Craft & Vision has released another in their series of excel­lent pho­tog­raphy related e-books. This one is enti­tled The Power of Black and White, by Piet Van den Eynde, and fea­tures the use of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for con­verting color images to black and white. And that explains the sub-title In Adobe Lightroom and Beyond.

But I use Apple’s Aperture, and I know many of you do, too. So I’d like to give you an overview of Piet’s book and ‘trans­late’ some of his points into tech­niques Aperture users can apply. I think this is appro­priate as a great deal of the book is about how to work with black and white con­ver­sions in gen­eral and only parts it rely on Lightroom. Even if you are an Aperture user, I think you will ben­efit from his book. And its just $5—don’t pass it up if you do any black and white work to speak of.

Chapter 1 begins by pro­viding some good tips on cap­turing images intended for black and white con­ver­sion. Chapter 2 goes into a little of the theory of color and how it applies in this con­text. Its in Chapter 3 that we first see Lightroom and only as an intro­duc­tion to its black and white tools. Many of these same tools appear in Aperture, but with dif­ferent names or arrangement.

Aperture’s Basic Adjustments

The tools pre­sented and their Aperture equiv­a­lents are:

• Exposure = Exposure
• Black Point = Black Point
• Fill Light = Shadows
• Highlight Recovery = Recovery
• Brightness = Brightness
• Clarity = Definition
• Contrast = Contrast
• Tone Curve =  Curves

So far, Aperture has, for all prac­tical pur­poses, iden­tical tools. But at this point Piet intro­duces Lightroom’s Targeted Adjustment Tool (or TAT), a con­cept that has no match in Aperture. Using the TAT as part of the Tone Curve adjust­ment, for example, lets you click on the image and drag up to lighten, or down to darken, what­ever tone is found under the mouse click. This is really very clever and can also be used in color selec­tion, as we’ll shortly see.

Lightroom’s Graduated Filter

Moving on we learn about more tools:

• Temperature = Temperature
• Tint = Tint
• Post-Crop Vignette = Vignette
• Presets = Presets

Again, near per­fect  matches. And, once again, a split—Aperture has no par­allel to Lightroom’s Grain and Graduated Filter tools. Lightroom’s Adjustment Brush is a com­bi­na­tion of sev­eral dif­ferent brushed on adjust­ment bricks in Aperture. In Lightroom you can brush on Exposure, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Clarity and Sharpness (Exposure, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Definition, and Sharpen for Aperture). Of course Aperture goes Lightroom one better here with the ability to brush in, or brush out, nearly any adjust­ment, even Curves.

The first case study of the book is pre­sented next. Here we learn about how changing the lumi­nance of dif­ferent colors change the apparent bright­ness of the grays those colors are con­verted to in black and white. Lightroom pro­vides sliders for eight colors (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Aqua, Blue, Purple and Magenta). Aperture’s color brick offers sliders for six colors (Red, Yellow, Green, Aqua, Blue and Magenta), but you can change any of the pre-determine colors to any of the colors in your image by selecting on the eye­dropper and clicking on that color. Here, again, the TAT in Lightroom is avail­able and it works by moving mul­tiple color sliders based on where you click in the image.

Aperture’s RAW Fine Tuning

Chapter 4 pro­vides a look at the author’s Lightroom work­flow touching on many of the tools already intro­duced. A few new tools shown are the Camera Profile adjust­ments, which are much like Aperture’s RAW Fine Tuning, and Auto Lens Correction (cor­recting for dis­tor­tion, chro­matic aber­ra­tions and vignetting). Lightroom trumps Aperture here as Aperture has no lens cor­rec­tion ability without resorting to plug-ins.

The second case study is a very long and detailed tuto­rial on how to apply the many tools avail­able to a spe­cific and dif­fi­cult image. All of the work done here can be done with Aperture in many of the same ways. Use the trans­la­tions above and follow along.

Next up is the third case study which uses Photoshop. Since Aperture can round trip to Photoshop just as Lightroom can, there’s no trans­la­tion needed here. Chapter 5 dis­cusses set­ting up and using pre­sets and again the two pro­grams are very sim­ilar in how they handle them. Aperture is a bit more flex­ible, as a preset doesn’t have to wipe out any existing adjust­ments as Lightroom’s do, but you can get the same work done with either.

Dodging and Burning are old dark­room tech­niques that are still impor­tant in today’s dig­ital world and Chapter 6 shows how they can be used for black and white work. Aperture has both Dodge and Burn as Quick Brushes, but Lightroom adds the very handy Graduated Filter. Chapter 7 goes out­side of Lightroom to show the use of the plug-ins Exposure (by Alien Skin Software—avail­able for Photoshop and Lightroom) and Silver Efex Pro 2 (by Nik Software—avail­able for Photoshop, Lightroom and Aperture).

High Dynamic Range imaging (per­haps better called Tone Mapping) is very pop­ular now in dig­ital pho­tog­raphy and Chapter 8 dis­cusses its use in black and white. Again, two plug-in are shown, HDR Efex Pro (by Nik Software—available for Photoshop, Lightroom and Aperture, and LR/Enfuse (by Photographer’s Toolbox—avail­able only for Lightroom). The very pop­ular stand­alone pro­gram, Photomatix Pro (byHDRsoft), is also discussed.

Chapter 9 offers some alter­na­tive ideas for fin­ishing your black and white con­ver­sion including Tinting (Color Monochrome in Aperture), Split Toning (no equiv­a­lent in Aperture), Selective Coloring, and adding bor­ders. Chapter 10 com­pletes the book and goes over printing, some­thing it seems that fewer and fewer pho­tog­ra­phers are doing them­selves these days. As should be clear by now, Aperture offers essen­tially the same tools for printing as Lightroom.

So there you have it. This is a great book for those wanting to get into black and white con­ver­sions for some of their color work. I’d rec­om­mend it for either Lightroom or Aperture users.