Black and White: Working with Styles and Presets

In order to achieve a specific look when doing Black and White work, you often need to combine a number of tools even though your original image is well exposed. Capture One Pro 6 comes with a number of specific Black and White Styles that can inspire you to create different Black and White looks. You can use the Black and White Tool Tab to get a nice overview of the Styles as well as the other relevant tools for creating beautiful Black and White images.

Capture One Pro 6 also includes a number of Black and White Presets showcasing how you can create very specific looks by using different combinations of the tool. These include Presets that utilize the Color Sensitivity sliders and Presets that include Split Toning. When preset stacking is allowed, you can combine Presets for Split Toning with Presets for Color Balance.

Use the built in Styles and Presets to be inspired; optimize them according to your personal taste and save them for future use.

Styles for Black and White:

The Styles and Presets can be found in the Black and White Tool Tab. This gives you easy access to both the built in Styles and to your own Styles via the User Styles.

In the example above, the Style “B&W – Old Look 1” has been used. This style uses the Black and White Tool to convert the color image to a black and white image and to add the brown/yellowish toning. Besides changing the color, this Style also increases the Contrast, adds a strong Vignetting and adds some negative Clarity. Also note that if you select multiple images, you can apply the Style to all the selected images at once.

3 different built in Black and White Styles. From left to right: B&W-Old look 1, B&W-Old look 2 and B&W-landscape 1.

Presets for Black and White:

The Black and White Tool has 2 tabs, one dealing with the conversion of colors into grey tones, and one dealing with color toning of the converted black and white image.

In the Presets dropdown menu, you will find Presets for both color conversion and toning. You can set up the tool to allow stacking of presets which allows you to combine presets. For instance, you can select “Color – Landscape 1” for the color conversion and select ”Split Toning – Blue Brown 2” for the toning like in the picture below.

The same image with 3 different Black and White Presets applied. From left to right: “Split Toning – BlueBrown 2”, “Split Toning – BlueRed 2” and “Split Toning – YellowBlue 2”.

The Presets named “Toning” rather than “Split toning” refer to a number of Presets where the Hue for the shadow and highlight toning have the same values.

These images have the same Color Sensitivity conversion but different Black and White (Toning) Presets applied. The upper left image has no Toning applied.