Bi-Colour Filters are just one of the Filters in Color Efex, part of the Nik Collection. What they do is apply one color to the top part of the picture and another to the bottom. This might sound like a bit of a cheap novelty, but it’s surprising just how effective this Bi-Colour Filter can be – and how often.
Ideas and effects
It's easy to get stuck in a rut and run out of ideas, so here are a few treatments and editing effects I've tried out over the years, with explanations about how they work and how to replicate them. I hope you find them useful!
What is solarisation in photography and how do you recreate it digitally?
Solarisation is a darkroom printing technique made famous by photographer Man Ray, and it involves re-exposing a print to light half way through its development time. This results in a partial reversal of the tones in the image, so that you get a mixture of a positive and negative image.
Dodging and burning techniques, the key to black and white imagery
Dodging and burning is an old-school black and white darkroom process for enhancing black and white images. It was (and is) carried out while the print is being exposed under the enlarger. It’s a process that sounds unsophisticated and largely unrepeatable but it’s at the heart of black and white photography, whether it’s carried out in a traditional darkroom or in photo editing software.
How do you create a color infrared look? Here’s the Infrared Film Filter in Nik Color Efex
Infrared photography is fascinating because it uses light below the visible spectrum to produce ethereal black and white images and surreal false color with color films. Strictly speaking, it requires film sensitized specifically for infrared wavelengths or camera sensors with the infrared filters removed. But it is possible to achieve the same look digitally using regular color images.
How do you create a vintage look? Here’s how the Vintage filter in Nik Color Efex does it
One of the ways to create a vintage look for color photographs is to use the color grading tools in most photo editors to shift and fade the colors to look ‘old’. You can use guesswork (or experience) but in Nik Color Efex there’s a Film Efex: Vintage filter that can give you a good head start but still lets you make your own adjustments. Here’s how it works.
What is the Bleach Bypass effect and how does it work in Nik Color Efex?
The bleach bypass process is an old analog darkroom technique that produced characteristically punchy images with high contrast, high definition and reduced saturation. You can reproduce this effect digitally in many different programs. Here, I’m using the Bleach Bypass filter in Nik Color Efex, which is one of the easiest and best implementations of this particular look.
Is there a Leica ‘look’, how do you get it, and how much is actually your camera work?
I’ve had a fascination with the Leica ‘look’ ever since I first went on a shoot with a digital Leica M rangefinder. The contrast and colors were exceptionally intense, the M-series lenses added a subtle vignette at wider apertures and there was an intriguing shift in the color palette compared to the clinical accuracy of other cameras.
Lightroom tip: Lightroom’s new Reflections removal tool really does work, and here’s how to use it
It sounds nigh-on impossible, but Lightroom’s new AI powered Remove option really can wipe away reflections in glass as if they had never existed. This is something which would be very, very difficult to achieve using regular editing tools. I’ve tried it out on a number of different images and been impressed by just how effective it is.
Lightroom tip: How to get Lightroom’s new Distraction Removal (People) tool to work!
This post was written soon after the new Distraction tools were added to Lightroom, so some of the issues I talk about may have been solved by the time you read this. This post is for anyone struggling to get the early version working…
Lightroom tip: Lightroom’s Enhance feature just got a huge update – did you spot it?
Lightroom’s Enhance feature used to create a new (larger) DNG file alongside the original RAW file, but now it doesn’t! That’s huge news for anyone who uses Adobe’s AI denoising tool regularly. Here’s how the new setup works.