The Basic Adjustments panel is one of the ‘optional’ Filters in Nik Silver Efex 8. What this means is that if you are building an effect from scratch, you can add it manually from the list of Filters in the left sidebar, or not use it at all. You will find it’s included as standard in many Silver Efex presets, though, and despite being ‘Basic’, it’s actually central to a lot of black and white ‘looks’.
The Basic Adjustments panel offers three main sections: Brightness Adjustments, Contrast Adjustments and Structure Adjustments. If all you’re concerned with is some simple tweaks to the brightness and contrast, you really don’t need to go deep at all because you can just use the Brightness and Contrast sliders in their relevant sections.
However, there’s a lot more to explore.
Silver Efex Brightness Adjustments and what they can do
Underneath the main Brightness slider you’ll see that the Basic Adjustments panel also has Highlights, Midtones and Shadows sliders. You can these to adjust the brightness of these three different tonal ranges, and it’s a good way to handle some more difficult subjects and more complex lighting. It’s very effective, and much simpler than curves adjustments or local adjustment/masking tools.
Underneath this is a Dynamic Brightness slider. This is a little more complex, because it makes the image brighter or darker while preserving the full tonal range of the picture – unlike regular brightness adjustments, which can leave images looking flat or lifeless.
The tools in this Brightness section might look more complicated than most, but they are also very powerful and very subtle, and definitely worth experimenting with.
Silver Efex Contrast Adjustments – clever and sophisticated
If you just want a simple contrast boost, just use the Contrast slider at the top. It does exactly what it says. The Amplify Whites and Amplify Blacks sliders underneath, though, do something a lot more sophisticated, and which you won’t find in other black and white tools. They add luminosity and depth in the brighter and darker areas to give black and white images a rich quality which isn’t always easy to achieve with regular tools.
So what’s the Soft Contrast slider all about? Well when you increase contrast in the regular way, images can quickly start to look too hard and ‘brittle’. Soft Contrast adds contrast with a kind of ‘glow’ effect, so. that you still get the rich contrast between light and shade, but with a softer look. Try it – it’s rather nice.
But the Soft Contrast slider has another trick. If you apply a negative value you get a kind of tone-mapping/HDR effect, where darker tones become lighter and bright tones are darkened – but still with a full black-to-white tonal range. It’s easy to get a bit carried away and take the effect too far, but this is still a great way to handle excessive lighting contrast in a scene.
Silver Efex Structure Adjustments – think ‘Clarity’
If you’re used to the Clarity effects you get in Lightroom and other programs, then this is what you get here, except that in Silver Efex it’s called ‘Structure’. It’s a great way to add definition and contrast to a scene, and you can either apply it to the image as a whole with the ‘Structure’ slider or target the Highlights, Midtones and Shadow areas separately with the sliders below. For example, you can add some definition and drama to the sky in an outdoor shot just by adding structure to the highlights.
One word of warning, though. Structure adjustments can add noticeable edge effects around object outlines, rather like hard sharpening effects. The stronger the adjustment, the more apparent these can become.
Lastly, the ‘Fine Structure’ slider is more like the ‘structure’ adjustments in other programs, adding clarity and definition in fine detail. Photographers will often talk about ‘micro-contrast’, and this is what this slider can add.
What is ‘Tonality Protection’?
This is a standard feature in Silver Efex Filters. Sometimes a strong adjustment can lead to clipped shadow or highlight detail, and these sliders help you bring back lost detail without having to backtrack through all the filter settings to adjust them.
Local Adjustments – a whole new topic!
The Basic Adjustments panel in Silver Efex is one of a number of Filters with a Local Adjustments section at the bottom. You can use the masking tools in this panel, which includes Nik Control Points, to select the areas of the photo you want to target for adjustment rather than applying the effect to the whole scene.
This is especially useful in the Basic Adjustment panel because it has the perfect set of ‘dodging and burning’ tools for classic black and white photo editing techniques. However, Silver Efex’s masking tools are quite deep, so they will be covered in a separate article.
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