These presets are a great assist for tweaking one’s imagination about what basic type of B&W effect may best suit the subject. Click on each one and it shows a preview of that effect on the big image. OK, so where do we begin? NIK provides 29 presets down the left side of the application window. One click on the Silver Efex Pro pane (Figure 2) opens the plug-in and displays the colour image as seen in Figure One above. NIK plug-ins come with their own panel which I keep on my second display along with Photoshop menus. I figured that with all its tools and options, and especially the way in which it provides very localized control over brightness, contrast and clarity (which they call “Structure”), Silver Efex Pro may be the ideal tool for the job.įirst I optimized the image for colour.
Ik silver efex pro 2 how to#
But how to achieve this without going crazy or spending a huge amount of time on it? It seemed like a candidate for the Delete key but wait I said to myself, perhaps the essential vision I was after could be rendered in B&W in order to focus on form over colour, with the jumbled stuff somehow faded away from the basic structure of the tree. Yeah, the twisted tree is there, but so what – it’s tangled in a jumble of branches and competes for attention with the blueness of the sky. Much to the detriment of the photograph, it turned out to be a classic case of the mind and the camera seeing two different images. I love photographing trees and the twisted shape and texture of this one interested me. I made this photograph at a park near Emirgan on the Bosporus upstream from Istanbul. There are good reasons to like B&W: mood, atmosphere, but perhaps most essential, it abstracts from colour, which can be distracting, and focuses the mind’s eye on form, structure and luminosity in a photograph. The image I show here (viewed in the Silver Efex interface) is a case in point:
Being in the USD 170~200 price range it’s not exactly inexpensive, but it offers a lot. Why? Ease of use, non-destructive editing, tremendous flexibility for crafting effects and tonal ranges and most important of all: just great results. Then over a year and a half ago NIK introduced Silver Efex Pro – to my mind, the definitive application for easily creating stunning B&W photographs. While techniques such as conversion to grayscale, conversion to L*a*b*, the Channel Mixer, the Channels to Layers technique and an old faithful plug-in “Convert to Black and White Pro” have been around quite a while, the Grayscale panel in Lightroom/Camera Raw and the B&W Adjustment Layer in Photoshop CS3/CS4 really upped-the-anteas very flexible, non-destructive and powerful B&W conversion tools. Some approaches are more laborious than others, some provide more flexibility, more control and more reversibility than others, and some just seem to be able to produce better results. There have been lively debates about the best techniques, and doubtless there will be more. There’s been much discussion of Black and White (B&W) conversion techniques on the Luminous-Landscape Forum and elsewhere – it’s a timeless and favorite topic for many, because B&W remains an important artistic medium.
0 kommentar(er)
