Open source B&W Aperture plugin

baldmountain · November 8, 2009

I've written an open source black and white conversion plugin for Aperture. Here is a screen shot of the plugin's edit window.

You can see that the plugin uses a channel mixer to combine the colors into a gray image. Film grain can be added as well as a sepia tone. The plugin is built on top of Apple's Core Image framework. The sepia tone uses the Core Image sepia image unit. The film grain is created using the Core Image Random image unit which is filtered using Gaussian Blur and then combined with the samples from the original image. If you are interested in details you can read the image unit source.

The source is available here: http://github.com/baldmountain/BlackAndWhite To get the source you'll need git.

If all you are interested in is the plugin, you can download the installer here: http://github.com/baldmountain/BlackAndWhite/raw/master/BlackAndWhite%20Installer.pkg

Miguel Delinquento · November 8, 2009

Looks great
I'm not an Aperture user, but have used channel mixing in Photoshop with great results. This looks like an excellent tool and a tangible contribution to the photographic community. Kudos

M

Wineman · November 13, 2009

Cool, I do use aperture for about 90% of my photos!!

I have it installed now on my computer, will give it a try!

thanks.

Ok, tried it and it does not work on my computer, have aperture 2.1.4, a mac bookpro 2.16GHz intel core 2 Duo with 3GB of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM and I am using OS X 10.6.2.

Heres what happens, I open the image, go to Images, Edit with, Black and white...

And I get to a display with the photo and the slider bars, but I do not see the buttons in the bottom, DONE, REVERT, CANCEL, NXT and PREV. not shown on my computer, here is a screen capture so you can see what is happening

So after this I just press the red X to close the window and my Aperture crashes... so nothing else to do but force quit.

If I re-open Aperture I do get a copy of the pic I have tried turning into B&W, but the copy remains in Color.

Thanks!

Z

baldmountain · November 13, 2009

Wineman wrote:

And I get to a display with the photo and the slider bars, but I do not see the buttons in the bottom, DONE, REVERT, CANCEL, NXT and PREV. not shown on my computer, here is a screen capture so you can see what is happening

Dang! Your screen is smaller than mine and I am not resizing to fit the smaller screen. OK, I can fix this. I also need to fix the issue where closing the window with the red x causes the plugin to crash rather than shutting down properly in the same way it would if you pressed cancel.

baldmountain · November 14, 2009

OK, should be fixed, just download the new installer and reinstall over the old version. Be sure to restart Aperture if it is running.

You should be able to close the plugin with the window close button. The maximize button should work too. Also the window should automatically constrain itself to the main screen. (It should fit on screen when it opens.) The window should also track it's size between invocations.

Let me know if you run into any other issues.

Wineman · November 14, 2009

Cool, now its working right on!!!

Each slider is working, the buttons work as well!!

One question, when you move a slider it automatically moves the others, this is correct, right?

thanks for taking the time to make this! and fixing it as well!!

Z.

carmel6942 · November 14, 2009

Geoff,

I just tried to install the plug in and I got an installation failed message. Here is the screen shot.

I am using a Powermac G5 duel2.7 10.5.8 4gb ram and am using aperture 2.1.4 Not sure what is happening after trying to install I opened aperture and everything seemed to be working correctly. Thanks for your time.

baldmountain · November 14, 2009

carmel6942 wrote:

I am using a Powermac G5 duel2.7 10.5.8 4gb ram and am using aperture 2.1.4 Not sure what is happening after trying to install I opened aperture and everything seemed to be working correctly. Thanks for your time.

Sorry Carl. The installer is Intel only. I'm working on a MacBook Pro and SnowLeopard. IIRC the PowerPC macs are deprecated and the SnowLeopard tools won't compile PowerPC code.

But if you are willing to download the code you could probably build it with the older tools. It is open source.

carmel6942 · November 15, 2009

baldmountain wrote:

Sorry Carl. The installer is Intel only. I'm working on a MacBook Pro and SnowLeopard. IIRC the PowerPC macs are deprecated and the SnowLeopard tools won't compile PowerPC code.

But if you are willing to download the code you could probably build it with the older tools. It is open source.

I had your first version installed and working great I actually used your installer

. I wasn't having any of the issues that the previous poster had. I was trying to update to cover just in case this was a problem later. I will try building myself, I downloaded the file baldmountain-BlackAndWhite-ad03586.zip but am clueless on how to complile it. Doing some light reading.

Some feedback
I do like the way you have it set up to do the different channels with sliders it makes for easy adjustments. The additions of film grain and sepia sliders are also great. a very functional plug in and well executed. Only a nit but I would like the option of being able to adjust the slider of just one channel and the others not automagically move also. Maybe you could add a check box for those who do not want a balanced mix. Otherwise so far this is a great addition into my plugin file and didn't cost my left arm. Thank you for taking the time to post and let us use your ideas.

dlplumer · November 15, 2009

I am an Aperture user and I have not yet tried your plugin. I am curious what this offers that is not already available in Aperture. The monotone and black and white conversion tools seem to offer everything your plugin offers sans grain. What am I missing?

Thanks:D

baldmountain · November 15, 2009

carmel6942 wrote:

I had your first version installed and working great I actually used your installer . I wasn't having any of the issues that the previous poster had. I was trying to update to cover just in case this was a problem later. I will try building myself, I downloaded the file baldmountain-BlackAndWhite-ad03586.zip but am clueless on how to complile it. Doing some light reading.

Some feedback
I do like the way you have it set up to do the different channels with sliders it makes for easy adjustments. The additions of film grain and sepia sliders are also great. a very functional plug in and well executed. Only a nit but I would like the option of being able to adjust the slider of just one channel and the others not automagically move also. Maybe you could add a check box for those who do not want a balanced mix. Otherwise so far this is a great addition into my plugin file and didn't cost my left arm. Thank you for taking the time to post and let us use your ideas.

To get the source you need git and clone the repository with a command like

git clone git://github.com/baldmountain/BlackAndWhite.git

Not sure where the zip file came from.

I really should label the sliders better. Think of them as percentages. You can only have 100% so if you have 60% red you have to split the other 40% between green and blue. This is why the other sliders move when you move a slider. If I kept the sliders independent I'd still have to balance them to limit the total to 100%. The final effect would be the same as what is implemented now.

Having said that I'm considering adding the ability to have negative values for the sliders so you can subtract the value of a color. You'd also be able to have greater than 100% for other colors. As long as the sum of the three sliders equals 100%.

baldmountain · November 15, 2009

dlplumer wrote:

I am an Aperture user and I have not yet tried your plugin. I am curious what this offers that is not already available in Aperture. The monotone and black and white conversion tools seem to offer everything your plugin offers sans grain. What am I missing?

Thanks:D

Hi, I believe that the tools in Aperture are built on top of image units in Core Image. I'm guessing that the Monochrome tool is built on the Color Monochrome image unit which from the documentation does:

Remaps colors so they fall within shades of a single color.

with the color set to gray which isn't what I wanted. I wanted a channel mixer so I implemented my own image unit. The film grain uses the Random and Gaussian Blur image units along with my channel mixer image unit. Sepia uses the Core Image Sepia image unit directly.

One of the things I'd like to change is the way the film grain is generated so I can generate different sized grain within the image. Currently the Gaussian Blur smooths the noise a bit to make it look a bit more like film grain but I'm not completely happy with the final results.

Open source B&W Aperture plugin

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