These black-and-white photo apps are 50 shades of great

Something that nearly all digital photos have in common—regardless of their camera of origin—is that they’re in color. Although that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it may seem counterintuitive, given the evolution of photography. Before digital replaced film as the photo medium of choice, color and monochrome shared the limelight. Today, if you want to channel your inner Ansel Adams with your own moody wide-angle vistas, specialty black-and-white apps are the path to achieving your monochromatic vision.

Hueless takes black and white seriously, offering a detailed and feature-laden set of controls.
Based on the reality that you do most of your shooting on the camera in your pocket, Curious Satellite’s Hueless is built exclusively for the iPhone and designed for skilled hobbyists, with an emphasis on shooting high-resolution JPEGs and TIFFs. The app is easy to use and navigate, though perhaps not ideal for that superquick shot when there’s just a few seconds between the train coming and your image of it emerging from the tunnel.

A button opens the interface to reveal several discrete controls that let you create presets, frame images, tap to focus, use composition rules, constrain dimension, adjust exposure and contrast, set geotags, and even apply colored filters for assorted monochrome looks. Despite its power and precision, don’t look for Hueless to convert existing images from your camera roll into black and white. Instead, treat Hueless as a film camera loaded with black-and-white stock. Shoot with Hueless when you want black and white through and through—monochrome from start to finish—absent color reinterpretation.

For the one-click joy of simply converting your iPhone’s native color images to black and white, focus on Pacific Helm’s Camera Noir. You can shoot original monochrome images through this app or retrofit older color photos. Shooting is intuitive via the camera icon, which lets you tap to focus, frame, and adjust exposure.

You can frame and focus your shot through the Camera Noir app, or just bring in a color image from your camera roll for the black-and-white treatment.
This minimalist app offers little in the way of controls, providing just low, medium, and high settings for exposure, plus crop marks and a level to assist in composition. While somewhat limited in functionality, the app is streamlined, quick, and easy to use. If you don’t have the time or inclination to mess with settings, Camera Noir will rescue your shoot.

Dramatic Black & White has a huge collection of adjustable filters.
For high drama, you can rely on JixiPix’s Dramatic Black & White for the iPhone or iPad. The app offers numerous settings, presets, and adjustments to fit the mood. Start with three levels of intensity: simple monochrome, high-key black and white, or infrared.

But that’s just for starters. Within those categories, multiple presets can feature colored tones to impart unique flair. The adjustable spotlight tool centers the effect on the canvas, while the crop tool lets you fine-tune the picture using popular aspect ratios.

Want to get more granular? Dramatic Black & White is happy to oblige by letting you adjust the tone, brightness, and contrast with each setting. It even offers a slider for adding old-time film grain to your photos. Shoot with the app’s camera, or import an image from your camera roll to give it the dramatic treatment—the results are uniformly stunning.

Simply B&W is not the only app to feature nontinting colored filters as an adjustment, but it’s the only one that tells you what they mean. That makes the app a lot more friendly.
Like Camera Noir, Simply B&W lets you either shoot an original photo via the app or desaturate a previously captured color image. The app concentrates on borders and vignettes, on the theory that simple framing goes a long way in improving black-and-white images. True to form, its frames and vignettes are either black or white. However, the app also lets you adjust brightness, contrast, and grain to make your pictures sing.

This app, unlike some others, actually has a set of filters that apply red, green, blue, yellow, and orange filters. These are not tints, but filters, just like the ones you use on your camera lens or in your photo-editing program, and they have roughly the same effect. The really neat part is that each filter has a key, so you know how to best use it—and when not to use it—on your photo.

Choose the default desaturation, or tweak within the app to adjust for black or white exposure, frames, and vignettes.
Apptrio’s Photo Noir lets you take control of specific aspects of your image. As with other apps, you can shoot through the app itself or you can import images from your camera roll and give them the monochromatic treatment.

Capable of working in portrait or landscape (with the app’s icons rotating according to orientation), Photo Noir specializes in exposure, framing, and vignettes. Presets cover a broad spectrum of basics, but they aren’t adjustable—all you can do is switch them on or off. How very black and white.

The simple interface makes the app a snap to use—without sliders or gestures, you just tap the buttons and see what happens. And if you are not pleased with the result, it takes only one tap to revert to the original and start again.

This simple app is surprisingly effective in giving you a range of black-and-white effects. You shoot directly through the camera and enable the Vignette size slider and Intensity options slider. Use just these two settings for a theatrical tableau—with flash on or off.

Noir Pro gives you a bit of black and white with a twist: postcards that you can actually mail, in addition to sharing on your social networks.
Along with the usual sharing options, you’ll find the Postcard feature, in which you can use the photo to create a geniune postcard that Fuerte International will send to any destination. Just as with a regular postcard, you fill in a message and an address; you may also add an optional profile photo.

B&W Master offers presets to cover a multitude of common shooting situations. The in-app purchase lets you preview the paid filters before you buy.
You can use Black & White Master both to shoot new pictures and to drain color from the images that are already in your camera roll, either in their original aspect ratio or in the trendy square format. Either way, the app lets you choose from a number of Instagram-like presets to easily apply the right monochromatic tone for your photo.

After you decide whether to reorient the shot, the app offers thumbnails of your picture with effects such as Bright, Contrast, Fog, and more. Once you tap one to preview it, you can slide your finger up and down on the screen to tweak the contrast, and slide left and right to adjust the brightness. The sliders disappear when you aren’t using them—a neat design touch, sure, but that also makes them easy to miss.

A $2 in-app purchase offers access to ten additional effects, and the app lets you preview all of them before you decide to buy. This is a neat, easy app to use, with lots of variety even in the free version.

Here’s something you don’t see every day: an honest-to-goodness black-and-white app for Android. With Appija’s Black and White Camera Pro, you can shoot through the built-in camera (front or rear) or bring in older pictures from the Gallery to edit. A handy slider lets you dynamically adjust exposure and set tints in several colors.

The ad-supported free version offers the same functionality as the Pro version, but the ads are pretty annoying.

Black and White Camera Pro lets you shoot through the app or bring in a color photo for editing. Just adjust the exposure with the dynamic slider, and pick a tint. Retro Photo Camera gives you minimal control over your picture, but it applies a sepia or grayscale tone to your photo, complete with decorative borders.
Dexati’s Retro Photo Camera provides several stylized monochrome and sepia-toned choices, complete with borders. You can take pictures right in the app, or pull in older ones from your Gallery or even from your Facebook albums (a nice touch).

Once you take a shot or import your photo into the app, all you have to do is tap the B&W Photo or Retro Effect button to preview the results. This app has no controls, so if you’re satisfied with the default—and thankfully, the defaults aren’t bad—then you’re good to go. With no cropping or adjustment tools, Retro Photo Camera is definitely not for tinkerers, but if you just want to desaturate a photo quickly, it’s worth a try. A welcome addition would be an option to toggle the borders on and off.

The app also lets you create wallpaper from your photo. Frequently, a color photo serving as wallpaper looks too busy under a mess of colorful app icons and widgets, making your home screens hard to read. But the same photo turned to black and white can make excellent wallpaper.

Camera Magic Effects offers several layers of editing capabilities, and you can use them to shoot with the final black-and-white output in mind. Although it is not a pure black-and-white app, it does have several black-and-white filters. Shooting with the app lets you set up your image for desaturation later. White balance and scene modes provide the backdrop, and after completing your shot, you can apply filters such as Negative Effect, Gray Scale Image, Snow Effect, Sepia Effect, Engrave Effect, or Emboss Effect.

While not precisely a black-and-white app, Camera Magic gives you a number of monochromatic filters to work with, and lets you set up a color shot with black and white in mind.
The free version is ad-supported, and while we didn’t find the ads too intrusive, if you use this app a lot you’ll probably want to shell out about $2 for the ad-free Pro version. 

In Android, move a photo to another folder

Once he's snapped a photo with his Android phone, Bob wants to move it to another folder.
This isn't really a photo issue; it's a file management issue. And so you need a file management app. I recommend the ASTRO File Manager. The Pro version costs $4, but the basic, free app is sufficient for this job (and much more).

After you've installed ASTRO from the Play Store, go ahead and launch it. Tap the Camera folder. If you don't see a Camera folder, tap the DCIM folder; you'll find the Camera folder inside.

The Camera folder contains all of the photos you've taken but have not yet deleted or moved elsewhere. Each photo will be visible as a thumbnail. Tap and hold the photo you want to move. If it's your most recent snapshot, it will be at the bottom.

An orange outline will appear around the thumbnail, indicating that you've selected it. Two additional menus will pop-up.

If you want to select an additional photo, tap it. If you want to select all of them, tap and hold any one of them.

Tap Move on the bottom menu. Two buttons will appear: CANCEL and PASTE. For now, ignore them.
Navigate ASTRO to the target folder. You can swipe left to right for the Android version of My Computer, listing all of the storage devices available. Tap the one you want and find and tap your desired folder.
If you want to create a new folder, tap the menu icon in the upper-right corner and select New Folder.
When you're in the right folder, tap PASTE. 

How to bypass your PC when ordering photo prints

FreePrints for Android
Old habits die hard. For example, many of us still insist on syncing our smartphones to our PCs, even though it's hardly necessary anymore. (Android, iOS, and Windows phones can automatically sync to the cloud.)

Likewise, many users still take the old-school approach when it comes to ordering prints of the photos they've snapped: They copy (or even email) them to a PC, then upload them to a printing service.

Proof positive that apps can solve a lot of old-school hassles, FreePrints lets you order photo prints right from your smartphone—no PC required.

The app debuted last year for iOS but is now available for Android and Windows Phone as well. All you do is choose the photos you want, crop them as needed, then decide on sizes.

True to its name, FreePrints gives you up to 85 free prints per month, though you're on the hook for shipping (which starts at $1.99 and stops at $9.99). That's for 4x6-inch glossies; if you want 5x5, 5x7, or 8x10 prints, you'll have to pay a little extra.

What makes FreePrints especially convenient is that it lets you upload photos not just from your camera roll, but also from your Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, and/or Picasa accounts. It's kind of like one-stop shopping for photo purchases.

That said, there are loads of other apps that afford similar convenience (though not as many with support for those third-party services). FreePrints is simply one option of many, and although it's not really free, it does save you the hassle of copying photos to your PC.

'The Hobbit': Ian McKellen Says Goodbye to Gandalf (Photo)

Peter Jackson and Ian McKellen

Goodbye, Gandalf.

Ian McKellen has played Gandalf, the wise wizard in Peter Jackson's Tolkien films, since The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring began filming in 1999.

But now the English actor has finally wrapped up his role as the iconic wizard, having completed work on the final film in Jackson's Hobbit trilogy, There and Back Again.

The director posted a photo of himself with McKellen on set in New Zealand.

PHOTOS: Elijah Wood in 'Hobbit' and 16 Other Cameos in Prequels, Reboots and Remakes

"Seconds ago we finished our last shot with Gandalf. The end of an incredible adventure that began in 1999. I'm feeling very sad right now," Jackson wrote.

McKellen, now 74, was 59 years old at the start of the first shoot for Fellowship.

The second installment in the Hobbit series -- which sees Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), joining 13 dwarves on a quest to reclaim the Lonely Mountain from the dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) -- will hit theaters on Dec. 13 via Warner Bros.

The final installment, There and Back Again, opens in theaters one year later, on Dec. 17, 2014.

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