Aperture Video Tip: Converting to Black & White

In this video, we show you our favorite technique for converting photographs to black and white using Apple’s Aperture 2. The obvious way of converting images is to just use the Monochrome Mixer brick and play with the Red, Green, and Blue control sliders in it. Many photographers do this as one of the last steps because they’re following the traditional workflow of “top to bottom” editing, which means they apply changes to White Balance, Exposure, Levels, etc, on the color image before turning it into black and white.

The disadvantage of this approach is that you are not applying changes based on the intended outcome. A great black and white conversion may look terrible in color (it often does), and that’s ok. As shown in the video, our preferred approach is to first apply the Monochrome Mixer conversion and then go from there. The best part of this tip is using the Color adjustment brick to give you a great deal of creative control.

OK, this is our first ever video tip so it’s a kind of rough and a bit long at almost 10 minutes, but we hope you find it useful and we welcome your comments. If you’d rather read the tip, we’ve written a short summary of the basic steps below.

Step 1: Convert to Black & White with Monochrome Mixer

The Monochrome Mixer brick is not visible by default. To activate it, click on the ‘plus’ (+) sign in the adjustments tab and select it. Your photograph will turn into a standard greyscale image, but using this brick you can play with the Presets to see the effect they have on your image. You can fine tune the result with the Red, Green, and Blue sliders. Quick tip here, try to get the sum of Red, Green, and Blue to be around 100% if you want a realistic effect. Going to far beyond that in either direction will create some strange results. Give it a go.

Step 2: Play with the other adjustment bricks

Now that you have a good starting point, you can go back to the top and start working your adjustments top to bottom. Start by playing with the White Balance sliders, they will affect the overall tonality of your image. Then go to the Exposure, Enhance, and Levels bricks and adjust as necessary. Each will do something different and the effect depends on the type of photograph you’re editing. The best way to learn is to play with them.

Step 3: Perform fine adjustments with the Color brick

This is the cool step really. By adjusting the Luminance slider in each of the colors in the Color brick, you can alter tones with much greater control. To give you an example, if you adjust the Red Luminance slider, the parts of the photograph that are red in the color version will turn lighter or darker in isolation of the other colors as you move the slider. This gives you an amazing amount of control. Imagine working on a landscape with a bright blue sky. By adjusting the Blue luminance slider you can make the sky darker without affecting anything else in the photograph. It’s almost like using a mask to affect only the sky, but without actually having to do any selections. If you’re into black and white photography you have to give this a try.

Step 4: Add a vignette to darken the corners

This is of course a very subjective adjustment and some photographers may not like the effect. We mention it here because adding vignettes to black and white photographs has been common since the film days, and you can do it right from Aperture. Like the Monochrome Mixer, this isn’t a default adjustment brick, so you need to activate it by selecting it from the ‘plus’ sign at the top of the Adjustments tab.

Using this technique you have an enormous amount of control over your black and white conversions. If only Aperture had a brick to add realistic film grain it would be the perfect black and white conversion tool. And remember all this is non-destructive, so you can go back and adjust as many times as you want.