Dramatic Black & White

Wednesday Addams, the fictional character from the Addams Family, pointed out very clearly the importance of black: ‘I’ll stop wearing black when they make a darker color.’ If your photos do not have the necessary shades of black, Dramatic Black & White comes with several parameters for helping you apply black & white effects on the fly.

Although the tool provides support for various fine-tuning parameters, the GUI does not look crowded and confusing at all. You may drag and drop pictures directly in the main window.

The utility works only with PNG, JPG, and TIFF file format. Plus, you may zoom in or out of the image, fit the photo in the main panel, reveal its actual size, as well as hide the configuration settings from the main window so you can focus on the previewing mode.

Dramatic Black & White lets you choose between a multitude of preset black & white profiles. Plus, you are given the freedom to manually adjust the RGB values, black and white strength, tone, contrast, spotlight, grain strength, and sharpen parameters.

You can preview the adjustments in real time and save the current configuration settings as a preset profile for being used in future projects. You can also make the application apply a random style to your pictures by automatically adjusting the settings.

What’s more, you can crop photos by cutting off unwanted areas around the images, undo or redo your actions, as well as view the original photo for a quick comparison.

A smart function included in the package, so-called Spotlight, gives you the possibility to brighten only certain parts from an image, leaving the rest in a black shade. You may add multiple spotlights, drag and drop them to the desired image area, as well as resize them.

If you are a fan of black & white effects, Dramatic Black & White comes with an intuitive set of features for transforming your images by changing lighter tones and colors, and offers very good output results. It can be configured by rookies and professionals alike. On the downside, it does not offer support for batch actions so you cannot process multiple files at the same time.