I felt the duotone version was nice, but it was a little bland and lost the character of the shot – despite my bringing the gold color back in using Silver Efex 2’s Selective Colorization feature found on its U-Point controls. As you can see in the image above that the color image is probably too happy for this scene where there’s a stark contrast between wealth and poverty in Shanghai, China. I found that one really fun thing to do with Silver Efex is to create a nice duotone image and use it is as a semi-transparent layer in Photoshop over your color image to create a nice desaturated look. Using a Silver Efex layer and lowering the opacity can create a neat desaturated look It’s so cool to see large prints of these neat images and realize that black and white doesn’t have to mean dull, and even more importantly it doesn’t have to mean JUST black and white! Put a new twist on your color images with Silver Efex Pro 2 layers In fact, I’ve been enjoying my new images so much that I’ve been printing them like mad on Epson Exhibition Fiber using the Advanced Black & White mode of my Epson Stylus® Pro 3880 printer. I really liked this shot in color, but the new look created in “black and white” was memorizing. It’s natural, but I found myself even experimenting with my fashion images using my Super Selenium preset to create shots like this one below:Ī color favorite, looks great with my Super Selenium preset Of course, when people think of black and white photography or even duotones I think visions of Ansel Adams and landscapes come to mind. I like both so it becomes fun to have multiple versions of your favorite shots My 2nd version went for a cooler and brighter look Of course, with Silver Efex Pro 2 (a.k.a., SEP2) I can just leave well enough alone with just one version of my image so I end up trying a bunch of different presets like I did in this article and in the photo below: Of course, I should probably use the term Duotone rather than black and white because most of my images, like the one above, ended up introducing some other color for a nice warm tone to the image. It became super addicting to play around with Silver Efex to the point where sometimes I’d probably spend a little too much time having fun creating multiple black and white variants of my images. I found myself falling in love with the new presets and creating some of my own. When I got my hands on an early release of Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro 2, I went nuts with it. I created this duotone of one of my favorite landscape shots. Using the 034 Yellowed 2 Preset as a starting point, Now my portfolio on Zenfolio even has some black and white images in it – something I thought I’d never do. In fact, in some cases even saved some bad shots with it. Over time I fell in love with Silver Efex Pro and found myself trying it out on various photos and I started to like it more and more. In my first review of Silver Efex Pro 1, I mentioned that “black and white photography isn’t really my thing” but I went on to say it was a fun product. Photo Copyright © Ron Martinsen – All Rights Reserved Silver Efex Pro 2 offers many great new presets like 032 Film Noir 3 shown above
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