When I posted the video of Color Efex Pro and Vivesa the other day, I deliberately left out my favourite plug-in of all the plug-ins in the Nik suite, Silver Efex Pro, mainly because I felt it deserved its own post. I'm still working on a little screen cast to show the software in action, but I thought I might post a little teaser in the mean time. If you haven't heard of Silver Efex Pro before, it's a fantastic plug in for Lightroom, Photoshop and Aperture, whose sole purpose is to make great black and white images. To quote an old tv ad, "it does what it says on the tin". Silver Efex Pro is an amazing plug-in and you can get spectacular results from it. Now that Google have dropped the price of the Nik suite, there hasn't been a better time to get it. Here's a quick example from an image I took the other day. Let's start with the original colour version:
It's a nice subject, but the light isn't great and there's a lot of distracting elements in the shot. With Silver Efex Pro, not only can you do black and white conversions, but you can dodge and burn within the interface among with other adjustments. Here's the result:
I think this works much better and its a much better image than the colour version. I'll have a screencast showing how I did this soon.
