Black and White

Easily create monochrome and split-tone images

With Photo Ninja's black and white filter, you can easily create pleasing monochrome images, and you have flexible control over the tonal interpretation of an image. A set of base conversions mimics the use of color filters in traditional black-and-white film photography. A hue-specific control supports fine tuning by varying the relative lightness of particular color ranges. For instance, you can target blues to darken the sky, or red-orange hues to lighten skin tones.

A split-tone colorization feature can map shadows to one color and highlights to another, with blended colors for intermediate tones. Subtle split toning can be effective for warming or cooling an image or improving separation of elements. Photo Ninja provides control over the midpoint of the blend and the rate of transition from one color to another, enabling a wide range of toning effects.

Example 1

Blue umbrellas rendered using different tonal interpretations. Left: Red filter (which darkens blues). Middle: Standard RGB luminance conversion. Right: Blue filter.

Example 2

Left: Straight black-and-white rendering. Right: Split-tone rendering, with red shadows and cyan highlights. Note how this warms the rocks and whitens the water.

Example 3

Boosting local contrast results in a more dramatic sky and stronger detail.

Example 4

In the image on the right, local contrast is reduced to increase separation of the island and simplify the background.