Aperture Experiments – monochrome

Playing around with Aperture, I’m slowly getting the hang of RAW treatment workflow after each day of shooting. A little bit of contrast here, adjusting the temperature there, a tad of vibrancy over here… What used to take me hours is now done in 10min thanks to the great “lift and stamp” tool.

But one thing I still can’t get a hang of is monchrome conversion… This is a photo I took yesterday from the 27th floor of the Shinjuku L Tower (the Nikon Plaza showroom). From it, I made a version with each pre-defined setting of Aperture:

Default Monochrome - R30% G59% B11%

Red filter
Red filter
Orange filter
Orange filter
Yellow filter
Yellow filter
Green filter
Green filter

But however many times I compare all these versions, I cannot tell which setting fits best… Anyone in the room with tips for me?

6 thoughts on “Aperture Experiments – monochrome”

  1. you have to ask yourself : “what is the predominant colour in the original version?”.
    Obviously it’s green; thus unless you want to make all greens turn black (which could be what you want to achieve, I don’t know), then avoid the green filter. The second dominant is blue, thus, same remark.
    it leaves you with orange, yellow and red.
    As a general rule, skin tones respond better to orange or yellow filters. Since your subject is not people, I personally would start with a red filter and tweak it down towards orange, with a hint of blue added for making the skyline sharper. But that’s me and I do not know what you are trying to achieve with this conversion.

    Again, those are very very rough guidelines, and for photography, there is no “right or wrong”, just many different visions of the same exposure.

  2. I kinda liked the red filter, the buildings look crisp and the sky is sharpish, but look at Monta-san’s face on the right… he looks like a corpse

  3. Then the current version of Aperture is not going to satisfy you. If you want to make localised changes, then you need something like Capture NX or an Aperture plugin from Nik Software that uses U-Point technology, like Silver Efex.

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