Silver Efex Pro is near-legendary plug-in for black and white photography that recreates classic film and darkroom effects. It’s part of the DxO Nik Collection and not sold separately. It can also be used a standalone program or as an external editor by programs like Capture One.
Nik Software must have discovered some unknown digital alchemy when it developed Silver Efex Pro. Suddenly, here was a digital imaging tool that really could replicate the look, feel and even the ‘soul’ of silver-based black and white. And one of the favourite tools of traditional black and white photographers was the ‘contrast’ filter. These…
Fine art can mean a whole lot of different things, but here I’m just going to show how to turn a colour image into a simple graphic composition that could work quite nicely when you hang it on your wall. There are two things you need in order for this to work. One is an…
Anyone who used to shoot with black and white film will have a favourite, and I always had a soft spot for Kodak Tri-X. I didn’t mind the grain because I liked that gritty, ‘documentary’ feel, and sometimes I push-processed during development to get a little more contrast, especially in the depths of the Northern…
Burning in the edges of your pictures is a great way to enhance the composition because it improves the picture’s overall contrast and helps you concentrate attention on the picture’s focal point. The point is that converting your pictures to black and white is just the start, and ‘digital’ techniques like channel mixing are useful…
The old-fashioned art of black and white photography went far beyond the initial picture-taking. Another, equally important creative process took place in the darkroom, where the image was dodged and burned to enhance the tones and concentrate the viewer’s gaze on the subject and composition. Dodging and burning is a bit of a lost art….