for me.
Powerretouche.com - black and white studio $75 or 50 UKP

The results from all were hard to distinguish apart but I preferred them to
any of the built-in Photoshop methods. For me the key points were:

Imagingfactory - lots of film options, most expensive, I found it easy to
get a balanced results
Silveroxide - only one film option per filter, cheaper, use of "brightness"
and "gamma" was fiddly in the small preview window.
Powerretouche - lots of options, "busy" user interface but powerful, slowest
to run

There may well be other plug-ins out there doing a similar job.  I'm
interested to hear others views before I buy one, especially from those who
have made prints.

Kim Fullbrook


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