Silicon Bonk (click to download), Current version: T33
Silicon Bonk is a departure from the classical B&W approach, by giving the user simple, yet powerful parameters, to quickly convert to stunning B&W without much thinking or even doing math.
Silicon Bonk doesn't emulate some specific look, but it gives you a powerful tool to create endless variations and get exactly the look you want.
It consists of just a hand full of controls: Hue and Luminance work together. Select a hue you want to change, and it gets modified by the luminance slider. (e.g. Set hue to 0 and Lumince to 10 to slightly brighten reds and darken Greens, this is a slight red filter)
Contrast changes the global image contrast
Mid adjusts the contrast midpoint .
Saturation changes the amount of residual color in the image from 0(none, default) to 200%
Equalizer offers a more advanced control over color luminance modifications, enabling you to modify just a single color band without affecting others. (i.e. pull down Blue and Cyan to darken the sky)
Protect highlights compressed highlights (and to a lesser degree shadows) before processing them with SB. This gives slightly more tonality when applying contrast, but might be undesirable sometimes.
Silicon Bonk runs very late in the pipeline by design and is especially tailored towards converting images to b&w that have previously been treated with color manipulating tools. (i.e. to quickly convert color images to b&w without making any previously made edits void), of course by setting saturation to a value > 0 you can also work on color images.
The name was grubernds idea, too, don't ask
Always remember that SB runs very late, so you can influence its results with virtually every tool/plugin that modifies color. use that to your advantage!
Btw, i would LOVE it if people would share some Silicon Bonk Presets in here, too. (Tri-X Preset anyone?)
Known issues:
- Histogram doesn't reflect changes. This is because SB runs after ASPs Curves (so they influence the conversion, too, as a lot of people use curves to correct their color images), but the histogram is computed in the Curves Stage as well. Please use the highlight/shadow clipping warning as a replacement.
Changelog:
T33 (2012-01-29)
- Enhanced Contrast control range
T32 (2012-01-23)
- Small UI fixes
- major speed improvements
T31 (2012-01-13)
- SB was running in the wrong pipeline stage, fixed.
T30 (2012-01-11)
- Initial ASP Version
- Port to ASP SDK
- Color Equalizer
- Protection now protects the shadows, too
- Settings got normalized.
Future Versions:
- T34(?) nothing planned (yet)
My thanks go to jknights for providing the mac builds.
My plugins are free, if you enjoy them, please think about donating me a coffee/beer here. Thanks
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