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Just a few months in the past we discovered quite a bit to love within the newest iteration of the Nik Assortment, a set of eight picture processing instruments initially developed by Nik Software program and lately owned by French software program firm DxO. On the time, we seemed on the general suite with a give attention to what was new. For this overview, although, we might wish to take a more in-depth have a look at simply one of many suite’s most helpful elements, Silver Efex Professional 3.
Bounce to:
Introduction | What’s new | Interface | Conclusion
Introduction
Nik Silver Efex Professional 3 is a black-and-white conversion software that goes far additional than the grayscale or black-and-white instruments constructed into Adobe Photoshop. It permits customers to simulate the look of particular real-world movie sorts, manually tuning their shade sensitivity and grain with an unbelievable quantity of flexibility and precision. For much less skilled customers, a beneficiant collection of presets are supplied to get you began with minimal effort.
Silver Efex means that you can make a variety of changes to brightness, distinction, construction and tonality, both globally or regionally utilizing management factors. You can even apply shade filters, scale back haze and end your creations with firming, vignetting, borders and extra.
Obtainable instantly as a part of the Nik Assortment 4 bundle, Silver Efex Professional 3 can operate both standalone or as a plugin for Photoshop, Lightroom and different appropriate apps on each Home windows 8.1+ or macOS 10.14+. (And as of the recently-released Nik Assortment 4 model 4.2, this consists of help for Adobe Photoshop working natively on Apple M1 gadgets.)
The general Nik Assortment 4 is priced at $149 for brand spanking new prospects, with upgrades obtainable to present prospects for $79. That truly makes it round $50 much less for the complete suite than Silver Efex Professional 1 or 2 used to price standalone.
What’s New?
Let’s take a fast have a look at what’s new in Silver Efex Professional 3. The most important change is to the consumer interface, which has been fully redesigned with a much more trendy look. Gone are the busy 3D-effect buttons, bevels and drop shadows of the Silver Efex Professional 2 UI, with the brand new model aiming to scale back distraction with a flatter, cleaner and extra trendy interface.
In comparison with that of model 2, Silver Efex Professional 3’s interface is way cleaner and extra trendy.
DxO has additionally up to date its U-Level management level expertise to scale back visible litter, considerably enhance versatility and within the newest v4.2 launch, carry a modest increase to efficiency as nicely. Management factors will be grouped or renamed, saved for reuse in presets, and in Lightroom Basic may also be copied and pasted between photographs. Their particular person sliders now seem in the appropriate panel somewhat than straight on the picture, and the luminance/chrominance values to which they reply will be tuned.
The corporate has additionally borrowed two options from its different apps to additional prolong Silver Efex Professional. It now boasts each the haze-busting ClearView slider from DxO PhotoLab, in addition to the flexibility so as to add certainly one of 39 black and white movie grain sorts from DxO FilmPack. Each of those additions can solely be utilized globally, somewhat than through U-Level controls.
Person interface and controls
Identical to the opposite apps within the Nik Assortment, Silver Efex Professional 3 can be utilized fully standalone and with out the necessity for third-party purposes.
Works standalone nevertheless it’s greatest used as a plugin
As a standalone app, Silver Efex can solely open photographs in JPEG or TIFF codecs, which somewhat limits its utility. Because it does not help Uncooked information standalone, many photographers will as a substitute wish to pair it with different apps.
Standalone mode is similar to plugin mode however with out the bottom-of-screen standing bar you’d use to use adjustments as a plugin. As a substitute, it’s essential to use save command within the file menu.
In addition to DxO’s personal PhotoLab collection, it may formally be used solely with Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Parts 2020+, Lightroom Basic 2019+, Affinity Picture 1.8+ or, as of its v4.2 launch, Seize One 21. Different purposes may fit to various levels, however aren’t formally supported.
For instance, Publicity X6 works even for Uncooked information, first changing them to TIFF format, however features as if Silver Efex had been opened standalone. You are not proven the standing bar on the backside of the display screen, and as a substitute should use the file menu to avoid wasting your outcomes. And previous to v4.2, Seize One did not work in any respect, showing positive however failing to use its changes within the remaining step.
The excellent news is {that a} free 30-day limitless trial is on the market, so if you happen to’re utilizing an software that is not formally supported with the Nik Assortment, you may strive them collectively first to see if every little thing works earlier than paying.
A good few presets maintain issues easy for learners
The quickest technique to get outcomes from Silver Efex Professional 3 is to make use of certainly one of its presets, of which there are a fairly beneficiant 58 in all. They’re separated considerably haphazardly into 5 teams with not-so-informative names: Basic, En Vogue, Fashionable, Classic and twenty fifth Anniversary. You can even view all 5 teams collectively, filtering them to point out solely your favorites or the ten most recently-used presets.
The presets are all proven atop the left-hand pane, alongside together with your modifying historical past for the present picture. For every preset you are proven a small preview based mostly upon the picture you are at present modifying. These are rendered in a short time, making it simple to easily scroll by the checklist and discover the look you are after, or a preset that can make leaping off level to your personal creation.
You possibly can’t completely modify the 58 base presets, however you may create new customized presets which will be exported and imported to permit sharing with different photographers or throughout a number of workstations. Your customized and imported presets are every grouped individually from the bottom presets, so there is not any technique to rapidly entry favorites from all three classes or to see all of them as one scrollable checklist.
An enormous collection of controls to tune outcomes to your tastes
After all, whereas presets are nice for learners who need fast outcomes, extra skilled photographers will favor to seize their very own inventive imaginative and prescient, not merely borrow another person’s.
Silver Efex Professional 3’s management checklist is so huge that, even with only one management level energetic and on a 1080p show, the appropriate pane continues to be nearly 3500 pixels tall. The cropped screenshots above hyperlink to the highest and backside halves of the appropriate pane, respectively.
Fortunately, Silver Efex Professional 3 presents an enormous quantity of management over your photographs courtesy of a whopping 50+ controls in its right-hand pane. And that is simply counting the controls which have an effect on your complete picture globally. Should you add a number of of DxO’s U-Level management factors to the picture, you may unlock one other dozen-plus sliders per level or group of factors.
Not solely international changes, however native ones too
Every management level you add to the picture is indicated with a small donut-shaped mark at its heart, and whereas it’s chosen, an outer circle seems displaying the extent past which the impact will regularly be feathered away to nothing. This outer restrict will be resized to cowl the portion of the picture you want.
For every level, there are additionally each luminance and chrominance sliders, and these enable you to to focus on particular areas of the picture based mostly on their brightness and shade earlier than the black and white conversion. Should you dial each sliders all the way down to zero, the management level will successfully develop into a graduated radial choice, as a substitute.
The flexibility to group and rename management factors could be very useful. On this masks view, I’ve chosen the taxi’s physique with one group of management factors, and the street markings with one other group.
As soon as positioned, a number of management factors will be grouped collectively. You can even rename each particular person factors and teams of them, and when saving new presets you may select whether or not or not management factors ought to be included. After all, as soon as the preset is subsequently utilized to a special picture, you may regulate the purpose positions if they do not fairly match what’s wanted from shot to shot.
A better have a look at the worldwide controls
The majority of Silver Efex Professional 3’s controls are grouped below its international changes header, with subgroups together with brightness, distinction or construction adjustment headers, in addition to tonality safety.
Brightness will be adjusted globally, or for the highlights, midtones and shadows. There’s additionally a dynamic brightness slider which tries to carry onto native distinction within the highlights and shadows will brightening or darkening the picture globally.
For distinction, you might have a alternative of both the fundamental distinction slider or a smooth distinction slider which goals for a much less harsh impact with extra diffuse transitions. There are additionally sliders to amplify whites or blacks alone.
Underneath the construction header, you get each the fundamental construction management and one for positive construction, in addition to particular person controls for construction within the spotlight, midtone and shadow areas. And eventually, the tonality safety part accommodates sliders to get better misplaced element in simply the spotlight and shadow areas of the picture.
Native changes get a subset of those international controls
Every particular person management level or group of them additionally presents a subset of the controls from the earlier part. Confusingly, they’re grouped somewhat otherwise to these for international changes, although. All however the dynamic brightness, smooth distinction, tonality safety and excessive/mid/shadow/black construction sliders have equivalents for management factors.
There’s additionally one further management which is restricted to the management factors – selective colorization. This lets you carry among the shade again into particular components of your in any other case black and white picture, and since you may have a number of management factors, you too can carry again a number of colours if you want.
Vanquish haze with the ClearView slider
One of many new options in Silver Efex Professional 3, inherited from DxO’s flagship PhotoLab software, is its new ClearView slider. Identical to its PhotoLab equal, it’s extremely efficient at recovering element and rising distinction in hazy backgrounds and different lower-contrast areas of your picture.
I typically discovered it onerous to push far sufficient although, just because the areas of reasonable distinction in my photographs would begin to present an excessive amount of distinction earlier than the hazy background was totally recovered. I might actually wish to see DxO permit ClearView to be paired with U-Level or another type of localized choice in a future launch to assist in these conditions.
Colour filtering with out the bodily filters
With conventional black and white movie, if you happen to wished to tune the response to particular person colours of sunshine you’d achieve this with filters hooked up to the entrance of the lens. For instance, you may connect a yellow, orange or even perhaps a crimson filter to make a blue sky extra dramatic, or a inexperienced filter to lighten foliage.
With Silver Efex Professional, that is all achieved post-capture without having to fumble for bodily filters, nonetheless. Crimson, orange, yellow, inexperienced and blue filter presets are all supplied, however if you happen to favor you too can dial in a selected hue in one-degree increments, and you too can management the power of the filter from 0 to 200%.
Simulate the look of actual B&W movie in two somewhat-contradictory methods
Silver Efex Professional 3 now presents two totally different instruments to simulate the look of black and white movie grain. The 2 can be utilized in live performance collectively, however the division between the 2 instruments is unnecessarily complicated.
Firstly, the movie sorts software lets you choose certainly one of 28 totally different movie sorts and dial in your required stage of grain dimension and hardness. You can even management the movie’s sensitivity in crimson, yellow, inexperienced, cyan, blue and violet channels, and regulate ranges/curves. All of that is carried over from earlier model and is predicated on code from Nik Software program, the unique creator of the Nik Assortment.
By way of the brand new movie grain software, DxO now additionally permits you to simulate the look of particular, actual movie grains based mostly on the identical algorithms it used to create its FilmPack plugin. In all, there are 38 movie grain sorts on provide, together with nearly each black and white movie kind from FilmPack. For every you may regulate the depth from 0 to 200%, and the grain dimension from 1.0 to 10.0.
The brand new movie grain software’s grain patterns have a really genuine really feel, however in contrast to the sooner movie sorts software, it solely handles grain simulation and forgoes any try to tune the movie’s responsiveness to totally different wavelengths of sunshine. You possibly can, nonetheless, use each instruments without delay, during which case the brand new software overrides solely the grain sample of the sooner one. (And you may, if you need, select totally different movie sorts in every part to, say, create a fictitious movie with the sunshine response of 1 movie however the grain of one other.)
Full-size, no-grain-added picture.
A variety of authentic-looking movie grains can be found in Silver Efex Professional 3. So as, these are 100% crops of the above picture with no added grain, Fuji Neopan 1600, Kodak T-Max 3200, Ilford Delta 3200 and filtered Kodak HIE. All share the identical Impartial profile and differ solely of their grain alternatives.
End your photographs with firming, vignetting, burnt edges and borders
Lastly, Silver Efex gives 4 totally different classes of ending changes: Firming, vignetting, burnt edges and borders. By default, these are one-click changes involving not more than making a range from a listing, however much more management is on the market if you need it.
For firming, you can’t solely choose a shade but in addition management power, hue and firming for each silver and paper, and the stability between the 2. For vignetting, you may regulate the power of the vignette (which might both darken or lighten), in addition to its dimension, roundness and heart level.
For burnt edges, you management the dimensions, transition softness and power of the impact on all 4 edges individually. And eventually, picture borders permits you not solely to decide on certainly one of 14 predefined border sorts, but in addition how thick the border is and the way far it extends into the picture. You can even regulate the roughness of the border, and supply a ‘seed’ quantity that this system ought to use when producing the random particulars in border textures.
The examine instruments will let you rapidly toggle between earlier than and after views, view the picture with an adjustable side-by-side or below/over break up, or see each earlier than and after photographs collectively.
Earlier than-and-after comparisons are fast and simple
View controls will be discovered on the prime of the display screen, and I discovered the comparability controls specifically to be somewhat useful. The leftmost of those toggles between the outcomes of your present settings or the default black and white conversion, and holding the P key down achieves the identical factor.
The central button splits the picture in two both vertically or horizontally, and means that you can transfer the dividing line throughout the picture to permit a cautious before-and-after comparability wherever throughout the picture. And eventually, the rightmost button provides you both side-by-side or below/over views of the complete picture.
The histogram software means that you can spotlight which picture areas are inside ten totally different luminance ranges at your present settings, even within the loupe view. Be aware additionally the historical past panel at display screen left.
The histogram software is surprisingly useful, too
One final operate I discovered to be notably useful was Silver Efex Professional 3’s histogram software, which sits beneath the loupe on the prime of the appropriate pane. It not solely provides you entry to RGB, crimson, inexperienced, blue or luminance graphs of your picture, but in addition splits it into ten totally different luminance ranges.
For any of the ten, you may allow an overlaid sample on the picture, with the sample shade various by the vary chosen. This makes it very easy to see which components of the picture share the identical luminance, and I discovered it much more helpful than the more-common strategy of simply highlighting the brightest and darkest picture areas.
Conclusion
It has been greater than a decade since Silver Efex Professional’s final main replace and till simply this yr, it hadn’t been considerably modified for the reason that suite’s unique creator, Nik Software program, was offered first to Google after which DxO.
Loads has modified in all that point, not just for Silver Efex itself but in addition within the imaging software program market. Gone are the times when a plugin of its ilk may command the heady worth of $200. Nowadays you should buy your complete eight-plugin Nik Assortment for a way more cheap $150, however sadly you may’t choose and select which of these plugins you wish to save much more.
In its overhauled type Silver Efex Professional 3 is way simpler on the attention than its predecessor, making it a lot simpler to focus in your photographs. And whereas a few of its new options sit somewhat awkwardly alongside earlier ones, as soon as we obtained used to the variations between movie sorts vs. movie grain and international vs. native adjustment sliders, we discovered it to be fairly simple to make use of contemplating the extent of management on provide.
Efficiency, whereas not mindblowing, is enough to stop frustration. On my 2018-vintage Dell XPS 15 9570 laptop computer working Home windows 10 model 20H2 and Nik Assortment v4.2, most sliders replace inside a half-second or much less of being tweaked, even these utilizing U-Level controls to restrict their impact to sure space of the picture. Ultimate renders can take maybe 20-30 seconds, which once more does not really feel unduly gradual.
And it is onerous to argue with Silver Efex Professional’s outcomes. Should you’re a fan of black and white pictures and are keen to place in a bit extra effort than merely clicking on a preset, you will get way more authentic-looking photographs than you’d from the black and white instruments in your digicam or most all-in-one apps like Photoshop.
Should you’re nonetheless utilizing the earlier launch of Silver Efex Professional, its successor represents a no brainer improve. In addition to a nicer interface and extra movie grain sorts, you may additionally discover the brand new ClearView software and improved U-Level expertise to be large enhancements. And if you happen to’re not already a Nik Assortment consumer however need a strong plugin that may ship realistically film-like black and white photographs, we might undoubtedly suggest giving the trial model a spin.
What we like:
Yields convincingly film-like outcomes
Presets get learners up and working rapidly
Making and sharing customized presets is straightforward
Each international and native changes
A great deal of controls to fine-tune the look you are after
ClearView software is sort of efficient at correcting haze
New consumer interface is cleaner and fewer distracting
Extra inexpensive as a set element than its predecessors have been offered individually
What we do not:
Can now not be bought individually
No Uncooked help when used standalone
Presets really feel somewhat disorganized
Movie sorts vs. movie grain instruments are unnecessarily complicated
Ditto the differing international and native adjustment slider preparations
Who’s it for:
Extra skilled photographers who need fine-grained management over their black and white creations, and who need a convincingly film-like remaining consequence.
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