3 Free Black & White Adjustment Presets for Apple Aperture 3
If you follow my blog you probably know that I love black and white photography.
I previously posted a video on how to convert colour photographs into black and white using Aperture 2. While it worked fine, you had to use the Dodge & Burn plugin in Aperture 2, which made it a destructive process and a bit of a pain in terms of workflow.
Now, Aperture 3 offers many ways to do it non-destructively with a lot more control over the final result. And a great feature is that you can save the edits as an adjustment preset so you don't have to do it all again alter. Even better, you can share these presets with others. I've been playing with this quite a bit since Aperture 3 was released and I have to say the possibilities are amazing.
I'm thoroughly enjoying the ability to save some of my settings as an adjustment preset that I can then apply to other photographs in one pass. I'm currently working on a series that emulates the effect of the black and white settings that my Panasonic GF1 bakes into the JPEG's. I'll share those when I'm happy with them, but for now I want to share 3 that I think are pretty cool.
The following photographs illustrate the effect:
Original photograph (with no adjustments applied)
Original photograph (no adjustments)
This is the photograph straight out of the camera with no editing. It's an iPhone 3gs photograph.
Adjustment Preset 1: B&W Light Shadows
Aperture 3 preset: Black & White Light Shadows
Adjustment Preset 2: B&W Preserve Shadows
Aperture 3 preset: Black & White Preserve ShadowsAdjustment Preset 3: B&W High Contrast
Aperture 3 preset: Black & White High Contrast
I hope you enjoy these black and white Aperture presets. They're completely free and I use them a lot myself. If you download them I'd appreciate your comments on them, good or bad! Do you find them useful? Any suggestions for improvements? Send me a message and let me know.
Other Apple Aperture related content you might enjoy:
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Reader Comments (5)
Many thanks for the presets - I'm just exploring the preset facility in Aperture 3 now.
Chris, the preset functionality in Aperture 3 is pretty cool. I'm sure there'll be a lot of free presets around very soon. There already are quite a bit and I'll be posting some more in a few weeks.
Gabriel - thanks for the presets. I mostly shoot B&W film but when I do fire off a few frames of digital, I often try to convert to B&W. Your preset titled "B&W Preserve Shadows" makes my images resemble T-Max 400 exposed at 800. Very nice and well done. I look forward to your next set of presets . . .
I love the looks of the Black and White on the first image.
Great presets, thanks for sharing!