#Tutorial Silver Efex Pro 2 Skin And Lips#
#Tutorial Silver Efex Pro 2 Free Makes It#
#Tutorial Silver Efex Pro 2 Full 200Mm Focal#

Especially when I want the B&W version to be used to add more detail to a photo. High Structure (smooth) My go to preset in Silver Efex. It gives you a nice even photo. This is a very good place to start. While it's generally possible, it usually involves a lot of time and effort.Nik Silver Efex comes with a lot of different presets, so I’m including here a few of my favorite ones.

Tutorial Silver Efex Pro 2 Free Makes It

Model is Karen Thompson Pringle)This is quite a controversial photo for me. The fact that it is now free makes it even more of a must have.(Scroll down to the bottom of the post to see the large version. It is in my opinion much better than most similar products. This was the first Nik product I bought and I believe it cost about £150 then. The course is 100 video tutorials plus the software you need for the course is free.Nik software also have some great tutorials on their Youtube Channels which I would strongly recommend.For me the real 'jewel in the crown' of the Nik Collection is Silver Efex Pro 2 (SEP2).

Tutorial Silver Efex Pro 2 Full 200Mm Focal

It was literally freezing and Karen was a real trooper during this shoot as we were both very cold. I like the different shadows that are cast on the face and the combination of warm and cool tones.The shot was taken using my Sigma 70-200mm/2.8 at wide open 2.8 aperture and full 200mm focal length which gives the very particular look that it is.It should also be noted that this was dead of winter and this shot was taken on a beach in Northumberland. Right now I like it again. There was also a long shadow being cast by a nearby pole on the model, Karen's face.I loved the photo at the time but at various points I have changed my opinions on it. There were multiple colours of light due to the warm ambient light becoming very blue as it passed behind icy winter clouds.I was using a warm gel on my beauty dish and flash (towards the front of the model) to match the sunset light, however as the light changed I liked the combination of both tones and decided not to remove or switch gels.

I will select this for demonstration purposes.If you are doing a black and white conversion from neutral this is a good place to start. Adjustments are on the right side of the window.The top preset is 'neutral' which means that none of the settings have been adjusted. Here you have presets on the left side (these include any custom presets you have created). In Photoshop you need to go into the Plugins menu.This is the main window. This also gave me the opportunity to create a new tutorial.You can open SEP2 in Lightroom by right clicking on your photo and going to >Edit In>Silver Efex Pro 2 - assuming you have installed it correctly.

Tutorial Silver Efex Pro 2 Skin And Lips

This is down to personal taste and preference. My Final Sensitivity AdjustmentsThese are my final adjustments to sensitivity. The picture generally gets brighter and we can see this most in the skin and lips. Increasing Red SensitivityHere we see the effect of pushing the red sensitivity up. This is most noticeable on the skin and lips. The image is generally darker.

These are located in a separate drop down menu.In traditional film photography people used to use various processes to add colour tones to their photos and most people are familiar with the common versions such as Sepia toning.I have previously covered how this works in Lightroom. I should have done some larger before and after screenshots to make it more obvious.Silver Effex Pro also has a number of specific presets that combine with the grain setting to give a more accurate feel of certain classic film types. The soft and hard slider adjusts how prominent the grains are.It is almost impossible to see at this size though due to the lack of detail. From what I understand their engine recreates the image using mathematical formulae that simulate individual grains - this is quite different to most plugins which simply add noise to the photograph.Lowering the 'grain per pixel' makes the film grain larger, raising it makes the grains smaller. The grain recreation engine it uses gives the most realistic and film like results. This helped to differentiate it from the other parts of her hair more.This is one of my favourite reasons for using Silver Effex Pro.

Highlights and Shadows is in the separate Brightness panel which you can see below as an example. This is similar to Lightroom where Amplify White and Black corresponds to White and Black settings. Here you can see the very subtle vignette I have applied in the before and after shot.This shot already has a vignetting effect from the prominent shadows and so I didn't feel any more than this was required.In fact one of the most common mistakes that I see people make on their shots when they start out is turning the degree of vignetting way up which just looks completely un-natural and strange to my eye - particularly on bright daylight shots.As a final touch I am going to tweak contrast a little bit. The amount allows you to create a darkening (negative) or lightening (positive) effect as well as altering it's shape between being more circular or rectangular and changing it's size.Unlike Lightroom you can also define the absolute centre of the vignette which is useful for certain types of shot. Here I have chosen a split tone preset which I feel works well with this photo.Old lenses and cameras used to impart a vignette on photographs and photographers would often exaggerate this effect to draw more attention to the subject.SEP has a number of presets as well as custom options for this. In this case the Silver Hue and Toning slider controls the shadows and the Paper Hue/Toning controls the highlights.There are also a number of common presets such as Sepia, Ambrotype, Selenium etc.

There are many more advanced features that are best demonstrated in video tutorials - as you can find in the link to the Youtube channel I posted earlier.One of these is the selective adjustment tool which allows localised adjustments to your images using a smart AI selection method which is only available in Nik tools.This allows the kind of fine tuning that would normally only be available through the use of multiple layers in Photoshop. The high contrast version has a very different feel which doesn't appeal to me as much.I have just scratched the surface here with what can be achieved with SEP2. As you can see in the histogram in the top right corner there are still large gaps at the top and bottom.Some people would normally stretch out the histogram by increasing the contrast slider (or adjusting the whites and blacks for finer control).I don't like such high contrast images as I have said but just to demonstrate this I have done a comparison below in case you do.Here are the changes which fill the histogram.The high contrast version is definitely more striking but I feel it looks less realistic and the difference is emphasised at larger sizes.Personally I feel that I actually prefer the colour photograph in this case but it is close for me between that and the lower contrast black and white which I feel retains more of the feel of the original colour photo.