Software How To

The image color of even a conventional black and white silver print is rarely black, white and grayscale shades. It may be warm (golden) or cold (blue) neutral or toned (sepia, magenta). Over many years print makers and chemists developed paper and developer combinations, as well as after-printing toners, to add additional color to monochrome silver prints. For example, using a warm-tone paper such as Agfa Portriga and a warm-tone enhancing developer, such as Selectol Soft, could alter image color. This yielded brownish blacks and creamy whites. A cold-tone paper could be developed in Dektol and after fixing toned in a mild dilution of rapid selenium toner for added “snap”, resulting in a “harder” bright white/deep black effect.

It all began back in 1990 with a shareware program called Paint Shop. Debuting the same year as Adobe PhotoShop 1.0, comparison to that legendary product has been inescapable. Paint Shop, known as PaintShop Pro X6 Ultimate in its current incarnation, has always been associated with three characteristics: extreme affordability, sufficient power for most photo enthusiasts, and Windows-only compatibility. PaintShop Pro has continued to evolve and improve, and today offers many significant enhancements, including the ability to run smoothly on Macs using a Windows emulation program.

There are many ways to share images these days, from social networks to clouds to full-fledged e-commerce platforms. For some, simple online albuming will do, but for others it can become an involving project that puts your images on the Internet in a very engaging way. It’s not only in the personalization of the look and feel of the wrapper around your image content that can separate your site from the crowd. It’s also the ability to work cross-platform, include an e-commerce component, and allow for a “translator” that can make your site accessible to folks and even clients around the world that can add to its attractiveness and functionality.

One such path is onOne Software’s Perfect B&W, nestled within their Perfect Photo Suite or available as a stand-alone or plug-in for Photoshop, Lightroom, and Aperture. The advantage of using it within the Suite is that you also get access to the other excellent modules within that program. The advantage of the stand-alone is that you get an amazing array of controls for a rather incredible price. The Suite, by the way, offers onOne’s Layers, Mask, Effects, Focus, and Resize programs, all highly regarded, making the options virtually endless. For this review I accessed Perfect B&W from within the Suite.

There’s a considerable difference between resizing, which means maintaining the same pixel dimensions and adapting to different document sizes at the same print resolution, and resampling, which means building additional pixels from the original file to enable printing larger documents at the same resolution. Say you have a 24MB file, obtained from an 8 megapixel digicam, that will normally fill an 8.5x11” print at 300 dpi when printing. But you just got a 13x19” printer and want to try your luck at that size, still at 300dpi. Well, for that you would need a 62MB file.

I always enjoy trying out the best new high-end products. It’s fun, but more important it tells me how good the best performance can be. But when reviewing color management tools I realize that photographers are not color scientists or computer programming experts, so I thought I’d start this review with a bit of a tech briefing on why they are important to all photographers who want to get the most from their work.

The job of auto-retouching software is to retouch faces quickly, easily, and with as little human intervention as possible. Most require you to either set or confirm where the major points of the face are, like the eyes, ears, and lips. After you’ve identified those areas, the software then goes about its business of transforming little Pamela into little Princess.