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’.
Nik Collection
The Nik Collection is an important collection of plug-ins once published by Nik Software but then taken over by Google when it bought the company. Google then made the Nik Collection free but it has now been bought for future commercial development by DxO.
See related articles below and read the full DxO Nik Collection review
Silver Efex Film Types explained, plus free downloadable cheat sheet
Silver Efex, part of the DxO Nik Collection is one of the best editing tools you can get for black and white photography, but the range of tools available and their interactions can sometimes be difficult to unravel. So here’s a guide to one of the most basic and effective tools of all – Film Styles. It’s often enough, even on its own, to produce rich and satisfying black and white versions of your digital images.
The strange alchemy of Analog Efex Filters, what they do and how they combine
Analog Efex is one of the creative plug-ins in the DxO Nik Collection and it’s a bit of an outlier because, first of all, it was developed by Google and not Nik Software (it appeared during Google’s ownership of the Nik Collection) and secondly, because it can produce the most amazing results from filters which individually don’t seem to amount to very much. I’ll explain.
Save 20% on DxO software when you buy two products, plus free premium support
DxO’s Black Friday deals may have been and gone, but there’s a new Christmas deal where you can save 20% if you buy two products, so that’s any combination of DxO PhotoLab 9.2, Nik Collection 8.2, DxO PureRAW 5.5, FilmPack 8 or ViewPoint 5. You’ll also get between 3 and 12 months of priority support, depending on the size of your order.
How to get an authentic looking vintage black and white look
So far in this series I’ve looked at black and white conversion tools, basic black and white tonal adjustments and the different ways you can use digital dodging and burning to bring black and white images to life. But if you want to make them look actually old, there’s a bit more to do. It’s not one single technique you need, but a whole bunch used together.
You’ve heard of graduated filters, but what about Nik Color Efex’s Bi-Colour Filters?
Bi-Colour Filters are just one of the Filters in Color Efex, part of the Nik Collection. What they do is apply one color to the top part of the picture and another to the bottom. This might sound like a bit of a cheap novelty, but it’s surprising just how effective this Bi-Colour Filter can be – and how often.
What is solarisation in photography and how do you recreate it digitally?
Solarisation is a darkroom printing technique made famous by photographer Man Ray, and it involves re-exposing a print to light half way through its development time. This results in a partial reversal of the tones in the image, so that you get a mixture of a positive and negative image.
How do you create a color infrared look? Here’s the Infrared Film Filter in Nik Color Efex
Infrared photography is fascinating because it uses light below the visible spectrum to produce ethereal black and white images and surreal false color with color films. Strictly speaking, it requires film sensitized specifically for infrared wavelengths or camera sensors with the infrared filters removed. But it is possible to achieve the same look digitally using regular color images.
How do you create a vintage look? Here’s how the Vintage filter in Nik Color Efex does it
One of the ways to create a vintage look for color photographs is to use the color grading tools in most photo editors to shift and fade the colors to look ‘old’. You can use guesswork (or experience) but in Nik Color Efex there’s a Film Efex: Vintage filter that can give you a good head start but still lets you make your own adjustments. Here’s how it works.
What is the Bleach Bypass effect and how does it work in Nik Color Efex?
The bleach bypass process is an old analog darkroom technique that produced characteristically punchy images with high contrast, high definition and reduced saturation. You can reproduce this effect digitally in many different programs. Here, I’m using the Bleach Bypass filter in Nik Color Efex, which is one of the easiest and best implementations of this particular look.