New iPhone App: Dramatic Black & White

App Store Description: In the early days of photography, photographers had no choice but to shoot in black and white. On invention of color, black and white photography didn’t die off--instead it flourished. Modern black and white photography at it’s best is art, and many photographers regard it as the purest form of photography.

With it’s dramatic contrast and light, which is the building block of a great photo, Dramatic Black & White doesn’t just display something, it tells a story one that is both emotional and beautiful. Dramatic Black and White draws attention to the composition with it’s contrast and light, and then adds texture, shape and form to turn your photo into an extraordinary work of art.

App Store Link: Dramatic Black & White; Sale Price: £0.69/$0.99/€0.79

Editors Comments: Dramatic Black & White is an interesting app that I would describe as being like Noir Photo on steroids. The UI is easy to use, offering a wide range of pre-defined looks/styles, which include standard B&W, Infrared Photo and Dramatic B&W.

Having loaded a photo, selected your style, you will then find you can fully customise and adjust the pre-defined mono effects, by adjusting the hotspots, contrast, tone, sharpness, filters and the ability to add variable amounts and different styles of film grain, via Adjust menu, before saving at up to full-res.

So what do I think of Dramatic Black & White?

Overall this is a nice app that offers a lot for its money, and as a first release, comes straight in to the B&W photo app category as a major contender/player.

There is however one major problem with this app, and that is, it takes well over 1 minute, yes 1 minute, to render and save a full-res image on an iPhone 4!!

That said, if you are a big fan of B&W photography, and at its current price, then I think this app is worth checking out, as I am sure the dev will address the save/render time issues in due course.

Comments

[Mr Tmney]

I agree 100% with Glyn, Dramatic B&W is fantastic! and truly is Noir Photo on steroids combined with Simply B&W. Just like all the other amazing iPhone, iPad & Mac desktop apps by Jixipix. The quality of their filters, effects & versatility are some of the best. The only reacurring issues with all their apps is the lengthy precessing time when saving your photo. I hope that eventually gets fixed & or speedier, but not at the cost of a downgrade in quality results. Either way, you will be thoroughly satisfied with the final results.

Besides the processing speed, if I had a request for Dramatic B&W it would be for Michael to impliment some of the brilliant borders / frames & possibly some of their extensive texture collections within the app.

*Side note for Michael, Develop a seprate Jixipix Border & frames & Textures app with not filter effects. Thus the user can add what they want layered upon previously edited images.

I highly recommend this Dramatic Black & White app!

[Miege]

Jixipix rocks (to me) for its Simply HDR app. Never thought of Dramatic Black & White to be like Noir Photo when it first arrived on the App Store, though :-D

[Fredde Cooney Ahlstrom]

Have a look at Steetmate, a rather crude and basic B/W app but with the sharpening and contrast options produces great images. /Fredde

[Mr Tmney]

Streetmate is an awful app, poorly developed & a UI that's anything but user friendly. I deleted that app the day after it was released. In no way shape or form does Streetmate remotely compare to the Quality & simplicity of Dramatic B&W, Simply B&W, Spica, MonoPhix etc.... In my personal opinion.

[iNologist]

I'm downloading this now. It looks like it does what nik softwares silverlight does with lightroom. I've been wanting to find a cool b+w conversion app like this forever. Hope it's up to snuff! Don't mind the fact it takes an age to save. That just suggests to me they are using smart algorithms or that they are hopelessly inefficient.....hopefully the former

[dhst_nl]

This app really rocks!

For B&W I normally use Monophix, but this app has some nice features that Monophix doesn't. Like the spotlight (adjustable vignette, so the center of the vignette doesn't necasseraly has to be in the center of the picture and the vignette doesn't have to be round.

Right now, I use a combination of Monophix and this one.

The only things I'm missing in this app is landscape and the magenta, yellow and cyan filters. And the processing time takes a little bit too long. When these features are there, I don't need another B&W-app anymore...

Highly recommended!

[Mr Tmney]

Excellent update released today. App is 50% faster rendering speed for preview & saving photo . Plus value added to sliders when adjusting effects & a few other additions.