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Review: Nik Sofware Silver Efex Pro
Take your photos in color and then convert them to black and white. (October 27th, 2008)
The Good
- Easy to use. Anyone can edit photos in minutes. Great control of contrast, brightness, and structure. 18 presets and the ability to create your own styles and save them. U Point tool allows pinpoint editing. Powerful engine changes photos at their base level instead of pasting filters over the existing data. Online resources include FAQs, tutorials, and more photo styles free with your registered software.
The Bad
- Some features don’t work in both Aperture and Photoshop. If you want to work on tiny areas, you have to use the U Point tool multiple times. Expensive if you only want to convert a few photos. No undo command.
The package includes an installer, a user’s guide, and some sample images so you can jump right in. The learning curve may be a little steep for those of you new to black and white conversion software, but the learning time is well worth the effort. If the price makes you apprehensive, just download the convenient 15-day trial demo. Once you purchase Silver Efex Pro, you can download more than 30 additional free custom styles via the Web site.
I installed Silver Efex Pro for Adobe Photoshop and in minutes I adjusted the brightness, contrast and structure of a photo of a delicious cheese plate. The Silver Efex Pro option appears in the Filter menu in Photoshop in a Nik Software folder. We tested the software with no problems in Photoshop CS2 and CS3. When you apply the filter, initially it applies a default black and white conversion that seems infinitely customizable.
The easy to use software window includes multiple filter options on the left. Thumbnail images of a variety of preset styles appear, including Pinhole, Holga, Antique Solarization, Antique Plate I and II, Darken Contrast Vignette, Wet Rocks, Soft Skin, Infrared Film Soft and Normal, Tin Type, Cyanotype, Ambrotype, Soft Sepia, Dark Sepia, and many others. That probably seems like too many options if you’re not familiar with manipulating your photos in black and white, but artists and photographers often want more detailed control when it comes to photo editing software and Silver Efex Pro delivers.
In addition to adjusting contrast, brightness, and structure, you can do many adjustments to your photos with only one click or using a slider control. The documentation suggests you use all the tools before you create a finished photo. Below I used that same cheese plate shot and manipulated it with different tools. You can see how wild and diverse the changes are, and I only used a few of the tools. I was never able to do this much with the existing Photoshop commands.
Tool Talk
In addition to the automated Style Browser on the left, Silver Efex Pro boasts more than 20, one-click settings, and the amazing U Point tool. The right side of the window contains the Enhancement Controls. A variety of slider controls let you apply small or major edits to the photo’s tone, style, color filter, or even apply a particular film attribute. The best attribute is that it takes little time to apply a variety of edits. I use an Intel MacBook with a 2.2 GHz processor and the most complex changes I made took place in under seven seconds, but most took only one or two seconds.
The U Point technology, as seen in the small graph in the screen shot above, gives you the ability to focus on a particular area of a photograph and adjust brightness, contrast, and saturation. It’s cool that you can do this with pinpoint accuracy anywhere in the photo without having to carefully mask your subjects or painstakingly click exactly where you want to make an adjustment.