Don’t pay attention to Paul Simon. Everything looks great in black-and-white, and monochrome imaging isn’t going away anytime soon, no matter what kind of cameras you prefer to use.
Digital photographers have lots of software and techniques that can be used to turn color digital images into monochrome and everybody has their favorites, but there are not many ways to get a color image to look as if it was shot with a specific kind of black and white film. Here are some of the best power tools around these days:
The technically oriented will love Silver Oxide’s Photoshop-compatible plug-ins. These plug-ins emulate specific black-and-white films including Agfa’s APX 25, 100; Kodak’s Tri-X, TMAX, TMY, Plus X, Pan X, T400CN, Verichrome; and Ilford’s HP5, FP4, Pan F, Delta 100, Delta 400, and XP2. Recently they’ve added some new Kodak emulsions including TMZ, Tech Pan, and Portra 400. Silver Oxide’s Bill Dusterwald told me “Tech Pan is the most unusual film that I’ve profiled. It has half the green response of any film, and a very strong red response. This makes the tonality very different from all the others.” Want an infrared look? Use their SilverIR Filter. All you have to do is take a color image, scanned or from a digital camera and, using the SilverIR filter, make it appear like a real infrared photograph.
Using Silver Oxide is easy: When you select any of the film-specific filters from Photoshop CS’ Filter > Silver Oxide menu, a control panel will appear. Every Enhanced Silver Oxide plug-in includes three color filters built in, that have been used by black-and-white photographers “almost as long as there has been film.” To change the relationship of tonalities in the image, you can apply the digital equivalent of a Red (25A), Yellow (8) Green (11) or even no filter. Silver Oxide modeled each of those filters and does the filtering before applying the film model, so the final result would appear just as if you had made the photograph with the filter attached to the front of the lens. Cool huh? Silver Oxide’s Photoshop-compatible plug-ins are available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS 9 or OS X.
Another way to give a black-and-white film look to digital images is with one of The Imaging Factory’s Convert To B&W plug-ins. The basic plug-in Convert to B&W plug-in costs $39.95, but does not give you an easy way to emulate a specific black-and -white film, although the more technically inclined could easily use its Audio Mixer interface to tweak the tonality to reproduce a specific monochrome film. Oh yeah, Convert To B&W lets you tone the image, too.
Don’t pay attention to Paul Simon. Everything looks great in black-and-white, and monochrome imaging isn’t going away anytime soon, no matter what kind of cameras you prefer to use.
Digital photographers have lots of software and techniques that can be used to turn color digital images into monochrome and everybody has their favorites, but there are not many ways to get a color image to look as if it was shot with a specific kind of black and white film. Here are some of the best power tools around these days:
The technically oriented will love Silver Oxide’s Photoshop-compatible plug-ins. These plug-ins emulate specific black-and-white films including Agfa’s APX 25, 100; Kodak’s Tri-X, TMAX, TMY, Plus X, Pan X, T400CN, Verichrome; and Ilford’s HP5, FP4, Pan F, Delta 100, Delta 400, and XP2. Recently they’ve added some new Kodak emulsions including TMZ, Tech Pan, and Portra 400. Silver Oxide’s Bill Dusterwald told me “Tech Pan is the most unusual film that I’ve profiled. It has half the green response of any film, and a very strong red response. This makes the tonality very different from all the others.” Want an infrared look? Use their SilverIR Filter. All you have to do is take a color image, scanned or from a digital camera and, using the SilverIR filter, make it appear like a real infrared photograph.
The Imaging Factory’s Convert To B&W Pro plug-in has a four-stage control interface ,including the mixer carried over from the standard plug-in. It also features a pop-up menu that lets you emulate Agfa Pan AFX, Ilford Delta (one of my favorites), Ilford FP4, Kodak T-Max, and Kodak Tri-X. The first level lets you apply a color filter to the image but unlike Silver Oxide filters, this one is continuously variable. The next two levels mimic the printing phase of a traditional darkroom and include sliders for exposure, negative exposure, and variable contrast paper grade. The last level lets you apply continuously variable toning effects. I like to add just a little brown toning to approximate the look of Agfa’s Portriga darkroom paper.
A piece of the Action
So you say that you’re not a photo geek and are just looking for a simple, inexpensive way to create black-and-white images from a color file? If you don’t want to emulate a specific film type, try Luis Gomez’s Photo Sharp Black-and-White Action. What’s an Action, you ask? Photoshop’s Actions palette lets you record a sequence of editing steps as an “Action” that can then be applied to another selection in the same image file, another image file, or even hundreds of different files. You can play an Action with steps disabled or display selected dialog boxes during playback to interactively adjust settings. Action sequences can even be saved and shared with others. I found Photo Sharp Black-and-White at share.studio.adobe.com. While registration is required it is free, as are many of the thousands of actions you can download.
I started with a photograph of my next-door neighbor, Jennifer. (No, she’s not a professional model, but the mother of two charming little boys.) For this portrait, I used a Photogenic Studio Max II monolight, with the umbrella mounted backwards and fired through it to make the light somewhat directional, but not too directional. Ambient light was very low and I shot at one-quarter power with a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second at f/7.1. (Canon EOS 10D, ISO 200 and Canon 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 USM lens set at 105mm.)
With one click of a button on Photoshop CS’ Action palette, Luis Gomez’s Photo Sharp Black and White Action converted the color portrait into crisp black-and-white. It was too crisp for me, so I softened the image with nik Multimedia’s (www.nikmultimedia.com) Classical blur filter that is part of their Color Efex package of plug-ins. 
All photographs ©2003 Joe Farace
Joe Farace is Colorado-based photographer/writer who has written or edited 24 books and 1,300 magazine stories. Visit his websites at www.joefarace.com and www.joefaraceshootscars.com.
