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…
Elements 12 is designed to be all things to all people, offering simple image fixes for beginners, Guided edits for those who want to try something more ambitious and learn about the Elements editing tools at the same time, and Expert mode, where you have full manual control and can achieve many of the effects…
Like other HDR tools, HDR Efex Pro 2 is designed to work with a sequence of bracketed exposures which cover a wider dynamic range than a single image could record. This means you need to pay special attention to the HDR Efex Pro merge tools. You’ll see these whenever you open a series of images,…
Dodging and burning was a standard darkroom technique for black and white photographers, but it works just as well on colour shots. ‘Dodging’ is where you lighten selected areas of the image and ‘burning’ is where you darken them. With the Lightroom adjustment brush tool this is really easy to do, and you can control…
Successful black and white photography sometimes gets its power from strong contrasts and graphic shapes, and sometimes it relies on subtlety and control. Silver Efex Pro, now taken over by DxO in the Nik Collection, can do both. In principle, you should be able to do all these things in Photoshop, but in practice I…
Photoshop Elements can open just as many different RAW file formats as Photoshop itself, since it too comes with the Adobe Camera Raw converter. The version you get with Elements doesn’t have all tools you get in the Photoshop version, but Elements RAW conversions do let you optimise your images very effectively before you open…
Nik Software HDR Efex Pro 2 is now part of the DxO Nik Collection, but the software itself is unchanged – it remains one of the most approachable and most effective HDR tools you can get. But while the bundled HDR Efex Pro 2 presets are many and varied, you can also create and save…
The Graduated Filter tool is one of Lightroom’s most useful features. It can darken overexposed skies, working directly with the RAW data to recover blown highlights at the same time. But it’s easy to overlook the Lightroom Graduated Filter Color effect. Normally, you might just darken the sky and stop there, but the small Color…
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…
When you hear the word ‘panorama’, you usually think of sweeping, letterbox-shaped vistas which are about ten times wider than they are high. Panoramas this wide, however, are very difficult to print and display effectively, and often lack the visual impact you meant them to have. In fact, traditional ‘panoramic’ cameras didn’t always go this…