Using Aperture for B&W conversion

[simon_hughes]

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Right now (and for years) I use PS for my post processing. When I switched over to Mac, however, I bought Aperture and I do like the concept of it (although I haven't used it much). I find that I convert probably 80% of my images to B&W and currently I do this with Jeff Ascough's wonderful actions (Brown Sugar is my favorite B&W conversion).

 

I'm interested in what other M8/Aperture users do for their B&W conversions. I've looked at and played around a bit with the Monochrome mixer in Aperture but it doesn't seem to give me the same rich results. (None of my Aperture books have any significant info on BW.) Obviously Jeff's Brown Sugar action is doing more that adjusting the "filter" channels. I also assume that Aperture "presets" are analogous to PS' actions... is this correct? If so, has anyone seen any Aperture presets you can download for some nice B&W results?

[nryn]

Simon,

 

I also use Aperture for library management and RAW conversion. Lightroom's B/W controls are far more granular than Apertures and produce some stellar results. I don't have any presets for download (nor do I know of any), but Aperture's presets aren't really equal conceptually to Photoshop Actions.

 

Anyway, I can share my experiences with B/W conversion in Aperture:

 

Obviously, the monochrome mixer is going to be where you spend most of your time, but don't forget that in Aperture the adjustments work top down--they've tried to order them in a way which suggests that settings at the top affect settings below. So the monochrome mixer will mix the cumulative results of the operations above. So playing with white balance will actually determine what the monochrome mixer is mixing...this can be a great way to get control over very small parts of the image's color spectrum. I'm sure you probably knew this, but thought I'd mention it just in case.

 

With this in mind, though, I find the RAW fine tuning sliders, particularly Boost, to be very useful in B/W conversion. Turning down Boost adds a certain richness or depth to the image, reducing contrast and thereby bringing back some details in highlights and shadows. Hard to describe; try for yourself.

 

The other thing I find useful is just a very small amount of color monochrome (.3 or less, often .1 is enough for me). To me, this "thickens" the image. Again, hard to describe. Actually, the only adjustment I have presets for is color monochrome. Everything else I prefer to handle on a per-image basis.

[Eoin]

Play around with the croma blur and switch off the noise reduction in the raw adjustment settings in the top part of the adjustment pane.

 

I also use the monochrome mixer with a few presets but your more than welcome to give them a try. The percentages are all RGB

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[simon_hughes]

Gents,

 

Thanks for your replies. After more thinking about it, I think I'm just going to stick with CS3 and Bridge. Since I often do burning and dodging as well as other things that Aperture just doesn't have, it makes sense to stay with PS. Bridge seems to have gotten much better as a DAM program too so I guess I'll just carry on.

 

Once again, thanks for your input. BTW, if you haven't tried Jeff Ascough's actions, I cannot recommend them highly enough!