Creating a B&W photo is simple. Creating a good B&W photo is hard. And to make your life easier, there are many plugins that can help you. Nik Silver Efex is one of those. As you can see on this blog, I prefer color photos to B&W. Not that I never try B&W photos, I just don’t usually post them.

In its core the plugin is very simple. You have three basic sliders, Brightenss, Contrast and Structure. They all do exactly what they say. Changing these values will change the way the B&W photo looks. Additional you can use control points to affect a certain part of the photo, color filters which simulate that you were holding a color filter in front of you camera, add a look of different film types, vignette, toning and few more. You get everything you need to make your work easier.

Also if you are used to Nik Plugins, like Color efex, working with Silver efex it very easy. They both share the same approach and interface.

As I mentioned I don’t do many B&W shots, but sometime I use a B&W version in my post-processing. I use it to add more detail and structure to my photos. I create it on a new layer and then change it into overlay, soft-light or luminosity blending mode.

Nik Silver Efex comes with a lot of different presets, so I’m including here a few of my favorite ones

Neutral

This is a very good place to start. It gives you a nice even photo.

High Structure (smooth)

My go to preset in Silver Efex. Especially when I want the B&W version to be used to add more detail to a photo. Just never ad noise in that case.

Hight contrast (harsh)

This wan gives a darker, stronger feeling to your photo. Great for street photography.

Antique Plate I

A little more vintage feel here. It also adds a lovely color cast to you photo.

Custom settings

Probably when you start using it, you will end with choosing your own settings. Here is a how this photo of Eiffel tower would look, if I chosen to go with a black and white version.

And here is one street shots, only edited through Silver Efex Pro 2

Overall this plugin will give you better results in B&W conversion than directly Photoshop, and it also gives you the ability to tweak it, without a huge knowledge of Photoshop.

For additional information on Silver efex, you can visit the Nik collection site here http://www.google.com/nikcollection/. Google does not offer any discount codes there, but if you look around, you maybe find one of the old ones, and can get the collection for a little cheaper :)

View all my other reviews here.

The time to submit a photo edit for my Photo contest sponsored by OLONEO is over, so now the voting starts. So all of you who want to participate, just head over to this Facebook photo album  and add a like to one or more photos that you prefer.

The photo with the most likes at midnight the 8th December will be the winner.Also the judges have already been notified, so they will have the second winner selected also by that time.

And if you also still want to have a chance to win  a copy of Oloneo Photoengine, feel free to join the raffle here:

The giveaway is over, the winners have been notified

The winner of this raffle will be announced at the same time as the two other winners.

And for those curious to see how 170 versions of the same photo look like, so here they are:

If there is one essential plugin for Photographers, I think this is the one. Color efex from Nik (now a part of Google) is a huge collection of filters, each one with its own set of parameters. Just by using it, you can create a lot of stunning looks, and also correct many photography problems. To go through all the available filters would make this review huge, so I will go through my favorite ones, that help me the most in my photos.

Pro contrast

This is the most useful one. It can correct color cast, contrast and also add more dynamic contrast, which created more detail and local contrast in you photo. It also gives a certain pop your photos, so they just look better and catch the viewers eye much more than before.

Detail extractor

Can add crazy amount of detail to your photo. I’am always very careful with this one, as it can easily be overdone. But when you need to pull out detail from shadows, this filter will help you (just don’t use it on object edges).

Glamour glow

This is primary a filter for portrait photos, but it can also be used for landscape shots. Especially fluffy clouds looks better after this is applied. It gives a glow and contrast to everything and you can also choose the temperature of the glow.

Darken/Lighten center

Creates a vignette around the photo, but also brightens the center. This is currently my favorite way to add a vignette. Adding a vignette can help guide the eyes into the center of the photo, so making it more interesting.

Cross processing

Cross processing simulates an effect from analog photography, where chemical solutions intended for different types of films were used to develop the photo. This creates a color shift in all color channels. There are multiple color shifts available and and you can specify the strength used.

Brilliance/Warminth

This one adds color. And it you push it into higher settings, you will see colors you didn’t even know were in your photo. Again, should be used with lower settings, not as in this example screenshot.

Sunlight

Fills you whole image with light. It really feels like if you took your photo during a very sunny day. It can help you  a lot when you have taken your photos during a grey, very cloudy day.

Polarization

This one simulates the polarization filter that you attach to your lens. You can specify the rotation and strength, and it will saturate and darken all the blue areas in you photo.

Indian summer

Change your summer shots into autumn shots. That’s exactly what this filter does. It takes all you green areas and changes them into yellow, orange or red ones.

Tonal contrast

Tonal contrast filter created a lot of local detail. You can specify how much the highlights, mid-tones and shadows are affected. This one can get you that grungy HDR look.

Additional you can use control points, to specify areas where the effect is used/not used. This is very hand if you don’t want to mask the layer with the original picture afterwards. It can help you to be faster in your processing of photos.

Color efex also always creates a new layer on which it applies the filer, which is very hand if you want to use it only on part of your photo. But be careful that you have no selection made, as that will make the effect only on the parts of the selection. Also if you want to have it effecting all layers, create a merged copy first.

Overall Color efex is one of the best plugins for photography editing you can get. It makes the work faster and easier. The only thing I don’t like, is that the Color efex window always wants to be in focus, so it forces you to look at progress bars. If you use it a lot, this can be so irritating. But that’s only a minor issue and it does not effect the performance of the plugin in anyway.

For additional information on Color efex, you can visit the Nik collection site here http://www.google.com/nikcollection/. Google does not offer any discount codes there, but if you look around, you maybe find one of the old ones, and can get the collection for a little cheaper :)

View all my other reviews here.

And here are few photos I used this plugin on. You can actually say, I used it in almost every single of my photos, in one way or another.

Oloneo Photoengine

I use multiple approaches and programs for my HDR processing and blending. One of my favorites is also the Oloneo Photoengine. As all HDR programs go, the results vary from photo to photo, but there are some points that make this one of the best programs to blend you photos. Except the last part, this review is also about HDRengine, which is a part of Photoengine.

Speed

This is the fastest blending program I ever used. You can see all the changes you do on the photo in real time, and once they are done, you can directly save the photo, without any additional time needed for processing.

Sharpness of result

A lot of HDR programs can remove a lot of sharpness from the photo. In my experience Photoengine leaves most of the sharpness in tact. The only way I can get more, is if I blend the photos manually in Photoshop.

Easy to use

This is my favorite thing about Photoengine. As I don’t really use presets that much, I really like that I’m able to get my result by using only one slider. Just by using the TM Strength I can get the result I need maybe 90% of the time. The rest of the time I only add more contrast and maybe change the white balance.

Single Image processing

Oloneo Photoengine doesn’t care if you put in one photo or multiple, it will treat them all the same, and you can use all the tools in both situations.

Other HDR editing features

Among other notable features, is the Natural HDR mode, which will make your photo more realistic (especially it will remove over-saturated colors), Detail strength, which will add a lot of detail, and I think should be used very lightly and complete set of tools needed to correct the colors or colorize your photo. All this tools are great if you don’t plan to continue your edit in Photoshop, but I don’t use them that often.

Photoengine vs. HDRengine

There is a second program from Oloneo, called HDRengine. All I mentioned until now is the same also for HDRengine, as that includes the same HDR editing parts. The difference between these two is, that Photoengine also includes two additions parts. They are HDR Relight, where you can combine photos of the same scene, with different light sources turned on. You can then control each light individually to create a final photo. The second addition is HDR DeNoise where Photoengine uses multiple photos of the same scene, taken with the same settings, to remove noise. This is different than normal noise reduction, and the results loose no detail in the process.

There are few things I don’t like about Photoengine. I don’t like the way the file browser works, where you have to browse for the folders, instead just going up and down in the tree structure. Also if they included the double click on the setting name to reset it, would make the work much faster. Additionally in the blending, with some photos the algorithm can create halos or a bright stroke around the dark areas. As I said, it’s not perfect for all the photos, but no program is.

Overall I highly suggest you give this program a try. It’s one of the simplest ways to start with HDR and also creates one of the most natural feeling results from them all.

For more information about Oloneo Photoengine and HDRengine, please visit the Oloneo site.

View all my other reviews here.

And here are few photos where I used Oloneo Photoengine for the initial HDR blending.

A week passed and we are again at the process Tuesday post. And as I’m currently hawing the contest and raffle where you can win Oloneo Photoengine, I thought I show you a photo which I edited mostly in Oloneo Photoengine. And I’m including a special tip today :). So here goes.

I took this photo two years ago, still with a Canon 7D (my 450D that I had at that time had a broken shutter :)). That’s also why I used only three brackets, as that’s all I could take then. So as usually I started in Lightroom. I corrected the horizon here and also did a little noise reduction.

From there I exported all three brackets as 16bit Tiff files and loaded them into Oloneo Photoengine. Here I merged them and as you can see, I had to move only one slider to get the look I wanted (the TM Strength). It created a very nice blend, and also opened the shadows more that it was on the original brackets.

My next step was to load this result into photoshop. I haven’t used any original brackets here, as there was no need to blend any parts from them. I then did the following edits on it (layers numbered from bottom up):

1. the result from Oloneo Photoengine
2. I removed lens flares from the trees on the right
3. did more noise reduction
4. brightened the darkest parts of the image
5. added glow (view my glow tutorial)
6. brightened the glow
7. changed the color of the sunlight (I will explain this in a moment)
8. brigtened the overall photo with an exposure adjustment, but not in the brightest areas
9. added more contrast to the basic midtones
10. added a little contrast to the whole image

And now for the point 7, where I mentioned I changed the color of the light. A lot of times when I have a photo with the sun in it, I want to have the surrounding area to have a nice yellow/orange glow to it. Same here. The green color was nice, but I wanted more. And to get this I did the following:

• created a new layer
• filled it with 50% grey (shift+backspace and select 50% grey and confirm :))
• set the blending mode to soft ligt, this will make this layer invisible for now
• picked a color from the sun, something nice and warm
• chosen a big soft brush, with around 20% opacity and started painting around the sun, the more away from it, the less brush strokes
• just change the opacity of the layer if the effect is too strong

And that’s it. Looks really great if you need more sun glow, or if you trying to change a color of a certain part of the photo. Here is this layer from this photo, shown without the blending mode selected and at full opacity. I used it in the end at 33% opacity, and as you can see, I also deleted parts of it.

And that was all. To see the original 0EV exposure and the Oloneo Photoengine result, please continue to the full post.