Fred Miranda’s BW Workflow Pro
I sprung for Fred Miranda’s BW Workflow Pro plugin today. It takes a color image and lets you choose from some preset filter types (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, etc.), as well as apply toning, film grain, and so on.
I’ve been playing with it on numerous images in my portfolio this evening, and I can attest to two things: 1) it only works well on photographs that would work as black & white in the first place, and 2) on those it works beautifully. I hesitate to qualify the following example of it at work (I liked it a great deal when I first finished it, and I doubt it more as the seconds tick by), but have a look:
Here we see Joe pretending he knows how to sail a boat (he’s actually pretty good at it), a sharpened version of the original, in color (the source) and in black & white toned with a bit of aqua (the plugin output). I used a red filter (note the darkened sky) and increased the dynamic range, which brought out the detail in the ripples on the lake and the clouds.
It’s available for both PC and Mac, and after a day of use I’d say it’s definitely worth the purchase price. It centralizes all of those little tweaks you’d have to make, and automates the processing steps necessary to simulate this kind of stuff. Too bad Fred doesn’t make a demo version…
Now if I can just resist his new Velvia Vision plugin and try to just shoot better source material to begin with - his before/after samples are eye-popping.
November 30th, 2004 at 10:36 am
Neatness on the filtration! The only problem is that the red filter removed the details from the right of Joe’s face and kind of bleached it out. It does a wonderful job of removing the haze in the sky, though. How does it differ from just tweaking in PS?
November 30th, 2004 at 11:06 am
I noticed the same loss of detail as Vince. Fortunately, there’s a pretty easy way to get it back. Before running the filter, duplicate the image layer. After converting the original layer to b&w, move the duplicate layer above it, change it’s mode to luminosity, and add a layer mask to hide it. Then, using the airbrush tool, reveal the parts of the layer that correspond to the blown-out areas. Here’s the version I came up with using the same settings as Adam and the above tweaks: http://photos.chaptastic.net/misc/1151597c.jpg
The plugin really doesn’t differ from anything you could achieve using the built-in tools in Photoshop. What it does is make the task much easier. The settings are a lot more intuitive: it’s much faster and easier to tell the plugin to use a red filter and a cool gray tritone than it is to do all the necessary steps manually.
November 30th, 2004 at 12:39 pm
Very nice, very nice! The revised version has perfect balance and tones, not to mention some sweet composition. Are you shooting all of these in RAW?