• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • News
  • Reviews
  • Organizing
  • Editing
  • Ideas
  • Explainers
  • Photo-editing A-Z
  • About

Life after Photoshop

  • Lightroom Classic
  • Capture One
  • Nik Collection
    • Analog Efex
    • Color Efex
    • Silver Efex
    • HDR Efex
    • Viveza
    • Sharpener
    • Dfine
    • Perspective Efex (retired)
  • DxO PureRAW
  • ON1 Photo RAW
  • Exposure X

Main Content

Nik Color Efex Solarisation filter

What is solarisation in photography and how do you recreate it digitally?

Solarisation is a darkroom printing technique made famous by photographer Man Ray, and it involves re-exposing a print to light half way through its development time. This results in a partial reversal of the tones in the image, so that you get a mixture of a positive and negative image.

Latest

Dodging and burning – after

Dodging and burning techniques, the key to black and white imagery

Dodging and burning is an old-school black and white darkroom process for enhancing black and white images. It was (and is) carried out while the print is being exposed under the enlarger. It’s a process that sounds unsophisticated and largely unrepeatable but it’s at the heart of black and white photography, whether it’s carried out in a traditional darkroom or in photo editing software.

Nik Color Efex Infrared Film Filter after

How do you create a color infrared look? Here’s the Infrared Film Filter in Nik Color Efex

Infrared photography is fascinating because it uses light below the visible spectrum to produce ethereal black and white images and surreal false color with color films. Strictly speaking, it requires film sensitized specifically for infrared wavelengths or camera sensors with the infrared filters removed. But it is possible to achieve the same look digitally using regular color images.

Basic black and white adjustments

Basic black and white adjustments in your digital darkroom

Black and white images are rarely perfect straight from the camera. If you’ve ever used your camera’s black and white modes hoping for some magical monochrome transformation, you’ll probably have come away disappointed. Black and white imagery relies on light and contrast… and a degree of exaggeration. Sometimes real-world scenes don’t provide the tonal depth and drama that a black and white rendering needs, and very often images will only come alive in the darkroom, or in its modern digital replacement, your image editor.

Nik Film Efex: Vintage Filter – after

How do you create a vintage look? Here’s how the Vintage filter in Nik Color Efex does it

One of the ways to create a vintage look for color photographs is to use the color grading tools in most photo editors to shift and fade the colors to look ‘old’. You can use guesswork (or experience) but in Nik Color Efex there’s a Film Efex: Vintage filter that can give you a good head start but still lets you make your own adjustments. Here’s how it works.

Reviews

Adobe Lightroom (2025)

Adobe Lightroom review (2025)

Adobe Lightroom (2025) verdict: 4.1 stars Adobe Lightroom does something pretty amazing. It makes all your photos available to organize and edit anywhere, on any device. But this does come at a cost. One drawback is that you have to pay for Adobe’s Creative Cloud storage, which is now included in its subscription plans. Another is that this version of Lightroom is slicker and more streamlined than the original Lightroom Classic, but also sacrifices some organizational features.

Nik Collection 8 HDR Efex

DxO Nik Collection 8 review

Verdict: 4.6 stars Nik Collection 8 has some interesting new features for existing users, but mostly for those who use Photoshop as their main ‘host’ application for launching the plug-ins. Silver Efex gets a major interface overhaul, however. This is very welcome, though its actual capabilities are little changed. Otherwise, apart from some workflow tweaks, it’s business as usual for this epic plug-in suite. Frankly, the Nik Collection is already such a wide-ranging, powerful and inspiring set of photo-enhancement tools that it’s always a bit of a surprise to find DxO has found anything to improve.

DxO PureRAW 5

DxO PureRAW 5 review

Verdict: 4.4 stars PureRAW 5 brings an even newer, even better DeepPRIME XD3 denoising process, XD3 X-Trans sensor support in beta, new local adjustments for selective sharpening and denoising and new custom presets for export. The results are quite amazing, as ever, though it’s hard to see any visible improvement over the earlier DeepPRIME XD2 process and there are a couple of niggly little operational glitches.

ACDSee Photo Studio 2025 Ultimate screenshot

Why don’t I talk about ACDSee?

I review a lot of software on Life after Photoshop but I rarely talk about ACDSee. Why? On the face of it, ACDSee Photo Studio 2025 is a powerful all-in-one photo organizing, developing and editing tool that embraces the latest developments in AI and is available both as a subscription and subscription free. So what’s not to like?

More reviews

How to articles

Achieving the Leica 'look' – annotation

Is there a Leica ‘look’, how do you get it, and how much is actually your camera work?

I’ve had a fascination with the Leica ‘look’ ever since I first went on a shoot with a digital Leica M rangefinder. The contrast and colors were exceptionally intense, the M-series lenses added a subtle vignette at wider apertures and there was an intriguing shift in the color palette compared to the clinical accuracy of other cameras.

Lightroom Masking after

Everyday edits: This minimalist still life shows Lightroom’s AI masking working perfectly

Minimalism, brutalism and architecture, three of my favourite things. So when I got the chance to spend a week in a converted WWII bunker, I spent much of my time exploring the objects, compositions and lighting in this strange but extraordinary environment.

Lightroom after shot

Everyday edits: Bournemouth Pier, with Lightroom Classic’s Storm Clouds Adaptive Preset

It was a dark, blustery day in May. Bournemouth, on the UK’s southern coastline, was not looking its best. But I didn’t want to try to glamourise it, I wanted to make this place look exactly how it felt on that day – only more so.

Dynamic range adjustments

Have I been looking at dynamic range all wrong? And how much is enough?

So until now I’ve been thinking of dynamic range recovery as being a combination of highlight recovery and shadow recovery. But actually, I’m starting to think that if my highlights are blown, that’s maybe not a dynamic range issue, but an exposure error on my part. I’ll explain what I mean.

Josef Sudek style in ON1 Photo RAW

Recreating a classic style digitally in ON1 Photo RAW: Josef Sudek

Josef Sudek was a photographer from what is now the Czech Republic who had a characteristic style, particularly later in his life, when he drew inspiration from the objects that surrounded him and the effects of light. His images were deep, soft and mysterious. But is it possible to achieve some of that look digitally without producing just a cheap, fake effect?

More Posts from this Category

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe to this site

Enter your email address to subscribe to Life after Photoshop and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Adobe Lightroom: what is it, where do you get it, what does it cost in 2025?

Adobe Lightroom is not one program but three. You could … [Read More...] about Adobe Lightroom: what is it, where do you get it, what does it cost in 2025?

The best photo editing software for organizing, editing, RAW and effects

Choosing the best image editing software used to be easy. … [Read More...] about The best photo editing software for organizing, editing, RAW and effects

Layers explained

Layers explained: what they do and how to use them

Layers are a central part of many photo editing processes, … [Read More...] about Layers explained: what they do and how to use them

BAN adjustments… Basic And Necessary image corrections to do first

Photo editing software does two quite different jobs. It can … [Read More...] about BAN adjustments… Basic And Necessary image corrections to do first

More Posts from this Category

Mission statement

Life after Photoshop is not anti-Photoshop or anti-subscriptions. It exists to showcase the many Photoshop alternatives that do more, go further, or offer more creative inspiration to photographers.

Affiliate links

Life after Photoshop is funded by affiliate links and may be paid a commission for downloads. This does not affect the price you pay, the ratings in reviews or the software selected for review.

Contact

Email lifeafterphotoshop@gmail.com

Copyright © 2025 Life after Photoshop · News Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.