Simply put, BLACK & WHITE projects is a complicated way to turn color images/photos into grayscale images/photos. The image file for a typical photo stores both lightness/darkness data plus color data for each pixel. If you simply convert an image to grayscale in many [most?] image editors, the software just dumps that color data. With BLACK & WHITE projects, or in Photoshop or Lightroom & some other apps, you can edit the color image first, before the conversion. Changing how all the greens [or blues or reds etc.] appear in a landscape for example, changes how dark [or light] that portion of the grayscale image will be. The advantage is practicality – it’s much easier to select a color than it is to mark off each section of a grayscale image that you want to change. Photoshop & Lightroom expect you to know what you’re doing – it’s not rocket science to move a slider or three and see how the grayscale image changes – while Franzis is happy to do the work for you, including some settings &/or FX that might displease fans of realism… some of the possibilities are anything but subtle. In fact, Franzis take somewhat the same approach used with their HDR app, emphasizing heavier FX to make your image stand out, rather than focusing on those things that can make a good photo better.
All giveaways, I’ve got version 4 elements from 3/7/17, version 4 from 5/31/18, and version 5 elements from 3/5/19. As I written before, Franzis giveaways often include a wrapper – once you enter the ID & key it unpacks the real setup app in the User temp folder, which can be saved to avoid that unlocking step in the future. Franzis developed software – not the apps they sell but don’t make themselves – are lightweight overall and will run fine copied to another copy of Windows, though you might have to re-register with the key. Plug-ins when included may be separate in the downloaded Zip file, though I have come across a few that were only available if setup found image editing software it recognized – since older versions are given away, current version image editors are often overlooked. I have found several cases where the plug-ins would not work if/when copied to the appropriate folder for a given image editor, but would work fine if copied to the program’s folder, with a shortcut added to the plug-in folder for that image editor.
Trivia… partly because the name BLACK & WHITE projects is technically wrong, partly because of a comment on the GOTD page, partly because I’m old, having played around with digital images since before Win 3.1... Black and White digital images contain quite a bit less data than grayscale – rather than how light or dark a pixel is supposed to be, they only record whether the pixel is black or white. Printers can print a photo using only black ink on white paper by placing their tiny black dots closer or further apart, making things lighter or darker as necessary, using a process called halftoning. [It used to be quite a thing, with different specialized patterns and software.] The display you’re using now doesn’t, can’t work that way. While you can still find software that will show you what the dithering or halftoning will look like when printed, what you’ll normally see is a grayscale image, where every pixel is black or white, but has varying lightness/darkness. That said, no one has been able to forget the old black and white photos from decades past, so you’ll still see back & white where perhaps you shouldn’t.