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Boost contrast with Silver Efex Pro’s vignettes

July 18, 2013 by Life after Photoshop

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. It’s a lot easier with digital than it was in the darkroom, of course, but now that black and white is more of a minority interest than a mainstream technique, people seem to have forgotten how to do it, when and why.

But a little extra work can make a huge difference, and here’s an example. Our start image is a very everyday record shot of an unusual rock formation on a beach. A straight black and white conversion isn’t really that much more interesting than the original, so I’ve taken the image into Silver Efex Pro 2 instead, because its special skill is recreating darkroom effects in a digital form.

  • DxO Nik Collection review
  • More Nik Collection news and tutorials
  • How to get the Nik Collection
Silver Efex Pro Vignette

I’m going to apply a very simple but very effective technique – a vignette. It concentrates attention on your subject and acts as a framing device that stops your viewer’s eyes from wandering out of the frame.

01 Pick a preset

Silver Efex Pro Vignette

You can conjour up your black and white effects from a neutral base image in Silver Efex Pro 2, but it’s much easier to pick a ‘look’ you want from the vertical list of presets on the left side of the program window. I’m going for the ‘Full Dynamic (Harsh)’ preset here because it darkens the sky a little and adds some ‘punch’ to the contrast.

02 Vignette presets

Silver Efex Pro Vignette

You can find Silver Efex Pro 2’s Vignette effects in the Finishing Adjustments panel on the right. There are a range of presets in the drop-down menu, and I’m choosing ‘Lens Falloff 3’. You can see the effects previewed live as you move down through the menu.

03 Fine tuning

Silver Efex Pro Vignette

Silver Efex Pro 2’s adjustment presets are just starting points. You can then go on to fine-tune the adjustments to get just the look you want. I’ve reduced the Amount slider (which darkens the vignette edges), moved the Circle-Rectangle slider to the right to make the vignette more rectangular, and increased  the Size value so that the darkening effect starts closer to the centre.

04 The finished image

Silver Efex Pro Vignette

I’m much  happier with this. Silver Efex Pro 2 has produced a more contrasty, better-defined image, and the vignette has really focused attention on the rock in the centre, emphasising its isolation and the strangeness of the overall scene.

Read more:

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

Related

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

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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