12 Black and White Photo Editors to Apply Stunning B/W Effects
Last Updated on April 2, 2023 by Peter Wood
Black and white photography is a timeless trend. There are dozens of B/W images on social media websites and fashion magazines. It is an artistic conception of photo creativity. The strong contrast between light and shadow makes the work of art. What are the best black and white photo editors to apply stunning and special B/W effects?
In the days of film photography, you shot on black and white film, which has built-in image noises and grain. Of course, you can also convert color images to black-and-white ones with black-and-white photo editors. Most photo editor only provides a simple B/W effect. When you need to find the desired and classic effects, here are the 12 best programs to turn your color photos into black-and-white effects on different platforms.
Part 1: Best Black and White Photo Editor with Stunning B/W Effects
WidsMob AI Retoucher is a versatile black-and-white photo editor with a whole series of black-and-white film photography, old photos, textures, pencil sketches, and more. Besides it provides a series of color adjustments, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, saturation, vibrance, tint, and temperature. Moreover, there are some artistic photo effects with AI noise reduction, AI haze removal, AI cartoon, AI style transfer, AI faces mosaic, and more.
- Provide classic black and white film of Kodak BW 400CN, Fuji Neopan, Ilford Pan, and more.
- Tweak red, green, blue, opacity, vignetting, shadows, and others to make special B/W photos.
- Convert photos to black and white cartoons, pencil sketches, paintings, textures, and others.
- Touch up portrait with skin softening, skin whitening, shine removal, eye circle removal, etc.
Step 1: Download and install WidsMob AI Retoucher, you can launch the program and click the Import button to add the desired photos you want to edit. Moreover, you can also drag-n-drop multiple photos for a batch process. It supports most RAW files, WebP, AVIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and more file formats.
Step 2: Choose the desired photo and click the Edit button in the upper right corner to go to the editing window. Go to the Filters button to select the desired B/W analog films from the Black and White Film section. It provides Kodak BW 400CN, Fuji Neopan Acros 100, Ilford HP5 Plus 400, and other analog films.
Step 3: To adjust the parameters for the black and white photos, you can simply choose the Adjust menu. The black-and-white photo editor enables you to adjust tint, exposure, contrast, highlights, saturation, and more. Of course, you can also adjust the color parameters to apply tone color images.
Step 4: Besides the above features, you can also choose the other effects before converting the photo into a black and white one, including AI Retouch, AI Face Clean, AI Face Mosaic, AI Style Transfer, AI Cartoonization, and more. After that, you can click the Save As button to save the output file on your computer.
Part 2: How to Apply Black and White Photo Effect with Photoshop
Photoshop is one of the most popular black-and-white photo editors to turn color images into B/W ones. Different from the other editors, it enables you to make monochrome images from scratches. Moreover, there are both destructive (not adjustable afterward) and non-destructive (adjustable afterward) black-and-white conversions in Photoshop. Here let’s take non-destructive black-and-white conversion for example.
Step 1: Once you launch Photoshop on your computer, you can add the desired color image into the program. Copy the background layer and go to the Layers Panel option. Choose the New Adjustment Layer icon, where you can find the Black & White option to turn color images into black and white ones.
Step 2: Then Photoshop will de-saturate the image. If you need to further edit the black and white image, you can click the Properties panel, in which you can tweak the sliders for Reds, Yellows, Greens, Cyans, Blues, and Magentas to get the desired effect. Preview the effect before saving them to your computer.
Step 3: Select the desired tool from the Filter menu, in which you can add noise, grain, and others to make a vintage effect. It is complicated if you need to get the desired one with the settings. When you get everything done, you can click the File menu and save the desired photo with the optimal quality to your computer.
Part 3: 5 Black and White Photo Editors on Android/iOS
If you take some photos with an Android phone or iPhone, you can also use some black and white photo editor apps to convert color images into B/W ones with ease. Here are 5 recommended programs you can take into consideration.
Top 1. Provoke Camera
Provoke Camera is more than a black and white camera, it is also a black and white photo editor. In another word, you can take photos directly or import the photos from your albums to convert color images to black and white ones. It was inspired by Japanese photographers of the late 1960s like Daido Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira, and so on. This black and white photo editor is pure, simple, and easy to use. It just offers one function producing black and white photos with a gritty, grainy, blurry look. Moreover, this editor for the black and white photo has two formats of the images, square format 126 and 35mm format 135. Certainly, it has many kinds of effects on editing black and white photos with stunning effects. So if you’re into black & white images this is banging.
Top 2. Lenka
Lenka is a black and white photo editor app designed by world-renowned photographer Kevin Abosch in France. It offers a real-time live preview to ensure that you can see exactly how your photo will look before pressing the shutter button. Moreover, it gives you the choice of automatic focus or manual focus and makes you adjust the exposure, contrast, and color temperature with sliders. The black & white photo editor allows you to edit photos and to share via email or messenger and to Facebook and Twitter. There is one thing you should know is that Lenka doesn’t allow for flash photography or the use of your front facing. While this editor is not like those apps offering too many technical controls, it gives you the excellent tool maximizing the black and white tonal range. What you can do is create your own pictures by adjusting exposure.
Top 3. Hueless
As another black and white photo editor for iPhone, Hueless is a wonderful app for those who focus on black and white photography. Although it only allows you to take black and white photos, the program offers a wider range of settings making it more outstanding among those apps. It is worth mentioning that the editor allows you to select from various colored “filters” like red, yellow, orange, etc. It makes an effect to influence the tonal contrast of the resulting black and white image by using actual colored glass filters. For instance, the right filter can help you to eliminate the red elements on your photo to appear as bright white in the resulting black and white photo. What’s more, it offers other features like custom presets, control focus & exposure together, geo-tag your photos, live exposure control slider, live contrast adjustment slider with contrast (black/white) balance, etc.
Top 4. Snapseed
Snapseed is a complete and professional black and white photo editor for iPhone and Android. It has 26 tools and filters, including healing, brush, structure, HDR, transform, and so on. Besides, if you want to re-adjust the photo, you can use the “stack”. Tune the images by adjusting the exposure and color automatically or manually with fine, precise control. The tool of rotate can help you rotation by 90 degrees, or straighten a skewed horizon. Moreover, white balance, makes the picture more natural. The black and white photo editor offers a brush to selectively retouch exposure, saturation, brightness, or warmth. Especially, Lens Blur-a tool makes your background soften, Glamour Glow adds a fine glow to images. Furthermore, Tonal Contrast lets you add details selectively in the shadows, mid-tones, and highlights. Moreover, it has different styles, forms and patterns with going retro with light leaks, scratches, film styles, and other kinds of styles to make infinite possibilities.
Top 5. Monokrom
Monokrom is a normal black and white photo editor but offers a unique approach to post-processing photos instead of standard editing ways. It uses a set of circles to which it can slide on the screen to adjust the exposure in such an interesting way. Therefore, it spends a little time to get familiar with it. Moreover, it does not like other apps, which can predictable and precise. On the contrary, it offers an interesting element of predictable randomness bringing a truly unique editing experience for you. Therefore, you can watch a demonstration video to see how the app works here. Especially, when you are at a low battery, this black and white photo editor will automatically turn on monochrome (or black & white) mode, which means your device can last longer. It also uses the color filter method for the conversion rather than straight desaturation.
Part 4: 5 Black and White Photo Editors Online
When you only need some basic black and white photo filters, you can take advantage of some online tools. But you might find limited B/W filters for JPEG files only for the online editors. Just get the desired one as below now.
Top 1. Lunapic.com
Lunapic is a free online photo editor, which provides various editing tools like cropping, adding text, and more than 200 effects and filters to help you easily edit your images according to your need. It has the basic filter to turn a color image into a black and white one. But it is difficult to combine all the features to get the desired one with ease.
Top 2. Pho.to
Pho.to is an instant online photo-editing tool that can let you fix and enhance your digital pictures in a smooth and effective way. It does not only offer black and white photo filters but also awesome photo filters and effects like sepia, vignetting, and pixilation to make cool filters and effects to your photos. Moreover, you can also add stickers, frames, texts, and more other elements to the photographs online.
Top 3. Fotor.com
Fotor offers color splash features to allow you to apply color to grayscale and black and white photos online. Once you get a black and white photo, you can take advantage of the color splash effect feature, which allows you to highlight and focus on the most important part of an image by allowing deep, rich color saturation. Just as the other online black and white photo editors, you can get limited effects for the B/W filters.
Top 4. Convertimage.net
Convertimage is a free online image converter and online editing tool to change and enhance your photos on the Internet. With this online tool, you can place your photo in Black & White in a few seconds without downloading a program. The black and white photo editor provides the basic B/W effects that you can process the color image within seconds.
Top 5. Canva.com
Canva has photo effects feature to add stellar photo effects to make your photos magnificent. With the “Street” filter, it can give your pictures the weight of black and white with a dash of worn color and heavy vignette. Of course, there are more other B/W filters and themes within the black and white photo editor. When you need to get a special design for your poster or card, it should be a nice choice.
How to Apply B/W Photo Effect Online
How to apply the desired B/W photo effect online? When you get a desired one from the above websites, you can load the images to get the effect. Let’s take Lunapic.com for example to make black and white photo editing online.
Step 1. Enter lunapic.com on the browser and find the Black and White under Filters.
Step 2. Click the Choose File button to choose the photo from your computer or directly enter your online photo URL on the Open URL form to apply the black and white color.
Step 3. After applying, you can click the Save option to directly download the black and white photo or share it on Facebook, Pinterest, and more with your family and friends.
Conclusion
When you want to apply a desired B/W photo effect, it should be hard to find a black-and-white photo editor. The article provides 12 programs with different effects, which you can choose according to your requirement. WidsMob Retoucher provides 12 analog film filters with thousands of B/W filters, so you can always get a satisfactory image.