Nearly every Mac graphic design or photo enhancement app I know of has one thing in common. An option to strip out the color.
Call it monochrome or simply black and white, but there’s little effort required these days to remove the color from a color photo. Click and you’re done, right? Almost. But not quite. True monochrome, or artistic black and white photography, needs a proper tool. Here it is.
Artistry Without Color
To be fair about it, even monochrome photos have color. Just not much and all within the same range. True black and white photography is an art.
One way to improve your black and white artistry is with the Mac app Tonality, which comes in two versions. One for photo enthusiasts, and priced accordingly.
The other is for professional photographers who understand the distinctions and nuance in working without color (and it’s priced accordingly).
The basic Tonality version still brings plenty of monochrome tricks to the table, including 16-bit support for native RAW image processing.
The key to any modern photo enhancement app is the quality of the options. Tonality comes with over 150 single click presets.
Also built in are smart contrast, adaptive exposure, and shadow recovery tools– exactly what you won’t find in a Mac app that simply strips out the color.
Tonality works on multiple layers and features textures, lens blur, glow, and other traditional photo enhancement options, all optimized for monochrome.
The Pro version costs more but does more. It features plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, as well as Apple’s now defunct Aperture app. It can also use source color from the original photo, and displays histograms, and more layers.
Of course, all photos can be exported to TIFF, JPG, PSD and other file formats. Not every Mac user and photographer will appreciate the options in Tonality, but if you enjoy black and white artistry, you’ll be dazzled by what the app can do that others cannot.
Despite the price tag, Tonality does come in a trial version so you can see what you’re getting, and the basic Tonality is upgradeable to the Pro version.
