Black and White Photo

Drop your photos onto the page and they turn black and white right away. A curtain over each picture shows the before and after side by side.

Every pixel becomes a gray of the same brightness your eye sees: green foliage stays lighter than the blue sky, and red falls in between. Averaging the three colors into one would merge the sky and the foliage into the same flat gray. The same approach to shades of gray is used by our PDF to grayscale converter.

Without color, a black and white picture often looks flat, so add some contrast. The sliders work the same way as on the brightness and contrast pages.

Toning colors the gray with a warm brown or a cool bluish tint, like an old print. The midtones take the color most strongly, while pure black and pure white stay clean, and the brightness of each pixel does not change.

The "no halftones" mode keeps only pure black and pure white pixels, like a stamp, a stencil, or a scanned signature. A pixel lighter than the threshold turns white, a darker one turns black. The "Find threshold" button picks a threshold for each photo from its histogram, placing it between the dark and the light areas. If thin lines disappear from the result, move the threshold to the right.