Silver Efex Pro
Silver Efex Pro works with both Lightroom Classic and Photoshop. It is one of the best known third-party plug-ins for these programs that provides extensive black and white conversion capabilities via the use of filters. For other black and white plug-in options, turn to page 156 for details about Topaz B&W Effects, and page 160 for info about On1 Perfect B&W.
If you can do something within the confines of Lightroom Classic or Photoshop, I’m not generally enthusiastic about recommending a third-party plug-in. After all, Lightroom Classic and Photoshop are complex enough to learn without mastering another user interface. But Silver Efex Pro has some serious advantages, and I often find I use it as part of my black and white conversion workflow—either by itself or in conjunction with other Photoshop conversion tools such as the Channel Mixer and Black & White adjustment layers.
I made this image of a pink begonia with a conversion to monochrome in mind.
If you decide to live without Silver Efex Pro, I think you can still do awesome digital black and white work—it just might take a little longer. You can always find a way in Photoshop itself to create the effects that are easily available in Silver Efex Pro, but how to do so isn’t necessarily obvious. In my opinion, why recreate the wheel? I prefer to spend my time in more creative pursuits.
Like Black & White adjustment layers themselves, the different black and white effects that Silver Efex Pro provides are largely named as if they were filters on the enlarger in a film darkroom. In addition, some of the options are named after antique film technologies—for example, Tin Type.
Obviously, with Silver Efex Pro as with Photoshop, what you are getting is a digital simulation of the effect that is referenced by an anachronistic name.
Once you’ve selected a particular preset, you can adjust its strength by changing the exposure and adding special effects such as toning and vignetting. Generally, these refinements work pretty intuitively—and I encourage you to experiment with them. You’ll get the hang of how they work pretty quickly.
The long and winding road that brings Silver Efex Pro to your black and white door . . .
Back in the 1990s, Nik Software was started as an innovative image manipulation and graphic design software company. As time went by, one of the company’s leading products was the Nik Collection, which included Nik Silver Efex Pro. Nik Silver Efex Pro and the other components of the Nik Collection were never a standalone application, but ran as plug-ins in applications such as Lightroom and Photoshop. The Nik Collection including Nik Silver Efex Pro was recognized as one of the most important image manipulation tools as signified by its retail price of about $500, and by the fact that Nikon owned a substantial portion of the company.
Fast forward to 2012, when Google bought Nik Software. Apparently, some of the other Nik products, rather than the Nik collection, were what Google really wanted (it has been suggested that Google’s real interest was Snapseed for its Android platform). Whatever the case, Google initially lowered the price for the Nik Collection to $149, and a few months later made it available for free download, with the understanding that Google would no longer support the product, and that it was eventually headed for obsolescence.
The photographic community howled with indignation!
In 2017, DxO—a small French company in the photographic space—acquired the Nik Collection from Google with the stated intent of maintaining and expanding the product. At the date of publication of this book:
- You can download the most recent version of the Nik Collection from the DxO website, www.dxo.com, for $69.
- My “free” version of the Nik tools, acquired from Google, works perfectly with Lightroom Classic and Photoshop.
- Some users report bugs when working with the Google version of the Nik tools, so your mileage may vary.
- The current DxO version fixes bugs, but includes no feature enhancements.
Despite the fact that Silver Efex Pro is comparatively older software that has not been significantly enhanced in years, it is still an incredibly capable and powerful black and white conversion program, and in many situations remains my “go to” application for this purpose.
As always, I strongly recommend working with Silver Efex Pro on a duplicate layer rather than on the Background layer itself. This gives me added flexibility, particularly as most of my conversions seem to involve more than one filter. You can either duplicate your layer in Photoshop or alternatively configure Silver Efex Pro to duplicate the layer for you.
Once Silver Efex Pro has been installed, it will appear toward the bottom of the Photoshop Filters menu as an item.
To open Silver Efex Pro:
- Open the photo you want to convert to black and white in Photoshop.
- Duplicate the layer you want to convert.
- With the duplicate layer selected, choose Silver Efex from the Photoshop Filters menu. The Silver Efex Pro window will open with a Neutral conversion selected. I often use this neutral conversion as the starting place for my black and white work with Silver Efex Pro.
Silver Efex Pro is shown here in split-screen mode, with the Silver Efex Pro default conversion at the top, and a conversion using the Film Noir 1 preset at the bottom.
The Silver Efex Pro High Structure preset primarily enhances definition, and also increases contrast throughout an image.
The final conversion uses three different Silver Efex Pro filters, shown here in the Layers panel. Most of the time I use more than one Silver Efex Pro conversion, with each different preset on its own layer. Sometimes masks and different blending modes are used.
Note that I’ve retained the original color image as the bottom, Background layer. The point of doing this as part of my workflow is that it enables me to get back to the color image if I need to at any point in the future.
What if you don’t see Silver Efex Pro on the Photoshop Filters menu?
Depending on the version of the collection you have (see the sidebar on page 151 about Silver Efex’s long and winding road), the Silver Efex Pro menu item may appear as a sub-item named either “Nik Collection,” “Google,” or “DxO.”
Photoshop is subject to continual updates. I have discovered that even when the updater is supposed to preserve your settings and filters, Silver Efex Pro and the Nik Collection are often left behind (but not, in my case, forgotten!). To fix this problem, you need to copy the collection folder from the old Photoshop plug-in folder on your computer to the new plug-in folder, and restart Photoshop.
Begonia—With this photograph of a beautiful oversized begonia, I saw the possibility of an image that would work in both color and black and white. First, I processed the image in color. Setting aside the color version for later print making, I then used several different layers and Silver Efex presets to render the flower in black and white.
Nikon D850, Zeiss 50mm Makro-Planar, three exposures combined in Photoshop at shutter speeds between 1/5 of a second and 1 second; each exposure at f/22 and ISO 64, tripod mounted; images processed in ACR and combined in Photoshop, and converted to black and white in Silver Efex Pro.
Straight and Narrow—On the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage trail in Galicia, Spain, on a stretch of trail between the towns of Melide and Arzue the trail crosses the River Iso, where pilgrims have traditionally washed their feet for over a thousand years. As I followed the meandering trail down to the banks of the Iso, I passed a narrow and perfectly straight row of eucalyptus trees. It seemed to me that the orderly progression of the trees was in marked contrast to the organic and confusing nature of life—and as such, a good counterpoint to the reasons why folks decide to walk a pilgrimage trail.
Nikon D850, 45mm, five exposures at shutter speed ranging from 1/125 of second and 1 second; each exposure at f/29 and ISO 64, tripod mounted; images processed and combined in Photoshop and HDR Efex Pro, and converted to black and white in Silver Efex Pro.