Traveling the Journey of Light | Photoblog Thoughts, feelings, and techniques behind the photography of Derrald Farnsworth-Livingston

How to Perform a Basic Black and White Conversion Using Nik Silver Efex Pro - Tractor Series Part IIIPosted by drfl on September 16th, 2009

One of the most obvious processing treatments that can be performed on an image of an old tractor would be to convert it to various types of monochrome. Today’s image was converted to Black and White by using Nik Silver Efex Pro. Black and White conversions can be performed both in-camera and later in processing with tools such as Photoshop, but I have found that Silver Efex Pro gives me more control over how the image is converted with some great visual presets.

When loading the image into Photoshop, I first corrected for color, although I did not spend too much time on making sure that all my casts were gone. If I know I’m converting to black and white, I often use the “Grayscale” feature in the RAW import dialog box to get a rough understanding of what the image will closely resemble.

I then activate the Nik Silver Efex dialog and scroll through the various options on the left side until I find the look that I desire. For the basic settings, I tweak the settings on the right such as brightness, contrast, and structure. Brightness and contrast work the same as those in Photoshop, while structure adds more definition to the lines within the image. Also available, the shadow slider brightens the darker areas while the highlights slider tones done the brightest parts of the image. This can have the perceived effect of lowering the contrast of the image, so I usually keep these two settings at a minimum.

For today’s image, I choose High-Contrast Yellow filter and left the defaults on brightness, contrast, and structure. I increased the brightness in the shadow areas to somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2, but kept the brightness slider at default. If you are not familiar with what colored filters do to black and white photographs I suggest checking out “Using Coloured Filters with Black and White Film” to gain an understanding. From there, I could tone my photograph or add a bit of vignetting. I will discuss both of these options in tomorrow’s edition of the tractor series.

To recap:

1. Load the RAW file into Adobe Photoshop and set the temperature, contrast, etc.
2. Use Nik Silver Efex Pro to find a black and white setting close to the desired result.
3. Tweak the Brightness/Contrast/Structure settings.
4. Modify the Shadows/Highlights settings.
5. Experiment with different colored filter effects.

Technical Details:
Canon 5d Mark II, 17-40 f/4l @ 37mm, f/11, 1/60 second