I just checked the analytics for this site and realised my black & white presets for Apple Aperture have been downloaded just over 1,000 times.
I find that amazing.
If you're one of them please send me a note or tweet me and let me know what you think. And if you've used them on your own photographs send me a link. I'd love to see what people have done with them.
Thanks to everyone who's downloaded them!
A few days ago I submitted my black & white Aperture presets to the Apple site for inclusion in their downloads page. It's my first time sending anything to Apple and I honestly expected it to take a while, but a friend found them today! I'm excited to see them there and really impressed that they were approved and published so quickly.
Link to them in the Apple website here.
The presets have been downloaded a few hundred times from my site already and I'm sure the Apple site will give them more exposure. It's great to see other photographers finding them useful. I even found a website in a language I don't know linking to them. I still find this whole Internet thing amazing.
Anyway, I've been considering sharing other Aperture presets I've made and this has certainly given me new energy to do so. I'll put another pack together in the next few weeks and post it here for download... and of course, submit to Apple.
I have another set of black & white presets that I use often for photographs taken at night with flash. Not sure how useful they'll be for others as they do a very specific job for me. I also have a couple of colour ones that I think are interesting.
If anyone has any ideas or suggestions please leave them in the comments.
Step by step instructions on how to install presets in 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 (no adjustments)
This is the photograph straight out of the camera with no editing. It's an iPhone 3gs photograph.
Aperture 3 preset: Black & White Light 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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