Create Atmospheric Black & White Photos with Noir Photo

Noir Photo is a new easy to use universal app from Red Giant Software, the same people behind Plastic Bullet Camera and Movie Looks, which attempts to create atmospheric looking Black & White photos in the film noir genre.

The App

Launch the app and you are presented with a fairly simple and straight forward interface, although the load photo and save icons are not obvious at first, but these can be found in the bottom right of the screen on your iPhone.

Having loaded a photo from the camera roll [there is no camera interface option with this app], you have 6 preset options to select and tweak. Each preset has its own colour tint, however you can alter this tint by selecting one of the 4 tint options [sepia, B&W, blue or green] to give you more flexibility and control. Selecting any of the presets will apply that presets default tint and vignette shape. The vignette can be resized and repositioned by using the iPhones touch and pinch gestures. Having adjusted and positioned the vignette, you can then adjust the inner and outer brightness and darkness of the vignette, and this is done by adjusting the first 2 dials found on the left, with the 3rd allowing you to increase/decrease the contrast.

Having pinched, touched, tinted and tweaked, all that remains is to save your full-res photo to the photo album, and load a new photo.

So what do I think of Noir Photo?

Although this is a universal app, the £1.79/$2.99/€2.39 price tag is a little steep for me, and I'd like to see the price drop to the next level. That said, overall this is a nice app, that with the right subject matter can turn in some really good film noir looks. There are however some things I'd like to see included/changed in the next release of this app.

1. There is no crop tool, so cropping has to be done outside of Noir Photo, so a cropping tool would be nice.
2. I'd like to see a focus control dial that could apply a soft focus/tilt shift effect.
3. To add the above extra focus dial, the current dials could be centered at zero, with the dials showing +/- to adjust the inner and outer effects. By adding this, the soft focus/tilt shift effect could be added without overcrowding the screen.
4. The open/save icons need to be improved.

Final thoughts

This is a funny app, as I find myself neither giving it a thumbs up nor a thumbs down. The price is slightly off putting, although with the right photo, the effects can be very good, with nice rich blacks. The interface is OK, although the open/save icons need to be made clearer, but at least photos are saved at full resolution.

If you are in to Black and White photography, then you will probably love this app, but if you can take or leave Black and White, then this app is probably not for you.

If you already have this app, then what do you think of it?

App Store Link: Noir Photo; Price: £1.79/$2.99/€2.39

Comments

[James Havelock]

I really like this app but then again, I like hard, contrasty B & W. If you don't, there are plenty of 59p, $0.99, apps that do B & W just as well.

[Nuno Mendonca]

Hi James,

What other apps would you recommend for that type of high contrasted B&W look? Or are there any B&W apps in general that you would recommend highly?

Thanks!

[Butow Maler]

Nuno, have a look at Monochromia. It does a good job and gots slider controls for contrast, brightness and "film grain". You can also control the vignette width and darkness.

[Nuno Mendonca]

Thanks Butow! I´ll check it out, for sure. :)

[James Havelock]

Hi Nuno

Vint B&W does a good job automated job but can't be used with existing images. Spica - Super Monochrome is another good automated app but can be a bit over the top. Before Noir Photo I was using Monophix or Monochomia B&W. These both work well but are the same price as Noir Photo though they are arguably more flexible. One of my favourite apps is Film Lab which has a large number of preset filters including B&W many claiming to emulate specific film characteristics. Hope that helps.

[Nuno Mendonca]

Thank you James, it sure does! I actually have Film Lab but only got it recently, so I didn´t really have a chance to explore it well, that gives me further incentive to do so! Thanks again!

[Avril Ce]

If you have Dynamic Light, it has a BW mode called infrared and with the strength dial all up and the color ball you can tweak it to some interesting BW effects. There is also normal BW effect, but I like the infrared better.