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Flaming Pear offer a pack of free Photoshop plugins and here I share five of my favorite mono photo effects using those plugins.
Some of these mono photo effects use Photoshop plugins that specifically produce monotone results, while others convert color filters to mono to produce a different effect to the original result.
You can download these Photoshop plugins for free from the Flaming Pear website and you can use them in any image editor that is compatible with .8bf files.
For this piece, I've used GIMP, along with the PSPI plugin, to execute the filters.
Antique Photo Using Zombie
There are lots of different ways to create old and aged sepia toned images and which one you use will be a matter of personal taste.
This example had the Zombie filter from Flaming Pear applied to it to convert it into a rough and blurry black and white image. The sepia tone was selected using the Change Foreground Color dialog and a new layer was added to the document and filled with the sepia color.
The Layer mode was changed to Color so that the photo below became visible with a sepia tone. Finally another layer was added on top and an indistinct border was applied to it. The Rectangle tool was used to draw a selection with rounded corners and feathered edges over the image which was then inverted and filled with white.
Demitone Effect from Flaming Pear Freebies
The Demitone filter applies a small dot effect to a photo that at first glance resembles the half tone images that are printed in newspapers. In reality the effect is achieved in a different way, but the result can be quite pleasing.
In this image, I applied the Demitone 50 filter to the background layer of the photo, which applied the dot effect to the colored image. To give more of a feel of a true half tone, I gave the image a monotone blue color.
This was done by selecting a tone of blue with the Change Foreground Color dialog and adding a new layer that was then filled with the blue color. The Layer mode of this layer was then set to Color so that the photo below became visible again.
Gray From... Filters from Flaming Pear Freebies
The Gray From... filters are designed to quickly and easily convert color photos into black and white. They differ from a straight forward color to mono conversion because they convert individual color channels into black and white.
The image shows how the poppies appear after being converted to mono using Gray from Red. Because there was lots of red light being reflected by the poppies, they became a light gray in the mono conversion.
If you used the Gray from Green or Gray from Blue filters on this photo, the result would have been poppies that were almost black, because they would be reflecting very little green or blue light.
Some filters can add quite unnatural color effects to photos and converting images to mono can hide the extreme stylization of those filters while allowing other aspects that they produce to be enjoyed.
The RGB to Lab filter is an example of this in that when it is applied to the poppies photo, the poppies became blue and the sky red, while the whole image gained a gentle and slightly washed out aura.
In some cases, the color shifts maybe just what you want, but in this case, while I liked the washed out effect, I wasn't so keen on the colors. However going to Colors > Desaturate gives a mono image with the washed out tones that looks quite naturalistic.
The effect of scan lines on images is quite popular and the Transline filter from Flaming Pear's Freebies does a basic job of producing them.
The lines that were added to the poppies picture were colored red and they added a tone to the photo that I didn't personally like. The simple step of going to Colors > Desaturate removed the redness while keeping the effect of fine scanlines.
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