Review: Tonality

Tonality looks a lot like Intensify Pro but, in keeping with the monochrome tone, the entire interface is black and white, save for yellow highlights for selected tools and active banks of sliders. Like Intensify, it’ll happily edit JPEG and raw files with a 16-bit processing engine. Unlike its stablemate, however, the presets and sliders are geared towards one purpose. Open an image and it’s immediately rendered in black and white, the presets along the bottom of the interface showing thumbnails of the effects. 

Black and white photography is amenable to variations in contrast/texture, which can help viewers focus on composition and subject. Thankfully, Tonality has Adaptive Exposure and Smart Contrast settings to take the guesswork out of mono conversion, with the Micro Structure slider adding sharpness. Note: changes aren’t saved until you export the final image, so don’t worry about damaging your color originals.

A nice touch is the selection of virtual colored filters that match those used by black and white film photographers over their lenses. Aperture featured a similar system, and it’s nice to see a traditional technique replicated in new software.

Obviously, not every image is suitable for converting to black and white, and part of the skill of a successful conversion is in picking a photograph that will be enhanced. When you’ve played with Tonality for long enough you’ll realize the color info is there, it’s just that the saturation sliders are set to zero. This opens up one of the most powerful features of the software: the ability to set split toning and selective color effects. The app effectively becomes a custom Instagram generator, creating grainy, vintage-looking masterpieces with vignettes and frame — ideal for social media. Any collection of slider settings can be saved as a preset for quick application, but it will be a long time before you use up the 150+ presets, including film emulation, vintage looks, and HDR.

Tonality opens up into a flexible photo editing system that creates striking effects quickly and at no risk to your originals. It’s not a one-stop editing shop — you’ll want to pair this with Lightroom, Photoshop Elements, or Intensify Pro. But if mono’s your thing, this is a great addition.

The bottom line. A great app to complement your image editor, with many ways to achieve striking shots.