Nik Silver Efex Pro Review

B&W photography gained more interest after the advent of digital photography as more photographers realized that it offered unique expressive and artistic capabilities even when the starting point was a color photograph. Over the years much has been written on how to make this conversion and features of popular image editing software made this better and easier. I have been making B&W, or monochrome conversions for quite some time now using the rich tool set in Photoshop, and later, Lightroom. I have experimented with tools ranging from simple gray scale conversion to channel mixer, from desaturate to gradient maps, from multilayer Hue-Saturation techniques to the newly introduced B&W conversion tool in Lightroom and Photoshop. I have even written up on them and made presentations here at PSRI. I am very pleased with my results to the point of exhibiting or publishing folios of my work.

I recently worked with a tool from Nik Software, Silver Efex Pro. The results are remarkably good and the ease of use makes further exploration of many different looks possible. In the review I have written you will get a sense of what it does with examples and my objective evaluation of Silver Efex Pro. If you are interested in acquiring this plugin, don’t rush to get your copy until you get your 15% PSRI discount code. It will be announced at the meetings, starting this evening, and distributed in our weekly e-mail newscast.

Nik Silver Efex Review

Workshop Notes on Sharpening

The sharpening workshop on January 3, 2010 was well received. Dennis is going to share his notes with more detail, but until then you can view the slide show of the conceptual part of the presentation and get a copy of the printable handout.

Go to the post on Kept Light Photography

PSRI Workshop

Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Photoshop Lightroom are common tools in the arsenal of most of our members. Continuing on with the series of workshops I have offered in the past, I will be offering a new on on January 3, 2010 Sunday from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM. The subject of the workshop is “Sharpening in Photoshop and Lightroom” and is open to PSRI members in good standing with fully paid dues. I will limit the participation to 12. If you are interested in participating, please post a comment on this post with your name and e-mail address for me to contact you. When the comments reach 12 plus a few for standby, I will close the comments and thereby registrations. (Note: Your comment will not be visible until it is approved.)

The location fo the workshop will be the Koffler Computer Lab on Providence College campus. I will post directions to the lab as the time gets near.

Workshop: Sharpening in Photoshop and Lightroom
Workshop leader: A. Cemal Ekin
Date: January 3, 2010
Time: 1:00 – 5:00 PM
Location: Koffler Computer Lab, Providence College

Yet another white balance tool

White balance has become a well-known issue and benefit to digital photographers. There are several different products in the market from simple to more complex. I have come across yet another one of these tools, this time from Datacolor, the makers of Spider series of monitor calibration, printer profiling devices. The new tool, SpyderCube, lives up to its name. It is indeed a cube with different tones on its surfaces with one side having a circular opening into a black-painted cavity. Its base allows it to stand on flat surfaces or, using the threaded mount, it can be mounted on a light stand or a tripod. The loop at the top will hook on other suitable objects to appear in the scene. It even has a chrome ball at its apex to evaluate the specular highlights. At $59 MSP it may deserve a look. These tools can be extremely useful to get an accurate white balance setting under diverse conditions. For more information visit the Datacolor Web site.

A new public beta

Look at the image below, you will see version “3″ of Adobe Lightroom. Yes, it is on the horizon with new and/or improved feature set including better noise reduction, better vignetting, and although invisible, a better processing engine. Take a look and decide if the features are of any interest to you. You can download it from Adobe Labs.