BLACK — Black & White Film Emulator for iPhone

BLACK — which I recently discovered thanks to this post by Erin Brooks — is a fun iPhone app for editing photos in black & white. In fact, what they’ve done is analyzed and tried to reproduce a variety of specific films, such as Kodak’s Tri-X 400, the lomo-style Lady Grey 400, Fuji’s Neopan 400, GP3 100 Shanghai, and more.

After playing with the app a while, I found myself completely agreeing with what Erin says here:

BLACK just does something extra-special when converting iPhone photos to black and white, and it does it so much better than the other apps I’ve used. It truly looks so much like film: it’s dynamic and gorgeous. I feel kind of like I’m cheating, because I just use one of their 10 black and white film presets (my favorite is the GP3 100 Shanghai, followed closely by the NEOPAN 400 Fuji–I like high contrast), maybe slightly adjust the curves, and that’s it. It’s so easy.

Speaking as a die-hard VSCO Cam user, I found BLACK fun and easy to use, and will keep it in my iPhone’s ‘Photo’ folder for the foreseeable future.

Note: The app is listed as “free” in the App Store, and you can certainly apply the presets and save photos for free, but the ability to tweak aspects such as Fade, Vignette, and Curves must be unlocked in-app for $1 (previously $2). Just consider the app a dollar up-front rather than free and you won’t feel unduly surprised.

Also, some App Store reviewers have complained about the app not saving full-resolution photos, but I’ve analyzed photos saved from BLACK on my iPhone 5s (using EXIF Wizard Pro) and have had no such issues, before or after unlocking the manual adjustments. Here are two such un-resized photos:

Lady Grey 400 film, +5 fade

Lady Grey 400 film, +5 fade

GP3 100 film with tweaked curves

GP3 100 film with tweaked curves