A first.
I have over 2500 images to date on my website, and to this point a tad over 130 of them are black and whites. I’ve used a few different software programs over the years to edit them, but once I ran across Silver Efex pro long ago, I’ve stayed with it.
There are many fine black and white conversion programs and Silver Efex is one of the best. The control point technology it shares with its companion programs from the Nik software software suite, makes creating masks - the key to at least 90% of what I need to do in Photoshop, an absolute breeze. There are even rare times you can make a complex mask in seconds that couldn’t be made by hand in Photoshop no matter how hard you tried, though no such complex mask was required in this shot.
Even so it was nice that creating a mask so I could brighten and bring out the detail in the camera lens in Silver Efex 2 only took seconds. So too was going into Veviza to lightening the skin of the girl with the backpack without effecting anything else around her.
The utter ease of selective editing, makes Silver Efex worth it just for that alone. The ability to go back and forth between the entire suite of Nik plug in filters while working on one image, makes Silver Efex even more worth acquiring. And since Google acquired Nik software and made the whole suite a free download, what are you waiting for??
While the ability to easily do complex local edits makes Silver Efex different from most, one thing it shares in common with all the good black and white conversion programs are it’s large array of global edits. Lots of presets to give you a nice starting point to jump off of, though for my particular tastes I stick with the vanilla, neutral preset, then go from there 99% of the time.
I love their group of black and white film mimic filters. I’ve used quite a few over the years to make my shots look like they were shot on, Kodak 100 Tmax pro. Or Kodak’s Panatomic X. Or Ilford’s Pan F plus. Or Agfa’s APX pro, just to name a few.
They also give you those well known color filters that mimic what darkroom developer’s of yore used on all their black and white photographs to selectively intensify one color channel over all the others. I use them quite a bit too, red, yellow, orange, etc, whatever filter worked best for a particular black and white shot.
The only color filter that I never used was blue, for it made the skin tones on people, be they black or white, look just ghastly. After the first 100 times of trying it on an black and white and hating it, I just came to trust leaving it alone until today.
For whatever reason when I applied the blue filter to this image their skin tones didn’t turn into some hideous dark tone, they got richer and more detailed instead (well except for the girl with the backpack, and even she wasn’t too bad, and a quick trip to Veviza for a few seconds took care of that – guys you’ve GOT to download this suite!!!)
So the one filter I never had any use for finally got its one day in the sun. As they say, there is a first time for everything.
ManhattanNYCsummerCentral ParkBethesda Fountaincandidblack and whitesld5
