Last week, on my way back from work in the evening, I took some monochrome photos in Tokyo's Itabashi Ward with the Hipstamatic (or, as it is called now, Classic) camera app on my iPhone.
Using this app will give you two variants of the same image on your camera roll:
the original standard color photo as produced by the iPhone camera, and
a second version of the same image, processed by the Classic app into a style of the user's choice.
I use what is rather cryptically called the "John S & BlacKeys SuperGrain" style that performs the following automated processing on the original image:
cropping it into square format
converting it into monochrome
strongly increasing the contrast and adding some grain
adding vignetting (darkening of image corners)
I'll go ahead and present some of the images I shot, with the color and monochrome versions side-by-side. For each case, I will briefly discuss my preferred variant.
(For comparison purposes, I cropped the original color photos into the same square format. No other edits or corrections were made to the images.)
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Image 1: "Matsubara Hair Works"
In this first pair of images depicting a neighborhood hair salon, I slightly prefer the color over the monochrome version. The electric cables visible on top of the color image add a nice graphical symmetry and perspective element that completely vanishes in the monochrome version due to the vignetting. Also, the difficult-to-read shop sign above the corner entrance gets exacerbated by the contrasty monochrome treatment to a degree that it almost hurts to look at it. The textures on the building exterior and the rendering of lights are pretty nice in the monochrome version though.
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Image 2: "Hasunuma Athlete Road Crossing"
Hasunuma Athlete Road connects Motohasunuma Station with a complex of sports and training fields in the direction of Akabane. This scene features some light pedestrian, bicycle and car traffic at an intersection. In this pair, I really like the monochrome version a lot. It seems to calm down the messy randomness of the color version quite a bit, and once again the high contrast works really well to accentuate the faded building exteriors. Also, I think the vignetting works better here than in the first image, and adds a welcome additional focus to the core scene.
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Image 3: "Evening Restaurant Lane"
A trio of Chinese restaurant (left), drinking bar (center) and café (right) in the Hasunumacho area of Itabashi Ward. I think both the color and monochrome versions have their merits, and cannot really choose one over the other. It is interesting how in the color version, the Chinese restaurant (with its luminous red awning, and being in the foreground of the composition) dominates the scene, whereas in the monochrome version, the luminous cafe exterior (with the nicely contrasting bicycles parked in front) becomes the initial focus of attention. Also, the vignetting works quite nicely again here.
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Image 4: "Chinese Restaurant"
This is "Suiren" (水蓮), the same Chinese restaurant as featured in the previous pair of images, but frontally photographed through some foreground shrubbery. I think that overall, the color image wins this one on atmosphere. The processing applied for the monochrome conversion unfortunately loses the warming glow of the awning, and the "noise" component adds a regrettable blurriness to some of the image's details.
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Image 5: "Family Mart"
A night scene outside a Convenience Store in my neighborhood, slightly tilted to the left. The color version has an attractive homely glow to it; however I quite enjoy the monochrome version as well - not least due to the almost complete dark around the shop, and the abstract oddity of some surrounding illuminated apartment building details randomly appearing out of nowhere.
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All images shot with iPhone 15 Pro. Monochrome versions processed by Hipstamatic app.
写真の撮影場所：東京都・板橋区