Successful black and white photography sometimes gets its power from strong contrasts and graphic shapes, and sometimes it relies on subtlety and control. Silver Efex Pro, now taken over by DxO in the Nik Collection, can do both. In principle, you should be able to do all these things in Photoshop, but in practice I […]
Tutorials
A quick guide to Elements RAW conversions
Photoshop Elements can open just as many different RAW file formats as Photoshop itself, since it too comes with the Adobe Camera Raw converter. The version you get with Elements doesn’t have all tools you get in the Photoshop version, but Elements RAW conversions do let you optimise your images very effectively before you open […]
Learn how to use HDR Efex Pro 2 presets
Nik Software HDR Efex Pro 2 is now part of the DxO Nik Collection, but the software itself is unchanged – it remains one of the most approachable and most effective HDR tools you can get. But while the bundled HDR Efex Pro 2 presets are many and varied, you can also create and save […]
Try out the Lightroom Graduated Filter color effect
The Graduated Filter tool is one of Lightroom’s most useful features. It can darken overexposed skies, working directly with the RAW data to recover blown highlights at the same time. But it’s easy to overlook the Lightroom Graduated Filter Color effect. Normally, you might just darken the sky and stop there, but the small Color […]
How to bring out textures with the Silver Efex Pro Structure slider
The Structure tool is one of Silver Efex Pro‘s secret weapons. It helps to give black and white images that indefinable ‘bite’ that we’re always trying to recapture with our digital images. You can think of the Silver Efex Pro Structure control it as a kind of ‘coarse sharpening’, which acts over a slightly larger […]
Create a two-shot Elements Photomerge panorama!
When you hear the word ‘panorama’, you usually think of sweeping, letterbox-shaped vistas which are about ten times wider than they are high. Panoramas this wide, however, are very difficult to print and display effectively, and often lack the visual impact you meant them to have. In fact, traditional ‘panoramic’ cameras didn’t always go this […]
Add drama to your shots with the Dark Contrasts filter in Color Efex Pro
DxO Color Efex Pro 4 has a number of contrast enhancing filter effects which work in subtly different ways. The Tonal Contrasts filter boosts contrast within specific tonal ranges, while the Detail Extractor can be used to produce HDR style effects. And at first glance, so does the Dark Contrasts filter, though the net result […]
How to use the the Lightroom Snapshot feature to compare editing techniques
If you’ve used Photoshop and Elements, you’ll probably have noticed the History palette. This keeps track of everything you’ve done since you opened the image, so if something goes wrong you can backtrack to an earlier state. Photoshop goes one better than Elements by adding a Snapshot feature, where you can separately record specific image […]
Discover the power of Silver Efex Pro Soft Contrast
The Soft Contrast slider is one of the new features introduced in Silver Efex Pro 2, and its effects are quite different to the regular Contrast control. At first it can seem quite difficult to work out a use for it, but you’ll soon discover when you start digging around in the presets that it […]
How to boost contrast in Photoshop Elements with overlay mode
Photoshop Elements does not have the curves feature found in Photoshop itself and many other image-editing programs, and many people cite this as one of its limitations. I don’t really agree. There’s always more than one way to do anything, including modifying the contrast, and I find this ‘overlay’ method so quick and useful I […]