The Control Points are the red dots (please look carefully, as they are a bit difficult to see in this image). To do this, I scrolled down to the Control Points panel (Figure 4, lower left) and added four control points as shown in Figure 5. That took care of the overall luminosity balance, but I wanted to fade the impact of the shrubbery between the large upper branches.
This panel’s sliders perform similarly to those in Lightroom’s Grayscale panel and Photoshop’s B&W Adjustment Layer: they alter tonality based on the original predominant colour. Then I decided to lighten the tree bark a bit by increasing the yellow component in the Sensitivity panel.
#SILVER EFEX PRO 2 NOT WORKING FULL#
The full set of luminosity and toning controls are shown in Figure 4 below.įor the tree image, I increased both brightness and contrast moderately by shifting the sliders for Brightness and Contrast (Figure 4, upper left), as well as by moderately pulling in the end points of the Tone Curve (Figure 4, upper right). I wanted a bit more contrast, fading of the shrubbery between the upper branches and a less brown, more sepia tone. It provided the best starting point for further work. For this particular image, I thought that “Antique Plate II” (second row from the bottom, fourth from the left) comes the closest to what was in my mind’s eye for this image: a primary focus on the structure of the tree and its largest branches. As I’ll show, having selected any one of them, they can be “tweaked” to satisfaction using the various controls down the right-hand side set of panels in the application window. 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.
#SILVER EFEX PRO 2 NOT WORKING 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.
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