Gabriel Ponzanelli Photography

 NOTE: This was originally posted on shutterstation.com, but since decommissioning that site I've pulled some of the articles here so they don't get lost. 

This video shows you how to do selective black & white in Aperture using either the Color brick or the included Dodge & Burn plugin. A few days ago we posted a video on how to convert your photographs to black & white in Aperture with much more control than you get with just the Monochrome Mixer. This video takes off where the previous one finished.

If you prefer to read the tip, continue reading.

This tip is really simple. To turn specific areas of your photograph to black & white while leaving others in color, you have 2 options: 

1. Color Brick: From the color brick, you can remove the saturation of specific colors by sliding the Saturation slider all the way to the left. This will turn these colors into black & white. However, doing this will desaturate the selected color in the entire image. For example, imagine a photograph of a person with blue eyes, wearing blue jeans, and standing outside with a blue sky. If you desaturate the blues, all 3 things (eyes, jeans, sky) will turn into black & white while leaving the rest in color. But what if you only want to turn the sky into black & white and not the jeans and eyes? Then you need to use the Dodge & Burn plugin.
2. Dodge & Burn: Select the photograph and go to Images>Edit with>Dodge & Burn. Once the plugin opens, you'll have your photograph in full color ready for editing. Just select "Desaturate" from the drop-down on the top-left corner and paint away. As long as your Strength is at 1 (ie. 100% Desaturation), everywhere you paint will turn into black & white. You can change the size and softness of the brush to give you more control in smaller areas. If you go over an area by mistake, just switch to Saturate and the color will return. 

UPDATE (20 Feb 2010): This applies only to Aperture 2 and is no longer valid for Aperture 3. In the new version you can do this non-destructively without the need for plugins by using the Brush in feature. I explain it briefly in a comment below, but here it is for easy access:

Anyway, the good news is that it’s even easier to do in Aperture 3, and it’s non-destructive! All you need to do is pull the Saturation slider down to zero in the Enhanced brick (the entire image will turn to black and white). Then click on the gear symbol on the upper right corner of the brick and select “Brush Enhance In”, that’ll turn the image back into color, but now you can just brush in the black & white adjustment. Just play with the controls in the brush HUD to define the brush size and softness. For pure black and white push the Strength slider all the way to the right.

A better way is to use the Black & White brick. It gives you more control over the conversion to black & white.

NOTE: This was originally posted on shutterstation.com, but since decommissioning that site I've pulled some of the articles here so they don't get lost.

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.