Sometimes your shots don’t quite have the lighting you wanted, even when you had the time to set up the lighting carefully, such as when you’re shooting a still life, for example. The scene looked OK when you assembled it and pressed the shutter button, but later on you look at it more carefully on […]
Color Efex
Color Efex is a software plug in that’s part of the DxO Nik collection. It offers a huge variety of preset image effects you can browse through and apply to your photos with a single click, but you can also adjust the filters manually and even stack them to create custom ‘recipes’. Color Efex also offers powerful localised adjustments via ‘control points’, 'control lines', polygon selections and more.
Check out the related articles below or read this full Nik Collection review.
Create spectacular landscapes with the Color Efex Pro Infrared Film effect
Infra-red photography can produce the most amazing and surreal pictures, and if shooting with infra-red film is no longer practical, it is possible to achieve the same infra-red effect with software. The Color Efex Pro Infrared Film effect aims to reproduce the look of infrared films faithfully from regular digital images. Technically, this is not […]
Give your landscapes a mystic glow with the Color Efex Pro Glamour Glow effect
The Color Efex Pro Glamour Glow effect would normally be used on portraits, but I think it works rather well on other subjects too. It adds an ethereal glow to everyday subjects, gives colours a pure, rich depth and lets you shift the colour balance too. I’m going to use it on this autumn shot […]
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 […]
Use Color Efex Pro control points to mask your graduated filters
Graduated filters are perfect for toning down bright skies, but they have a problem. Any object sticking up into the sky gets ‘graduated’ too! But Color Efex Pro control points are the answer… All the filters in Color Efex Pro have opacity control points. You can use them to hide the filter effect in areas […]
Get better tonal adjustments with the Tonal Contrast filter in Color Efex Pro
You can make basic tonal adjustments with levels and more sophisticated modifications with curves, but the Tonal Contrast filter in DxO Color Efex Pro goes a whole step further. The problem with curves adjustments is that any change you make in one area of the image curve has a knock-on effect on the rest. If […]
How to create your own processing recipe in Color Efex Pro 4
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]