Simply B&W Review

Back to the basics of black and white photography.

by Pu on July 16, 2011

Simply B&W does exactly what its name states: it turns photos into black and white. Given the overabundance of black and white converters in the App Store, Simply B&W can easily go unnoticed. As a matter of fact, although I am mostly devoted to black and white photography, I had overlooked this app myself. However, as far as the value of Simply B&W is concerned, I am quite sure iPhone black and white hardcore enthusiasts will enjoy this app quite a bit.

Main Features

  • Full resolution available;
  • Black or white border on/off;
  • Color filters;
  • Adjust brightness and contrast;
  • Send via email.

Appotography Opinion

Simply B&W is very essential in its features and straightforward in its workflow. You load your a photo from your iPhone and the photo is instantly converted into average black and white. All you have to do to is setting brightness and contrast values and applying colored filters to your photo, in order to make the important elements stand out.

Simply B&W iPhoneColored filters are what mostly affect the look of your black and white photo, since the way the final image will look like depends primarily on color channel settings. By applying a color filter, you pass the color which the filter is named after and block all the others. Filters available in Simply B&W are red, green, blue, yellow and orange, which is, basically, all you need in photography to produce good looking black and white.

Other than that, from the main page, you can go to the app’s settings and enable or disable the border feature (enables/disables a plain black or white border, not adjustable).

Simply B&W iPhone

Black border with no filter (left), blue filter + high contrast (right)

What I like about Simply B&W is its minimal approach. You spend a few seconds adjusting just the crucial settings and forget about all the rest. Simply B&W produces high quality, classy black and white. Caring more about editing than about actually taking photos can be detrimental. More than anything else, Simply B&W is a reminder that a good photo is the starting point to any decent looking post-processing.

The developer of Simply B&W kindly provided a promo code for reviewing purposes.

Overall

Name: Simply B&W
Developer: Mr. B. Ware
Compatibility: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad. iOS 4.0 or later.
Price: £0.59||$0.99||€0.79
Vote: 4/5

Simply B&W - Mr. B. Ware

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