Color Efex Pro 4 doesn’t just boast a huge list of great filter effects, it also lets you ‘stack’ them in combination and then save your own, unique style as a ‘Recipe’. Nik Software really pulled out all the stops with Color Efex Pro 4. There were many useful additions and tweaks to the filters, […]
DxO Nik Collection
With the launch of the DxO Nik Collection 3, the Collection now consists of eight different plug-ins, including four of the best creative tools for photographers you can buy today. Silver Efex Pro is still unrivalled for its black and white photography effects, Color Efex Pro has a dazzling array of photographic effects, Analog Efex Pro is superb at evoking classic analog film and darkroom effects and HDR Efex Pro makes HDR merging and editing easy enough for anyone to get great results straight out of the box. The new plug in, Perspective Efex, corrects perspective distortion and more.
How to create a fine art effect with Silver Efex Pro 2
Fine art can mean a whole lot of different things, but here I’m just going to show how to turn a colour image into a simple graphic composition that could work quite nicely when you hang it on your wall. There are two things you need in order for this to work. One is an […]
Ho to get an HDR effect from a single image in Color Efex Pro
There are so many filters in Color Efex Pro that it can take a long, long time to work out all the things that it can do. Some of the tools are obvious, like Levels and Curves or Graduated Filters, but some are less so, and the Detail Extractor is a prime example. It sounds […]
How to save a preset for Kodak Tri-X black and white in Silver Efex Pro
Anyone who used to shoot with black and white film will have a favourite, and I always had a soft spot for Kodak Tri-X. I didn’t mind the grain because I liked that gritty, ‘documentary’ feel, and sometimes I push-processed during development to get a little more contrast, especially in the depths of the Northern […]
Adding localised levels and curves adjustments in Color Efex Pro 4
DxO Color Efex Pro 4 isn’t just a collection of special effects. It also has a number of powerful image-editing tools hidden amongst them, and one of these is the Levels & Curves tool. You can use this to make adjustments to your images in the same way you would in Photoshop, Elements and other […]
Silver Efex Pro 2
Originally developed by Nik Software and sold separately, this is now part of Google’s Nik Collection, following Google’s buy-out of the company. It’s a black and white conversion, enhancement and effects plug-in that replicates the look of traditional silver halide films and darkroom processes with uncanny accuracy and real power. There are many black and […]
Color Efex Pro 4
Color Efex Pro 4 is a image-effects plug-in for Photoshop, Elements, Lightroom and Aperture. It was originally published by Nik Software as a standalone plug-in, but now that Nik has been bought out by Google, it’s being sold as part of the Google Nik Collection, a suite which contains all of Nik’s plug-ins at a […]
Use edge burning to enhance your composition in Silver Efex Pro 2
Burning in the edges of your pictures is a great way to enhance the composition because it improves the picture’s overall contrast and helps you concentrate attention on the picture’s focal point. The point is that converting your pictures to black and white is just the start, and ‘digital’ techniques like channel mixing are useful […]
How to create a moonlight effect in Color Efex Pro 4
If you look at any old Hollywood film you’d see they had a standard technique for creating ‘moonlight’. They’d simply shoot in bright sunlight, reduce the exposure and give the picture a blue tinge. The bizarre thing was that it worked – it did give the appearance of ‘night’. Moonlight isn’t actually blue, though. If […]
How to stack filters in Color Efex Pro 4
Color Efex Pro 4 (part of the DxO Nik Collection) doesn’t just apply individual filters – you can also combine, or ‘stack’ filters to create a cumulative effect. I’ve used it here to add a warm, dreamy glow to this minimalist landscape in order to show how this stacking system works. The start shot is […]