Today I’m going to show you how I make crispy Black and White edits. I have a third Instagram account just for basic and minimal edited photos. They are also very well composed photos. If you want to check out the FEED just click on @ashcroft54_ll to check it out. All of the the photos are taken with my iPhone 4s with Pro Camera or Qbro. The photo up above was taken with Qbro and edited with Dynamic Light and PS Express.

I’m going to take this photo up above and convert it to a crispy Black and White photo.

I’m going to load my photo onto Dynamic Light app. The effect I like to choose is Infrared FX.

I usually push my the effect to 100% because I want the brightest whites and deep dark blacks, with really contrasty details.

Then I load the photo to PS Express to smooth and sharpen my photo. Now I know a lot of you don’t want to pay for the $4.99 to unlock the Denoise part of PS Express. You can also use Noise Master app if you want to smooth out the noise and sharpen with Filterstorm or Photo Forge 2. There are always other alternatives if you want to try other apps and see if you can make close to the same effects.

Tap on the pencil button the right hand side below.

You will see the list of edits you can do with PS Express as you can see I will be doing the Noise first and Sharpen second.

Now to adjust the noise up to 100, you have to slide your finger up an angle. Then slide it upward in an angle. This will take some practice and I found the adjustment on accident.

I will do Sharpen the same but I will do downward instead of upwards. I don’t like to over sharpen because you get weird things like halos and discolored pixels popping up on the photos. You want to make your photo crisps and smooth at the same time. Over sharpen photos don’t look that great unless you’re trying to pull off some type of editing effect that compliments your style of editing.

Here’s my final black and white crispy conversion of The Hall of Justice building in Downtown San Diego. It’s very crispy but smooth at the same time, so everything pops out.

Another example of a crispy black and white photo of Horton Plaza Shopping Center, inside Downtown San Diego.

Now if you have an questions about this blog please leave comments or email me ashcroft54@gmail.com. You can also follow Facebook and Google+ pages and or check out the Combo Apps: iPhoneography Extreme Editing Group on Flickr down below. You can also find everything I’m linked to on my about.me splash page @ASHCROFT54. Last there is the Combo Apps forum feed on Instagram, just click on @combo_apps and hit the follow button.