Mixing Silver Efex

Eastern State Penitentiary is, simply stated, gritty. There are remnants of ancient green paint peeling from clay walls. The cells are lighted by a single window, and the floors have long ago lost their tiling. What remains are small rooms, a mix of shades of green, red, browns, but with colors muted with the soot of nearly a century.

To capture and convey this haunting feeling, the isolation that the prisoners must have felt and endured, I used a combination of NIK Software plugins. In this particular article, I want to argue that Silver Efex Pro is not just for conversion of color images to black and white. Rather, it can be “mixed” with a color image to enhance the texture and to produce a “gritty” feeling that captures the desolation I felt.

A raw image is processed to a tiff file and brought into Photoshop. The colors, contrast, brightness, etc. are adjusted (using plugins such as NIKʼs Viveza) to render an image that conveys the proper lighting and color scheme as shown in figure 1.

Then, NIK Silver Efex Pro is used to convert the image to black and white. Since we are not going to leave the image in black and white, but rather blend the black and white image with the original color image, we need to adjust the contrast, brightness and structure slightly differently than we would otherwise. In this case, we want to insure that no areas are so dark as to mask the area in the resultant composite image.

In other words, we might render the black and white image “brighter” in the shadow areas and not as “dark” in the lighter areas than we would normally do in a conversion to black and white. It is important to consider where or what parts of the image you want to render “gritty” and those areas are made “darker” in the black and white image. Thus we create a black and white image as shown in figure 2.

Then in Photoshop, we “blend” the color and black and white images, by changing the opacity of the Silver Efex layer. Typically, about 10 - 20% opacity is all that is necessary to render the desired effect. The effect should usually be very subtle. At first glance, it may merely appear as a “desaturation” of the colors. But close inspection will reveal the increased texture that reflects the “shadowing” created by the black and white tonal contrast. (Note that NIK plugins create a separate layer “automatically” .) This resultant image is shown in figure 3.

If needed, additional adjustments can be made using other NIK plugins such as Color Efex and Viveza to emphasize specific areas, or to further enhance and convey the artistic feeling.

To learn more, please attend one of our workshops.

All images Copyright (c) 2010 by Craig Rudlin. All Rights Reserved

A Point of Color

When we view an image, we are instinctively drawn toward brighter areas and, when present, an eye. This, of course, is why nature and portrait photographers always focus on the eye of the subject.

One dramatic implementation of these rules is to create a black and white photograph with only a single “point of color.” The viewer will be inevitably drawn to this point.

To illustrate, consider this image of a big horn sheep (Jasper National Park):

What intrigued me about this image was (of course) the horn but most of all, that big, orange eye. I wanted to emphasize these features, and importantly to create “drama” by conveying to the viewer, the sheepʼs penetrating stare.

To accomplish this, I decided to convert the image to black and white using NIK Softwareʼs Silver Efex Pro, yielding this image:

Note how the texture of the hair and horn is emphasized, giving a more dramatic effect. But, the conversion has left the eye dark, hollow-- precisely the opposite of what I intended for the image. I have lost that sense of intrigue, the “penetrating” stare. What I needed to do was to restore the color to the eye.

With Silver Efex, this can be done in one of several ways:

1. Select the “brush” button thereby allowing you to brush Silver Efex onto the image. NIK then allows you to use Photoshopʼs brush tool to apply the effect to specific areas of the image.
2. Select the “apply” button to apply Silver Efex across the entire image.

Then create a standard Photoshop layer mask and choose black as your paint color. You can then use Photoshopʼs brush tool to remove Silver Efexʼs conversion from any area of the image. The advantage of using Photoshopʼs brush tool is that you can select the opacity of the brush (hence allowing you to apply Silver Efex either 100% or any lesser amount, i.e. with gradations) to any area of the image. The advantage of creating a Photoshop layer mask (i.e., the second method) is that it allows you to later modify how you applied Silver Efex.

The resulting image: