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…
Curves adjustments are tricky to get right. Small changes can have a big impact on the image, and it’s easy to make things worse not better. That’s why Adobe’s provided a secret weapon – the Adjust Point Curve tool in Lightroom. Normally, you make curves adjustments by estimating or measuring the position of the area…
Black and white photography relies heavily on dodging and burning to add emphasis to certain parts of the image, to balance or contrast areas of tone, and improve the overall composition – and Silver Efex Pro’s control points let you do this in moments, without masks or selections. You don’t always need them. Silver Efex…
You can’t always choose the lighting you shoot in, and sometimes it’s just so flat that your pictures don’t have any depth or intensity. It doesn’t help that most digital cameras lean slightly towards overexposure in these conditions too. That’s why I wanted to have a go at ‘relighting’ some shots I took in Paris…
You can make basic tonal adjustments with levels and more sophisticated modifications with curves, but the Tonal Contrast filter in DxO Color Efex Pro goes a whole step further. The problem with curves adjustments is that any change you make in one area of the image curve has a knock-on effect on the rest. If…