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Black & White

Setting Color’s Saturation to zero gives you grey footage, but it throws away all the control a darkroom printer or a black-and-white photographer takes for granted — which colours become light and which become dark. The Black & White effect is the dedicated tool for monochrome: it decides how each colour maps to a shade of grey, shapes the tonal response like a film stock, and finishes the image with grain, toning, and a vignette.

Add it the same way as any other effect: select a clip, choose Black & White from the Effects menu (under Color), and adjust it in the Inspector. Like every effect it stacks with the others and every control keyframes.

What’s in this guide

Section titled “What’s in this guide”

Start from a preset

Section titled “Start from a preset”

The fastest way in is the preset picker at the top of the effect. Presets are grouped by family, and — this is the key to using them — each family only touches its own controls, so you can layer one from each:

  • Neutral — tonal baselines (Flat, High Contrast, High Key, Low Key, Maximum White/Black), plus Neutral ▸ Neutral, which resets every control.
  • Filters — optical colour filters (Yellow, Orange, Red, Deep Red, Green, Blue, Infrared). These change only the colour-to-grey mapping.
  • Toning — darkroom tints (Sepia, Selenium, Cyanotype, Platinum, Gold, two splits). These change only the tint.
  • Cinematic — complete looks (Film Noir, Silent Era, Newsreel, Modern Cinema, Documentary, Street / Pushed, Fashion High Key, Dramatic Landscape, Portrait). These span every group, so use one as a starting point rather than a layer.
  • Film — 19 emulations of classic black-and-white film stocks, each pairing a spectral sensitivity with a characteristic curve and grain scaled to the film’s speed. Names are generic (Classic 400, Ultra Fine 50, Pushed 3200…); hover a preset to see the stock it’s inspired by in the tooltip.

Because a filter, a toning, and a film stock each stay in their own lane, you can pick Filters ▸ Red (25), then Film ▸ Classic 400, then Toning ▸ Sepia and each keeps the others intact. Every preset also leaves Amount alone, so switching looks never disturbs a dry/wet blend you’ve dialled in.

Note on the film presets: the emulations are inspired by each stock’s published characteristic curve and spectral sensitivity — they are an interpretation of the look, not a measured profile of the film.

Conversion — how colours become grey

Section titled “Conversion — how colours become grey”

This group decides which colours render light and which render dark.

  • Filter Hue and Filter Strength simulate a coloured glass filter screwed onto the lens, exactly as a film photographer would use one. A filter lightens its own colour and darkens the opposite: a red filter (Filter Hue 0°) dramatically darkens a blue sky and makes clouds leap out; a green filter lightens foliage and skin. Filter Strength at 0% means no filter. The filter is applied before the mixer and is exposure-normalised, so turning it up darkens the sky without darkening the whole picture.
  • The eight per-hue sliders — Reds, Oranges, Yellows, Greens, Aquas, Blues, Purples, Magentas — are the fine control. Each one makes tones of that colour render lighter (positive) or darker (negative) in the final grey. Drag Blues down to deepen a sky; drag Oranges up to brighten skin. Greys and neutrals are untouched no matter how you set the sliders — only actual colour is affected.

Film — the tone response

Section titled “Film — the tone response”

This group shapes the brightness and contrast of the monochrome signal, the way a film stock’s characteristic curve and emulsion do.

  • Brightness raises or lowers exposure in photographic stops.
  • Contrast steepens (above 1.0) or flattens (below 1.0) the tones around mid-grey.
  • Shadows lifts (+) or crushes (−) the darkest tones — the film toe.
  • Highlights lifts (+) or rolls off (−) the brightest tones — the film shoulder.
  • Grain adds procedural film grain. It’s luma-weighted, so it’s strongest in the midtones like real emulsion, and it’s resolution-aware, so 1080p and 4K look alike. Grain Size sets how coarse it is.
  • Static Grain fixes a single grain field for the whole clip instead of re-seeding it each frame — useful for stills or stop-motion, where crawling grain would look wrong. With it off, the grain animates frame to frame, and it renders identically in preview and export.

Finishing — toning and vignette

Section titled “Finishing — toning and vignette”

The last group tints and frames the image.

  • Tone Hue and Tone Strength apply a single overall tint — the classic darkroom sepia (≈ 35°), a cool blue cyanotype, and so on. Strength at 0% keeps the image pure neutral.
  • Shadow Hue, Highlight Hue, Split Strength, and Split Balance are split toning: one colour in the shadows and another in the highlights (warm shadows against cool highlights is a common cinematic look). Split Balance shifts where the crossover between the two sits.
  • Vignette darkens (−) or lightens (+) the edges of the frame. Vignette Size sets its radius and Vignette Softness how gradually it fades. The vignette follows the layer, so it stays centred even if the clip is scaled or repositioned by a Transform effect.

Amount

Section titled “Amount”

Amount at the very top blends the whole effect against the original colour footage: 100% is full monochrome, 0% is the untouched colour image. Keyframe it to fade from colour to black-and-white over a shot, or leave it partway for a desaturated-but-not-grey look.

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