One of the things I do with quite a few of my photographs is to convert them into black and white. Sometimes this is because of the level of noise on the images when taking low level photographs.

I've taken the following image and converted it using four tools - Aperture, Lightworks, Gimp and iPhoto.

Media_httpjanedallawa_bgndb

The following are the outcomes - in each case you can click on the images to download the full image - they have an extension according to the tool used, so black and white - iphoto.jpg etc. In all cases I have used the basic transformation provided and haven't updated any of the settings, or done any further manipulation. The images are ordered, clockwise as Aperture, Lightworks, iPhoto and Gimp.

Media_httpjanedallawa_ddacl
Media_httpjanedallawa_imqse

Media_httpjanedallawa_ddavz
Media_httpjanedallawa_jnqgl

To my eye both aperture and lightroom do a pretty good job with this image, both Gimp and iPhoto seem to have lost a lot the contrast. So, for this task both aperture and lightroom get a point.