Silver Efex, part of the DxO Nik Collection is one of the best editing tools you can get for black and white photography, but the range of tools available and their interactions can sometimes be difficult to unravel. So here’s a guide to one of the most basic and effective tools of all – Film Styles. It’s often enough, even on its own, to produce rich and satisfying black and white versions of your digital images.
Tips
The strange alchemy of Analog Efex Filters, what they do and how they combine
Analog Efex is one of the creative plug-ins in the DxO Nik Collection and it’s a bit of an outlier because, first of all, it was developed by Google and not Nik Software (it appeared during Google’s ownership of the Nik Collection) and secondly, because it can produce the most amazing results from filters which individually don’t seem to amount to very much. I’ll explain.
It’s the most basic tool ever, and Lightroom doesn’t have it: Levels and Auto Levels
So yes, Lightroom does have a Tone Curve panel which kind of does the same thing as levels adjustments, but you have to drag the black point and white point control points manually for each image – there’s no auto option. And yes, you can use Lightroom’s Auto tone adjustments, but these adjust eight different sliders at once, which is equally annoying. It’s why I keep going back to Capture One.
How to turn black and white negatives into positives in Adobe Lightroom
Lightroom doesn’t have a ‘negative’ filter for turning negative images into positives, so how do you do it? I’ve been going through my old mono negatives, rephotographing them with a camera and a macro lens, and I wanted to figure out how to convert them without using an external tool – and here’s how it’s done! (And it should work in any other software with curves adjustments.)
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.