Portable Vampix

Portable Vampix is a lightweight and fairly easy to understand piece of software that was designed to help you turn regular color pictures to B&W, allowing you to manually adjust the threshold levels to effortlessly obtain the effects you are looking for.

Clear-cut and accessible looks

Appearance-wise, the application is very basic and underwhelming, featuring nothing more than a medium-sized, non-resizable window, where all of its configuration parameters can be found.
Its usage is quite simple and undemanding, but just in case, Portable Vampix also lists the four steps you need to go through in order to turn your pictures to black and white, at the top of its main window.

Convert color images to B&W with just a few mouse moves

To load your photo into the program, you can either use the ‘Load’ button in its interface or the equivalent ’File’ menu option, and browse for your file, then open it. Alternately, you can just drag and drop it over the main window.
You should bear in mind that you can only process pictures individually, as batch operations are not supported; similarly, Portable Vampix can only work with JPG format files, other types of images not being supported.
After having loading your file, you can set the color ‘Thresholds’ by hand, being able to choose the ‘Central Color’ with one click on the image, a dedicated section informing you of the ‘Distance from CC’, whenever you hover your mouse cursor over it.
You can also opt between two ‘Display’ modes’, specifically ‘Picture’ and ‘Mask’. Once your adjustments are finalized, you can save the black and white photo to your computer, to JPG format only.

A straightforward Black and White converter

All things considered, Portable Vampix proves to be a useful, though quite simplistic utility, and as a result, it may fail to impress more demanding individuals; this is due particularly to the limited file types that it supports, as well as its inability to handle bulk processing.