In fact, I’ve been enjoying my new images so much that I’ve been printing them like mad on Epson Exhibition Fiber using the Advanced Black & White mode of my Epson Stylus® Pro 3880 printer. I really liked this shot in color, but the new look created in “black and white” was memorizing. It’s natural, but I found myself even experimenting with my fashion images using my Super Selenium preset to create shots like this one below:Ī color favorite, looks great with my Super Selenium preset Of course, when people think of black and white photography or even duotones I think visions of Ansel Adams and landscapes come to mind. I like both so it becomes fun to have multiple versions of your favorite shots My 2nd version went for a cooler and brighter look Of course, with Silver Efex Pro 2 (a.k.a., SEP2) I can just leave well enough alone with just one version of my image so I end up trying a bunch of different presets like I did in this article and in the photo below: Of course, I should probably use the term Duotone rather than black and white because most of my images, like the one above, ended up introducing some other color for a nice warm tone to the image. It became super addicting to play around with Silver Efex to the point where sometimes I’d probably spend a little too much time having fun creating multiple black and white variants of my images. I found myself falling in love with the new presets and creating some of my own. When I got my hands on an early release of Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro 2, I went nuts with it. I created this duotone of one of my favorite landscape shots. Using the 034 Yellowed 2 Preset as a starting point, Now my portfolio on Zenfolio even has some black and white images in it – something I thought I’d never do. In fact, in some cases even saved some bad shots with it. Over time I fell in love with Silver Efex Pro and found myself trying it out on various photos and I started to like it more and more. In my first review of Silver Efex Pro 1, I mentioned that “black and white photography isn’t really my thing” but I went on to say it was a fun product. Photo Copyright © Ron Martinsen – All Rights Reserved List Price: $149 (entire Nik Collection).Silver Efex Pro 2 offers many great new presets like 032 Film Noir 3 shown above Customize your own presets and import additional presets from company updates and other users. Preset filters include 18 popular film types, as well as additional toners, borders and vignettes. As you edit, the built-in histores your changes side by side, so you can undo any unwanted edits at anytime. The Dynamic Brightness and Soft Contrast features allow you to customize brightness and contrast, emphasizing lines and shapes while maintaining highlight exposure and defining depth of field. Silver Efex Pro (above), part of the Google Nik Collection, is the go-to plug-in for many pro photographers. These presets are useful, as they can be used to match specific analog film grains for a desired look or as a starting place for your own experimentation.
While most software gives you the ability to customize and personalize your images through individual edits to highlights, shadows, contrast, color filters and grain, many also have preset filters. Whether you previsualize every image, experiment as you process or fall somewhere in between, using specialized software to convert your images from color to black-and-white can make the process easier and help achieve better results. While many experienced black-and-white photographers previsualize their images in monochrome, knowing which images they’ll convert as they’re composing the shot, others make the black-and-white decision during their postprocess workflow as they spontaneously experiment with individual images. Unlike analog film photography, where you would choose either color or black-and-white film before even touching your other camera settings, in the digital era, photographers generally shoot in color and then convert their images to black-and-white using digital software.