MPro is another camera app focused on delivering black and white images. In the past getting black and white photographs as you wanted them right off the bat with the iPhone was so much more complicated and sometimes even tedious, as you had to switch multiple times among apps just to make slight adjustments. Honestly, monochrome cameras for the iPhone have gotten so much better over time and choice is so much richer than it used to be.
Main Features
- Full resolution available;
- 7 filters;
- 5 aspect ratios;
- 2 grid types;
- 2 shutter modes;
- Focus and exposure controls;
- Focus and exposure lock;
- Adjust contrast;
- Level meter;
- File format selection (JPG and TIFF);
- Self-timer.
Hueless
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.
The most notable feature added in version 1.1 is the fullscreen editing. By tapping on the uppermost right corner of the tool panel (on the dotted corner), it’s now possible to enlarge the work area. This is especially useful when better control on finer detail is required, as it allows more accurate placement of the ellipse affecting the vignette’s adjustment.
Other enhancements in Noir Photo 1.1 include: higher editing resolution and preservation of photo metadata, so that original information is not lost upon saving.
Colored 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.
Monochromia 1.5 finally offers a color channel feature, for greater flexibility and better conversion from color to black and white. The possibility to apply filters for individual color channels makes a huge difference. From Monochromia’s developing area, you can now access the color channel settings. Other than red, green, blue, yellow, and orange filters, it’s possible to select normal grayscale and maximum channels.
