
In addition to my normal Photo Friday image, today I’m going to do a mini-review of Silver Efex Pro 2 by Nik Software. Having used Silver Efex in the past, I became quite a fan of the engine and options behind the filter. Besides giving me some granular control over the image, I was able to modify items such as film grain, structure, color filters, and contrast with ease which helped take my black and white conversions to the next level. Silver Efex Pro 2 takes all of this and adds even more. All the same stuff is there, but now they have added fine structure, soft contrast, image borders, the ability to amplify both the whites and blacks, and a feature for selective color. The normal presets are still there with the ability to set your own and export and import them. This is great because if you develop a “look” and want a team of people to have access, it can be readily available. One last item to note, the software seems faster to me than the previous version. While version 1 wasn’t a slouch, I am impressed by how quickly it rendered the output. The only nit I found was that when changing presents, sometimes I had to click on the image to get it to update. Not a huge problem, but it was somewhat annoying, initially.
Last week I photographed a duck feather I found with my daughter and I thought it the perfect opportunity to put the software through a test. Below are some of the looks I created with Silver Efex Pro 2. Mind you, this is only scratching the surface, but it can create some wildly varied output. See the examples after the jump.
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