Black and white photography with Capture One is made easy with a variety of styles and sophisticated tools. Capture One, like Lightroom, gives you the option to work on one photo and then use those settings and save them as a User Style so that you can apply them to other photos. Just like Lightroom in Capture One you can also apply these User Styles on import.
If you look online, it won’t take you long to come across various websites selling or giving away free styles. Some of them mimicking traditional film types such as Tri-X or Ilford HP5.
The Capture One website also has a variety of styles for sale, and not just for black and white. You can see some of the Capture One styles here.
Capture One has an incredible black and white section, for really fine tuning your images when you convert them. You can even adjust individual colours once you convert your image to black and white. One of my favourite additions to my black and white images is to add some film grain. Capture One has a very nice “silver rich” grain which looks very similar to what you’d get from shooting on a high ISO film. Like all things in Capture One you can fine tune, with sliders, just how much of an impact the grain will make.
Once you have worked on one image, you can go to the Styles Panel in Capture One and save all the changes you’ve made to that image as a user style to add to other images in the future. Obviously one Style won’t be perfect for every image but it’s a great starting point for editing, that means you can still fine tune and adjust things like contrast and brightness after applying the style.
If you don’t yet have Capture One Pro, you can download a trial here. If you’ve decided Capture One is for you and you decide to purchase a copy use MUNRO10 on checkout for a complimentary 10% discount.
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