Like all good black and white photo editing tools, Silver Efex can ‘filter’ the colours in your digital images to translate them into different shades of grey. You can replicate the effect of traditional black and white ‘contrast’ filters, achieving dramatic blue skies with a red filter effect, richer landscape tones with a yellow filter effect and more. Here’s how it works.
So the first thing to know is that there are two places to create this effect, not one. The first lies in Silver Efex’s Film Styles panel. This is a standard fixture in the right sidebar in Silver Efex 8, and it’s there whatever other filters and presets you apply.
You can choose a Film Style from a drop-down menu which lists many classic black and white films. When you do this, the panel is populated with settings for Sensitivity, Levels & Curves and Grain.
It’s the Sensitivity panel that’s interesting here, because this adjusts the strengths of different colour ranges in the original image to match the spectral sensitivity of that film. However, you can adjust these sliders manually to achieve darker blues, lighter greens and so on. That’s fine, but if you want to ‘filter’ your black and white images this way, I’d suggest using the proper tool.
The Silver Efex 8 Colour Filter
You can add the Colour Filter from the left sidebar (or it may already have been added if you’ve chosen a preset effect. What’s interesting about this filter is that it uses an approach which will be familiar to photographers. It displays a set of filter colour buttons you can click on directly and – if you then want to modify this effect, you can do it using the controls below.
For example, where clicking a button selects a specific colour range, the Hue slider below lets you adjust that colour range precisely. It’s often interesting to move the slider across the Hue scale to see how it affects the image in the main window.
Or you might click the ‘red filter’ button but decide the effect just isn’t strong enough. This is easily fixed by moving the Strength slider. In fact it’s possible to produce much stronger black and white filter effects digitally than was ever possible using regular optical filters with black and white film.
The only danger is increasingly visible edge artefacts. This digital filtration process changes the mix of the red, green and blue colour channels, placing a lot more emphasis on the red or blue channels, for example. When all three colour channels are mixed equally, artefacts aren’t a problem, but when you start leaning heavily on one or two, the limited colour information becomes apparent. In other words, you need to know when to stop!
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If you want to keep all this information as a permanent resource, just download the cheat sheet below.
