Add drama to your shots with the Dark Contrasts filter in Color Efex Pro

03 Adding an opacity control point

To fix this I’ve clicked the ‘-‘ (minus) button in the Control Point section underneath the filter tools, then clicked on an area of the sky near the horizon. This removes the filter effect in that area. Sometimes that’s enough, but here it’s gone from one extreme to the other – so I drag the control point’s opacity slider to an intermediate value so that the Dark Contrasts effect is toned down but not removed completely.

04 More control points

These opacity control points operate over a circular area, so instead of increasing the size of the circle, which would make the opacity effect take in too much of the sky and the foreground, I simply add two more opacity-reducing control points (circled). This reduces the effect on the clouds in the lower part of the sky only – I think the top of the sky is fine as it is.

05 Vignette effect

I’ve finished this image by adding a Lens: Vignette filter. It’s nothing to do with the Dark Contrasts filter, but I thought it would finish off the dark, stormy effect quite nicely.