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…
DxO Color Efex Pro 4 has a number of contrast enhancing filter effects which work in subtly different ways. The Tonal Contrasts filter boosts contrast within specific tonal ranges, while the Detail Extractor can be used to produce HDR style effects. And at first glance, so does the Dark Contrasts filter, though the net result…
If you’ve used Photoshop and Elements, you’ll probably have noticed the History palette. This keeps track of everything you’ve done since you opened the image, so if something goes wrong you can backtrack to an earlier state. Photoshop goes one better than Elements by adding a Snapshot feature, where you can separately record specific image…
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…
Photoshop Elements does not have the curves feature found in Photoshop itself and many other image-editing programs, and many people cite this as one of its limitations. I don’t really agree. There’s always more than one way to do anything, including modifying the contrast, and I find this ‘overlay’ method so quick and useful I…
Graduated filters are perfect for toning down bright skies, but they have a problem. Any object sticking up into the sky gets ‘graduated’ too! But Color Efex Pro control points are the answer… All the filters in Color Efex Pro have opacity control points. You can use them to hide the filter effect in areas…
The Capture One Color Editor is designed for subtle manipulation, not wholesale colour substitutions. It has much in common with the Replace Color tool in Photoshop and Elements, but restricts itself to modest hue shifts rather than complete colour changes. It’s really useful where the image as a whole is more or less right, but…