More than one user requested, after the publication of our recent review of Dramatic Black & White, a comparison between JixiPix’s app and Red Giant’s Noir Photo. Dramatic Black & White and Noir Photo are essentially similar apps: both try to convey beautiful monochrome effects that are suggestive and extremely pleasing to the eye.
Note: we are only taking into account the iPhone version of Dramatic Black & White and Noir Photo.
UI
Both apps are well-designed and well-rounded products. Both feature similar ellipse tools for relighting by vignette placement on images. Personally, I am more inclined to like the sleek and focused interface of Noir Photo, with the numbered dial controls instead of the sliders. Even so, Dramatic Black & White’s interface works well and it’s very easy to get the hang of.
Processing Speed
Noir Photo does much better than Dramatic Black & White with processing times. With its simple and to-the-point three-dials system, Noir Photo is capable of delivering great effects in seconds. Rendering and saving also work amazingly smoothly. Red Giant’s expertise clearly gives them a huge advantage in this case. It’s nothing new, as JixiPix’s apps are renown for their sluggish processing times. Like other JixiPix’s apps, Dramatic Black & White is much slower than average apps when it comes to saving processed photos, in spite of all the recent enhancements.
Longevity
None among these two apps will make you regret your purchase and both allow the saving of custom presets for use at a later date. It must be said though that Dramatic Black & White, with its more thorough effects editor, does better than Noir Photo, as it allows more freedom in selecting different effects and has a wider selection of adjustments which counts, among other things, Infrared and HDR-like ready-to-use presets. Most importantly, JixiPix’s monochrome app comes with an RGB channel filter editor, which is a fundamental element for proper control over effective black and white conversion.
Quality
Again, Dramatic Black & White, especially thanks to a few additional tools like the RGB channel editor, has something more to offer. Still, both apps are capable of delivering fantastic black and white and monochrome effects. Thanks to the accessible controls, relighting photos with the help of the ellipse tool can be easily done in both apps. The two apps offer full resolution saving. After observation, I can say that in terms of mere quality, these two apps are equivalent.
Sharing
Noir Photo’s sharing options are basically non-existent. Dramatic Black & White is not the most sharing-friendly app out there, but it comes with at least the send to email and share to Facebook features, plus it supports AirPrint.
Price
With a price tag of $1.99, Dramatic Black & White is a little cheaper in the App Store and, overall, it comes with more features than its opponent. Which in very simple words means that you will get more for less money. Of course, money’s value depends a lot on your priorities. If you are looking for an app to do its work fast and you do not care for the extra features, then the $2.99 for Noir Photo are definitely well spent.
Conclusion
While Dramatic Black & White offers more in terms of variety and customization, Noir Photo is definitely the winner when it comes to quick processing. Anyhow, Noir Photo and Dramatic Black & White are top apps in their category, delivering great quality photographic monochrome effects for a reasonable price. Both apps offer their users long-lived effects — meaning you won’t get tired of the beautiful monochrome of these apps, even after applying the same effects many times — that are enough to justify the purchase.
JixiPix’s app offers tone adjustment — for the creation of sepia and other monochrome effects –, sharpness, contrast and brightness sliders. The app also comes with a handy spotlight editing tool. Moving and resizing the ellipse over the image, you can shrink, enlarge and find the right placement for your vignette, thus achieving more or less dramatic lighting. The RGB filter editor will help you in fine-tuning the black and white, blocking off specific color channels, in order to perfectly complement the original image. Dramatic Black & White will let you save your custom presets, so that you can use them more than once and you can also use the app’s randomizing button to generate unexpected effects.
Dramatic Black & White comes with a more than adequate collection of presets which can be fully customized for even more variety. The quality of the effects is excellent and the possibility to save custom presets, as in other apps by JixiPix, means greater flexibility than that offered by most iPhone apps devoted to monochrome. The only black and white app that I can think of that truly allows the same level of customization is Monochromia — which is, in fact, one of my personal favorites for black and white on iPhone. The only thing that could definitely be improved is the rendering times, which are, in spite of updates, still on the slow side.
