The good folks at Topaz Labs were kind enough to gift me a free license to their Black and White plugin, B&W Effects. The image above is my first attempt at using it, and I can report that it is a solid program. I need to spend some more time using it before I can present a full review. For now, I can report that it has all the black and white controls you would want and expect: color filters, localized control via brushes, curves, 2 detail sliders, plus a ton of presets. It dd take me a while to find everything because their arrangement is different from what I am used to, but as I worked through the edits to this photo I began to see the logic.

In fact I was so unfamiliar with the program that what I’m about to do is decidedly unfair to it. Yet I think it comes through pretty well. After I finished working on the above image, I decided to try to create basically the same look, first using my old favorite Silver Efex Pro from Nik/Google, and OnOne’s Perfect Black and White. I didn’t spend a lot of time making sure everything was as similar as possible. I just edited each version one right after the other using each tool in order. 

The bottom line from this extremely limited test is that I can report that the Topaz product is at least the match for its older competitors.  I will play with it some more and give another report once I have a better grasp on what it can do.

Finally – I am, at the time of this post – not in an affiliate relationship with any of these companies. Apart from the free review copy of the program Topaz gave me nothing for writing this post.  They do have an affiliate program and I might join in the future but I have not done so at this time. Cheers!