Editor’s Note: This week, we’re focussing on onOne Software’s Perfect Photo Suite. We’ve asked several Photofocus writers to each make a tutorial. We’ll also have a free preset pack at the end of the week for you.
Black and white photographs let me express my vision. I often prefer then to color (here are three articles about making great black and whites both in camera and in post), and I make them in my camera as well as on the computer–heck, I even shoot black and white film. I often set my camera to monochrome and shoot RAW+JPEG, but any of my images which I feel are good, I always end up finishing manually. Lightroom does a fair job, but I’ve always gone to Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 for my best works. Now, with the new Perfect Photo Suite 9, I’ve got a tool that’s helping to liberate my vision in a few new ways and make my overall workflow faster. In this post, I’ll show you how I approach that workflow and how Perfect Photo Suite 9’s Black and White fits in.
onOne is Fast
The first thing I love about onOne’s Perfect Photo Suite 9 (PPS9) is that it handles lots of images quickly without crashing. I should clarify–I have the whole suite, but you can buy the Perfect Black and White 9 on it’s own, and it’s quite affordable at just $59.95. Anyway, with Nik Silver Efex, I’m lucky to open three images at once and not have it crash several times. With PPS9, I’ve opened 25 images all at once and it’s handled them all like a champ. This makes me faster overall, especially since those 25 were put through at least two different modules each within the suite.
Professional Black and White Tools
There are certain tools I always look for when making black and whites, whether in the camera or on the computer, and the first one I require is colored filters. I usually have a yellow, orange, or red filter activated in the camera when I shoot because it really sets my monochrome images apart. Plain old monochrome/black and white settings are pretty bland. Colored filters affect the tones of gray that replace the colors of the world. Using a red filter makes reds a brighter tone, and it makes blues a darker tone, making instant contrast that really looks great. I use red for street photography, orange for portraits, and sometimes green for landscapes. (I would like to see a preset for a blue filter in future versions)
The vignette tools are also terrific. I used the soft setting here for a gently blended bit of darkening at the edges. The toning settings are my favorite, though. They’ve got excellent presets, and I think Black Tea 1 is my new favorite for a touch of warmth. I’m also using a touch of glow, which isn’t possible to apply in Lightroom, nor in Silver Efex. Click here to download my Landscape preset for Perfect Black and White, free of charge. And here’s a link to instructions for installing the presets from this article.


Colorless is Not Lifeless
Here again is that landscape preset. I enjoy the glow settings because they soften the features without reducing sharpness. Oh, the preset also includes a little added grain. Remember, a preset is just a launching point; you’re supposed to make adjustments to the sliders to custom fit your photograph.


For Portraits


For this image, however, I used the infrared color filter, and reset the reds to zero. You can manually adjust the sliders for th
I finished this one with a gentle vignette and another of the excellent border options.


This photograph is a portrait, but it’s also a landscape. I used my Landscape preset and darkened the aqua slider a little to enrich Abbie’s


The Real Advantage to onOne
So far, PPS9’s only real advantage over my Lightroom/Nik workflow for black and white is that it handles lots of files at once better than
For this portrait of the
This is the black and white photograph I settled on (I think the whole thing came together well–especially the smooth gunmetal look of the car!)


After I applied the black and white settings, I was brought back to the layers module with the original color image layer underneath the black and white layer. I then remembered a technique I learned from Vincent Versace about blending a black and white layer into a color layer using various layer blending modes and varied layer opacity, so I fooled around with those and settled on a slightly saturated version of my original color (and I gotta add that it is so cool to see a live preview on my image of what all the layer blending modes will look like). Then, I clicked the Effects module and found a terrific wet plate imitation to use as a border, and then it brought me back to the Layers again where I could launch more possibilities! I find this flexile workflow very satisfying and empowering.


Conclusion
I’ve been getting along well enough with my Lightroom and Nik Silver Efex workflow for years, but now I’m happy to mix it up. onOne’s new Perfect Black and White 9 and the whole Perfect Photo Suite give me the professional tools I need to make my style of black and whites. On top of this, though, they’ve given me an excellent layered workflow with a whole quiver full of new effects and tools, plus the stability to handle many photographs all at once. These things alone make it more than worth the $150 for the whole suite. But this article didn’t even touch on the excellent selection tools I wrote about the other day. Combining the selection tools with Perfect Black and White has made my Steve Jobs Portrait Project so much faster to finish and it’s honestly renewed my vigor for the project since I now have less work to do to make each portrait perfect. It’s a great tool for me, so I suggest you download the free 30 day trial and give it a shot. I think you won’t be disappointed (although, if you buy it an you are disappointed, they’ll give you your money back!)