Short bio
Tony Shepherd is a Nashville-based photographer, Ricoh and Tamron ambassador, and author of Nashville: A Photographic Journey Through Music City. His work spans street, documentary, and monochrome photography. He created Monochrome Lab from the photographer’s side of the screen: a focused black-and-white editing environment shaped by the tools and decisions he wanted in his own digital darkroom.
Long bio
Tony Shepherd is a Nashville-based photographer whose work is rooted in observation, atmosphere, people, and the expressive possibilities of black-and-white photography. He is a Ricoh and Tamron ambassador and the author of Nashville: A Photographic Journey Through Music City.
Monochrome Lab came out of his own editing practice. He was not trying to build another application that did everything. He started with a smaller question: what would an editor feel like if black-and-white photography were the whole point?
That question shaped the software. Monochrome Lab focuses on tone, channel response, texture, detail, diffusion, local control, and the feel of the finished photograph. It is intentionally narrow in the places where general-purpose editors are broad.
Shepherd can speak from both sides of the process: as the photographer making the image and as the person building the tool used to finish it.
Interview areas
- Why black-and-white photography benefits from a dedicated editing environment
- How 3D LUTs shape color-to-monochrome response and tonal character
- Why RGB channel information still matters in a monochrome workflow
- Designing software from a working photographer’s perspective
- The role of specialization in an era of increasingly broad creative software
- RAW processing, interpretation, and the digital darkroom