Normally, if you want to create any kind of black and white effect with the DxO Nik Collection, you’d go straight to Silver Efex Pro. However, Color Efex Pro has some black and white effects of its own. The effects are different to Silver Efex Pro’s, so although the tools aren’t quite as sophisticated, you…
Keystone correction is usually used to fix converging verticals in architectural shots – that’s the most obvious use for the Capture One keystone correction tools – but this vertical keystone correction isn’t the only kind you’ll need. Keystone distortion happens when you tilt the camera relative to your subject, and this can mean horizontal tilt…
Yesterday I looked at how Aperture handled RAW+JPEG pairs and today it’s the turn of Lightroom (now Lightroom Classic). At first glance it looks as if Lightroom RAW+JPEG pairs work in much the same way, but there is in fact a significant difference: Aperture imports both and lets you choose which one to display; Lightroom…
It’s one of the less glamorous plug-ins in the Google Nik Collection, but Google Dfine 2 still fills a valuable function. It’s a noise-reduction plug-in that goes a few steps further than the noise reduction options built into regular applications, so here’s a quick guide to how it works and what it can do. I’m…
Photoshop Elements comes with a range of pre-designed graphics for creating all manner of home projects like greetings cards, calendars and so on. It’s all very cute, but doesn’t have much to do with more serious image-editing jobs… except that it is possible to use some of these Elements graphics in more ambitious ways. To…
Color Efex Pro‘s Bi-Colour filter adds a colour gradient to your pictures, adding a subtle wash of one colour to the base and one to the top. It’s not an effect you’ll use every day, but don’t dismiss it straight away because there is a type of shot where it really comes to life, and…
Newcomers to Capture One may be confused by its talk of ‘Sessions’, which are an alternative way of browsing, selecting and editing pictures that’s still available, even though Capture One Pro now offers Aperture and Lightroom style image catalogs. ‘Sessions’ exist because Capture One isn’t just another image cataloguing and editing tool. In fact, its…
Lightroom 5 brought a whole bunch of exciting enhancements, but they weren’t all headline-grabbing editing tools – Adobe also introduced Smart Previews, which could be the most important advance of all for those of use with image collections too large to store on an internal drive. I do my day-to-day work on a laptop with…
HDR Efex Pro isn’t just for special effects. It can enhance your images in much more straightforward ways, improving the tonal balance, sky detail and colour saturation. I like to use it on landscapes, where professionals can wait for hours for the right lighting, but the rest of us have to grab shots when we…
I’ve discovered what I think is a really neat way of producing richer, deeper colours by turning your picture into black and white… well, sort of. If you’ve got an image which needs more contrast, the usual method is to use curves adjustments. But contrast and saturation are linked, so you get more saturated colours…