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How to apply the Zone System in Silver Efex Pro

November 8, 2013 by Life after Photoshop

10 Hide the alerts

Silver Efex Pro Zone System

All this cross-hatching can make it hard to judge the effectiveness of the image as a whole, but you don’t have to disable your zone alerts completely – you can simply hide them by de-selecting the checkbox underneath the histogram.

11 Tonality Protection

Silver Efex Pro Zone System

Now I can see that the sun-facing sides of the rocks in the foreground are just a little too bright and harsh. I’m not going to try to fix them with control points (how many would that take?). Instead, I’m using the Highlights slider (circled) in the Tonality Protection section of the Global Adjustment panel just to pull back the highlights globally.

12 The finished picture

Silver Efex Pro Zone System

This is just so much better than the start shot, and I think the key is the digital re-interpretation of Ansel Adam’s Zone System and darkroom techniques. You have to create an image with a full tonal range to start from, and then use dodging and burning techniques to balance the tones in the picture and make the composition work.

Read more:

  • Black and white photography basics
  • 5 ways to convert color images to black and white
  • More Silver Efex Pro tutorials

Related

Pages: Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4

Filed Under: Nik Collection, TutorialsTagged With: Black and white, Silver Efex Pro

Life after Photoshop is owned and run by photographer and journalist Rod Lawton. Rod has been a photography journalist for nearly 40 years, starting out in film (obviously) but then migrating to digital. He has worked as a freelance journalist, technique editor and channel editor, and is now Group Reviews Editor on Digital Camera World. Life after Photoshop is a personal project started in 2013.

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