You can use Silver Efex Pro perfectly effectively by choosing a preset and then modifying the settings as necessary using the tools panel. What you may not realise is that Silver Efex Pro simulates specific film types very closely. In fact, you can choose your film manually in the Film Types panel. And if that's not enough you can create a black … [Read more...]
Create mono with a difference with this Lightroom selective colour technique
Black and white doesn't have to be completely black and white! If you preserve just a splash of colour you can create a very striking effect, and it's a very easy technique to try out because it doesn't need any complex selections or colour adjustments. The same broad technique can be applied in most image-editors, but here's how the Lightroom … [Read more...]
Exploring the Silver Efex Pro Film Noir effect
Silver Efex Pro comes with a large range of varied and powerful black and white presets, and one of my favourites is the Silver Efex Pro Film Noir effect. This does every bad thing we're told to avoid with our high-quality digital images! It reduces the sharpness of the picture, adds a hefty dose of grain, darkens the edges of the frame with a … [Read more...]
Try out this Silver Efex Pro tutorial for subtle black and white portrait effects
Successful black and white photography sometimes gets its power from strong contrasts and graphic shapes, and sometimes it relies on subtlety and control. Nik Software's Silver Efex Pro, now taken over by Google, can do both. In principle, you should be able to do all these things in Photoshop, but in practice I think plug-ins like this do a much … [Read more...]
How to bring out textures with the Silver Efex Pro Structure slider
The Structure tool is one of Silver Efex Pro's secret weapons. It helps to give black and white images that indefinable 'bite' that we're always trying to recapture with our digital images. You can think of the Silver Efex Pro Structure control it as a kind of 'coarse sharpening', which acts over a slightly larger radius than conventional … [Read more...]
Discover the power of the Silver Efex Pro 2 soft contrast control
The Soft Contrast slider is one of the new features introduced in Silver Efex Pro 2, and its effects are quite different to the regular Contrast control. At first it can seem quite difficult to work out a use for it, but you'll soon discover when you start digging around in the presets that it keeps on cropping up. So here's an example where its … [Read more...]