Everything you need to know about Monochrome
Monochrome converts your image to black and white with built-in tonal shaping, similar to professional raw converters. Unlike a pure grayscale conversion, Monochrome lifts shadows and midtones, protects highlights, and adds subtle film-like contrast — producing a print-ready black & white image in one step.
Parameters
- Preserve Highlights
Controls how much brighter tones are protected from darkening during grayscale conversion. Colored pixels (warm skin, golden light) can lose brightness because BT.709 weighs blue heavily. This slider blends toward the brightest channel, preserving perceived brightness. Works across the full tonal range, not just near-white. - Midtone Lift
Opens up shadows and midtones without blowing out highlights. The curve is shadow-biased: it lifts dark areas more strongly than midtones, mimicking how professional converters handle low-key images. Positive values brighten, negative values darken. The effect tapers off toward pure white to preserve highlight headroom. - Film Contrast
Adds a subtle S-curve that deepens shadows and brightens highlights, mimicking the characteristic contrast of black & white film stocks. At 0, the tonal curve is linear. Higher values increase the contrast punch.
How It Works
Each pixel is decoded from sRGB to linear light, luminance is computed using Rec. 709 weights, highlight preservation is applied, then the result is re-encoded to sRGB. After that, a shadow-biased lift curve opens up dark areas (peaking around 30% gray), and an optional S-curve adds film-like contrast.
Tips
- Start with the defaults — they’re tuned to match the look of professional raw converters
- For high-key portraits: increase Preserve Highlights, lower Midtone Lift
- For dramatic low-key: set Midtone Lift to negative, increase Film Contrast
- For a flat, editorial look: Midtone Lift 0.20–0.25, Film Contrast 0
- For pure mathematical grayscale, use the Grayscale plugin instead