The other thing to note is that McNally (and the guy that does the work) loves the Nik suite of tools. Yep so do I. So much so that if Apple would somehow get the RAW processing straitened out and get into bed with Nik incorporating Viviza local adjustments – or the whole suite into Aperture in a more integrated way. Even if it was the “smart object” kind of way (just saving all of the control points file by file and reapplying them when entering the tool again) this would be a game changer in the Aperture v Lightroom competition. I guess what I am saying is take the best out of NX2 and jamb it into Aperture or something thereabouts.

RB

To answer part one – yes I have used it to produce non-crappy, well at least in my opinion, prints. Earlier this summer I produced two gigantic prints using Silver EFEX Pro printed on Museo Silver Rag. The prints are fantastic and look about as good as black and white gets using any medium. I plan on donating them to the community fund raiser – people love local photography, but that is a topic for another day. The images used for the prints are the one at the top of the post and this one:

Both images are small versions of the actual settings used for the prints and therefore are not really optimized for display. They have a lot of things in common and that brings us to part two of the question – getting decent prints on paper.

The most gigantic hurdle for a lot of photographers that “grew up” digital is getting decent prints. The sequence goes something like this – that looks good, print, “hey WTF this looks like crap on paper, how come it is so different”, then they go nuts on color management (usually not a huge issue in this day and age and usually not the root of the issue), still looks like crap, boost contrast, boost saturation, boost everything – hey it’s “better” but still sucks, just in a different way – all the detail is gone – no subtle tones, etc, etc.

Here is the facts – looking at images on the screen is like looking at slides on a light box – you have like 1000:1 contrast ratio between blacks and whites. On paper you are lucky to get like 100:1 in fantastic light with a perfect print. This is the root of the issue and something good black and white print folks have understood since the beginning of time. How to translate the real world that has a contrast ratio of like 1,000,000:1 onto paper with a contrast ratio orders of magnitude lower. The answer is not to lower the contrast of the scene and just put that onto paper as is – it will look hmmmm – FLAT. Lowering the contrast of the scene gets the image on film or sensor without blown out highlights or blocked up shadows but that is just the beginning. The answer is not boost the overall contrast so  that the print has no detail in the shadows and highlights. The answer is local contrast.

On to some practical advise – remember my rant about the lame dodge/burn tool? Again this is fundamental for good prints. Good prints have boat loads of local contrast in zones 3 to 7 or in digital speak about a quarter way into the histogram to about three quarters the way into the histogram. Maybe a little more either way. with tiny bits and pieces of stuff sprinkled in all over the place representing the bottom quarter and top quarter of the histogram. Histograms are all well and good but they tell you nothing about WHERE the tonal values are in relation to each other. I can show you two different images with the same exact histogram where one looks flat and the other looks fantastic. Just because your histogram looks “right” doesn’t mean your print will look right or be good.

In the mini-review of Silver EFEX I raved about the little zone tool at the bottom left of all the tools. Here is why – after making decent prints for 20 years I still use this thing (or things like it) to make sure my eyes are not tricking me because I am looking at the image on the screen at 1000:1 contrast ratio. The two images posted have a couple things in common from an analytical perspective. The big thing is that they both have 80%+ of the tones between zone 3 and zone 7 on the little tool.  The next thing is they both have way way less than 1% in zone 1 – this is as black as you can get – DMAX in old chemical speak. Oh and they both have absolutely NO zone 10 or paper white, not one pixel. This may or may not be appropriate for your image. For these it is. The other zones (mostly 8 and 2) are sprinkled about the very lightest and darkest areas in tiny little amounts adding to the local contrast. There are no large areas that are zone 8 or 9. The bright areas have the illusion of being fantastically bright because they are next to areas that are like zone 4 and 5. Trust me the magic all happens in zone 6 and 7.

If I pushed the highlight values one more zone the clouds would look like they were made out of concrete instead of water vapor. It’s not the absolute value it’s the tonal value that happens to be next to each other that give the impression of contrast and bright/darkness.

Hope this helps at all.

RB

I was first introduced to Nik Software’s unique way of doing things in Nikon NX and NX2. NX and NX2 come with color control points built-in, Viveza is a plug-in for Aperture and Adobe products that pretty much boils down to color control points. NX2 goes beyond that in allowing you to use control points as masks for anything else NX2 can do as well but I will stick to color control points as this is what Viveza does. I used to use Photoshop for local adjustments and I still do but 90% of what I do for my personal work can be done with Viveza. In fact it is so easy and intuitive that I rather use Viveza than other methods of making selections and masks if I can.

The Nik Software website has a far better tutorial on what control points are and how they work than I would care to put together. Instead of a walk through I will be brief and just show a practical example of one of the ways that I use Viveza as well as my opinion on the variations of packaging from Nik and my opinions on what you should buy. One word of caution that cannot be repeated enough, do not interpret this example as how Viveza can rescue a really bad photograph and make a good one. This example is how Viveza can help you get what you want from a scene quickly and easily if you know where you want to go.

The image at the top of the post is a pretty much final version of an image that I have had a number of discussions with on-line iBuddiesâ„¢ regarding “how I did it”. I produced it as a black and white using Nik Silver EFEX and the people were very interested in the post processing so I figured I would do a color version with Viveza for your pleasure (or not). Here is the original image strait out of camera using Aperture’s default RAW conversion.

Bleahhhk, but not an accident. I shot it this way because I know exactly what my camera does and planned to produce a black and white version using Silver EFEX. This image’s entire reason to exist from my point of view was the sky and the reflections in the water. I wanted it to have a feeling that it was late in the day (it was 6/24/09 at 8pm right around the summer solstice). The only thing that I wanted to make sure of was that I could ratchet the hell out of the contrast while while retaining detail in the brightest clouds, reflections in the water, and detail in the ripples on the water without going totally white or totally black. For my taste most images with really strong clouds that have the contrast ratcheted up end up blowing out the whites in the bright areas of the clouds. The problem with that is the clouds look like they are made out of cement and loose the gaseous vapor feeling in those images, especially on paper.

Moving on, this is the version I sent into Viveza.

Wow, that’s a whole lot better, nice. For those interested this took about 10 seconds in Aperture in the following order:

1. Boosted the contrast to get the overall separation I was looking for.
2. Bumped up the brightness a tad until the whitest part of the clouds still had the detail I wanted.
3. Now that I could see where all the colors were hiding I cooled the white balance a hair to get the sky and blue water reflections where I wanted them while retaining the golden sun on the sunlit sides clouds, boats, and water.
4. Bumped up the definition a hair to make the tiny little boats and ripples stand out a little more.
5. Bumped up the vibrance a bit until the sky had the exact tone that I wanted without blowing the blue channel and it going all primary color on me.
6. Bumped up the shadows a hair, mainly to give them some breathing room for the torture I was about to subject them to in Vivza. I find that the shadow slider in Aperture in combination with the “advanced” controls does a way better job in boosting the shadows into a usable range while maintaining good color than just about any other tool i have used. Bottom line – you could use Viveza to make the shadows a little bit brighter but it does not do as good a job so do it before you send it out of Aperture.

And here is the version with local adjustments done in Viveza in about a minute with a couple of control points.

Here is a conceptual description of what I did. If you give Viveza a trial spin you will know why a conceptual description is good enough. If any of you think it would be helpful I could be convinced to post a screen-cast of the actual Viveza session from start to finish.

1. Control point(s) in the water on the brightest reflection to boost the brightness and contrast.
2. Control points in the grey/neutral clouds on on the horizon set to do nothing in order to subtract the water selection from the sky.
3. Control point on the clouds at the right to boost contrast a hair.
4. Control point(s) on the bluest of blue sky to bring down the brightness a hair.

The bottom line is Vivza and control points are actually fun to use, they encourage you to try things and variations on things that you may not do if you had to go through laborious convolutions to mask them. The fact is after you use control points in Viveza, NX2, or the other Nik Software products, just about any other way of making selections seems laborious.

Nik sells Viveza in a couple of different ways in a couple of different bundles that seem to change fairly often over the life of the product. The key differentiator is one works with Photoshop and the other will ONLY work in Aperture. If you do not own Photoshop and never ever want to use Photoshop get the version or bundle that will only work with Aperture. If you own Photoshop get the one that works with Photoshop, even if you never or rarely use it. In fact personally images from Aperture to Photoshop just to use Viveza even though I can do it either way. You may ask why – the answer is that I make the image in PS a smart object and then render the Viveza plugin on the smart object. I do this because all of the control points are saved and can be re-tweaked later without reproducing the whole shooting match from scratch. This seems trivial to do an I wonder why the Aperture plug-in mechanism does not work this way. I sure hope that it does in the future.

RB

Ps. Let me know if a screen-cast of the session would be helpful. Oh one more thing, if you do end up getting Viveza I would really appreciate it if you got it here to help offset the cost of keeping the site going.

The consensus question was if it was worth the cash. I really hate to make those kind of value judgements for other people, the variables are so different for everyone. I will weigh in on the “worth it” just a little bit for Silver Efex Pro only because it is a non-trivial investment and it has some pretty narrow functionality compared to say a Photoshop CS4 or Lightroom or Aperture 2. My opinion is that it is worth it if you use it. Use meaning a lot of things. I will rephrase a couple of things from my original review to be clear. If you like black and white photography but the software you are using it not cutting it then Silver Efex is probably worth the money. If you do a heck of a lot of black and white and Silver Efex could save you a lot of time then it is worth the money. I did say that it was the best black and white conversion software that I have ever used. I bought it and I was quite satisfied with using all of the bag of tricks in Photoshop that I have developed over the years. Then again I am a nut.

I guess you should try it – Nik does have a free trial version. See what you think. If you like black and white but rather shoot digital and not mess around with film and a darkroom you should definitely do the free trial. Like all of the Nik software this has some depth and deserves some dedicated time behind the wheel rather than a couple of clicks here and there so start the eval when you will have time to do it justice.

The bigger flaw that a few people pointed out was that they had a hard time visualizing what Istarted with for the image that I included with the review. I apologize for that, looking back on it I was stupid not to include the starting color digital image so here it is. Not only that but you can have the whole RAW NEF file as well so you can examine the color, black and white versions that Aperture does as well as what Nik can do in all of the glorious 100% detail if you want. You can even take a look at the strange 12-24 lens distortion if you want and see how the brand spanking new Nikon Capture NX2 automatically knows how to correct it based on a database of Nikon lenses included with it. You gotta love NX2 sometimes. Obviously I didn’t use NX2 for this conversion.

I even went way out of my way, walked out my front door, across a dirt road, and through some grass to make this image for all of you today. I guess that was about 150 feet. Have fun.

RB

Ps. What would really be fun is to see some reader black and white interpretations of the same image. I will bet dollars to doughnuts that they will be different than mine.

I will get to the bottom line really quick and follow-up with a couple of more detailed thoughts. I can do anything that Silver Efex Pro 3.0 can do in plain old Photoshop. The only exception may be the Nik grain engine. That being said if you have been doing digital black and white conversions for a long time and understand what you are going for and how to  get there in Photoshop there is nothing that is going to knock your socks off about Silver Efex Pro that would cause you to want it. The only exception as I mentioned is if you have the black and white conversion thing exactly where you want it in Photoshop but have been searching for a decent way to simulate film grain.

On the other hand if you love black and white but have no idea how to get the results that you want in Photoshop or rather not use Photoshop in your work-flow Silver Efex Pro may be just the ticket. You can get fantastic results extremely fast with no fuss. If you are familiar with the Nik control point way of making local adjustments and masks, local adjustments are a breeze. They work just like they work in other Nik products like Viveza or Capture NX2. You can set up presets that combine everything that Silver Efex can do to speed up your workflow even more.

Going through some of the features in a little bit more detail along with some random thoughts and opinions let’s start over on the right hand side, this is where all of the image controls live. First off you have brightness, contrast, and structure sliders. The first two are pretty much self explanatory. The structure control deserves a little more explanation. This control is a very fine tuned local contrast control that is perfectly suited to dealing with black and white tonal ranges. While you can accomplish the same results in Photoshop if you have no idea how you might go nuts with a million different curves, masks and other local adjustments to get the same effects of what the structure control does just by sliding it back and forth. This is one of the high points of Silver Efex, especially if you are struggling with Photoshop adjustments to get some of the same effects. Fantastic.

Next come the control points for localized adjustments and the highlights/shadows protection controls that are typical of all Nik software – if you don’t know what they do visit Nik’s site, it’s pretty much all they talk about. Extremely quick, easy, and effective. I wish Aperture would adopt something like this build in to Aperture.

After that are the color filters, these are typical of virtually every black and white conversion tool out there. Nik’s twist on them is each filter has a color and strength fine tuning slider. The controls are a little different but accomplish the same thing as everything else out there – channel mixers, etc. No need to dwell on them.

After the color filter controls comes the film types block. This is an attempt to simulate various brands  and speeds of actual black and white films that have been on the market over the years. Simulation of actual black and white films are nothing new or exclusive to Nik Silver Efex and I have to say the attributes that Nik attempts to simulate are pretty comprehensive but I find them more an amusement than an indispensable finely tuned tool. You may feel differently. The Silver Efex Pro film types attempt to simulate characteristic curves, grain, and spectral response of each film type. This deserves a little bit of an explanation for those not super familiar with actual black and white film.

Each black and white film has a unique spectral response in terms of the way it sees colors. some films see blue a little more than they see green, etc. These spectral response differences with real black and white films are subtle but noticeable in various situations. In the real world you have to be pretty familiar with various films with similar subjects to notice any spectral response differences between them. Add a colored filter and the spectral response differences between films is overwhelmed by the colored filter. The same thing holds true for tonal response curves or how a particular film responds to various exposure values. TXP (TRI-X PRO 320) is vastly different than regular TX (TRI-X 400). While they are important in getting to know a particular film if you are shooting real film the differences are overwhelmed when you start manipulating the contrast curves in other ways.  The grain simulator is preset set for each film type in sort of a caricature sort of way that may serve as a starting point for some of the various film type simulations but is in no way the end all be all of what that particular film looks like in reality.

I guess my issue with the film type simulations all boils down to the way the characteristic curves are handled within the film type simulation. The characteristic curves do not appear to be characteristic curves of the various films developed to the same CI (overall contrast index), they seem to be combined with completely different CI’s from film type to film type. In effect you get a film types characteristic curve AND a ONE particular way of developing that film combined into one, each simulation again being a caricature the “guy on the street’s” impression of a particular film. 

The film grain simulation is by far the best I have ever seen. At first glance it really does give the impression of the way real film grain looks. It does have some short comings. The first one is the biggest deal with simulating real film grain. With real film grain seems random in areas with no detail and then some how seems to magically line itself up and form specific patterns to reproduce details that seem smaller than the film grains in highly detailed areas of the image. If you have ever looked at film under high magnification this is clear and is the biggest reason most grain simulators look like absolute crap compared to real film grain. When I first looked at the Nik simulated film grain I thought that this was nailed. Upon closer inspection it is not. Maybe Nik does do something different in areas with a lot of detail but it does not nail the way real film grain works. Maybe in the next version.

The second and more minor issue that I have with the grain simulator is the way that you control it. A slider for “grains per pixel” and a slider to control hardness/softness of the grain. Depending on how you plan to use your final images this seems like the wrong way to control a grain simulation to me for an image that starts out with no grain and you can put out at arbitrary sizes. For example If I shoot with TRI-X and push it to 1600 shot on 5×4 film and then print an 8×10 print you would never even see the grain. How come when I choose the TRI-X film simulation I get what a super grainy pushed TRI-X 35mm blown up to 11×14 would look like no matter what the resolution of the camera I am using even at tiny web display sizes. Conversely if you send a 6 Megapixel image in it looks completely different than if you send a 25 Megapixel image in. What this all adds up to is the grain engine is difficult to nail down with any degree of repeatability depending on your output sizes and intent. It needs a better UI to specify what it should be doing. Especially if you are going to use it as a preset across multiple output intents and cameras.

After the film types are the stylizing controls. You can simulate various traditional print toning methods, add vignettes, and add edge burning effects. Again nothing new under the sun here but quick easy and effective. Not much to talk about here, maybe a mention that each of these controls has enormous flexibility and range.

The last thing I will mention is something that seems like a small thing but it is actually m favorite feature of Silver Efex. The little Zone viewer all of the way at the bottom of the left hand side. This little thing is a god send if you do any printing. Even with a ton of practice it is still really easy to get an image that looks great on screen but looks like crap on paper. The huge 1000:1 contrast range of your typical high quality LCD monitor tricks your eyes very easily. Tones that are easy to differentiate with full detail at the high and low end of the tonal range will not do the same thing with ink on paper at more like 100:1 contrast ratio. The little zone system tool works a couple of ways. If you hover your mouse over a particular zone it shows you all of the tones in the image that are in that range. If you click on one of the little zone patches the overlay stays on the image. This makes it easy to make adjustments while keeping things in ranges that will look great on paper. Very cool.

Nik’s packaging and pricing structure for various products continue to be a mystery to me. No advice here but if you do choose to by one of the various versions for Photoshop, the whole shebang pack (except no SFX for NX2) or just the lowly Aperture version do me a favor and use the Amazon link on the site.

RB

Briefly this is what is not here – No optimized shots that are prettified by a specific filter. No regurgitated lessons on how to use the software, and no feature comparisons or shootouts. Instead I thought I would do my best to tell you how I approach the product, what I think of it’s usefulness, and some practical tips if you decide to use it.

Of course I must include a few images here and there so I found the crappiest, most boring, yucky image I could as a starting point to illustrate some of the crazy things that Color EFX can do. Every once in a while I’ll force myself to take a walk to shoot subjects that I normally don’t shoot with lenses that I normally don’t use. I am usually not too careful and shoot a lot. I even force myself to shoot images that I know will not be any good. Maybe some more on why I do that some other time. To the point here is the base crappy image – perfect for doing some wild manipulations.

When using Color EFX the last thing you want to do is goose up an image with enhancements prior to sending into most of the filters. For the most part make sure it is neutral and relatively flat. There are a couple of exceptions for filters like vignette. The vast majority of the filters in Color EFX do massive manipulations to brightness, contrast, and color so it’s best to send it in neutral and on the flatter side. On that note one of the biggest criticisms that I have of the product is that the default settings for most of the filters are way way way over the top. If you like subtle this alone could be a big turn off for you. Once you get comfy with the product it’s not a deal breaker because you can easily save multiple presets for each filter that suit your taste and image needs.

I am not a huge fan of most of the filter sets out there, I own this one because of it’s huge range of effects, the versatility of each filter, and the high quality of output. If you are evaluating Color EFX with the 30 day trial make sure you have the time to really spend with it. Even if you used it every day for the month you may have a hard time really getting a feel for all it will do. The vast majority of the dozens of filters have a depth that is far beyond the default presets and most are useful beyond the name. An example may be the “sunshine” filter. I think it is supposed to add sunlight to an overcast scene but it has a huge range of effects. So much so that different settings don’t even look like the same filter.

Here is my boring crappy tree in the sun with the sunlight filter. I would probably run it through for another pass of Color EFX and do a neutral grad at the bottom on this if it were for real. That brings up an intellectual limitation of Color EFX, you cannot apply multiple filters in one shot. I say intellectual limitation because rarely would I do this, I would probably keep my in-between stages along the way anyway in case I change my mind (sort of like layers, just sequential). Actually I have rarely used more than one Color EFX filter on an image. I have but while I was working on it I kept the first and second stages until I was sure that the image was where I wanted it.  When you hit the save button in Color EFX there is no going back and adjusting the effect. Another good reason to use the capability to save your presets for each filter. I actually have some favorite starting points and save a working set with the same project name as my Aperture project.

Actually that is one feature of the product not really discussed much, the ability to save groups of filters together and the ability to save filter presets. If you do not use these you will be sorry, trying to remember settings while tweaking a project does not work. Heck I cannot stand this any more I have to add the neutral density grad to the sunshine. That’s probably over the top but hey we’re having fun with a crappy image so let’s let it all hang out. Not only that but I wanted to make a point. If you start out with a flatter image for some of the more outrageous effects and you need to manipulate the contrast or levels after the fact in Aperture have no fear the image output by Color EFX is a 16 bit TIFF file so you can adjust the crap out of it after it comes back into Aperture if required. Now we are getting somewhere. I knew I shot this tree for a reason. Let’s go for something a little more surreal. That’s the direction this thing is going and I kind of like it.

How about a going exact opposite of sunshine and use the midnight filter in blue mode. This one actually has the blur built in as well as a bunch of completely different color rendering modes and adjustment sliders. One of the things that makes Color EFX is the depth most of the effects have. One of the dangerous things is that some of the effects and settings may have so much of an effect on an image that you get sort of stuck going to the same filter or the same preset for everything but the real power is not applying the same filter to everything you shoot. It’s also not flipping through every filter with every setting on every image. What a complete waste of time. I guess it’s okay if you have nothing better to do and like playing with your computer. The real power is taking some dedicated time to experiment and develop a concept or visual idea for a project be it personal or commercial and then go shoot the exact material you need to realize the concept.

Having that visual concept of the post production treatment prior to shooting is the key to using Color EFX productively. Fooling around with some of your images and exploring visual concepts is just the start. I like where the midnight blue thing is going but let’s go back to the sunlight thing for a moment and try a more surreal color rendition using the bi-color filters and running it back through with some soft focus. This bi-color is a cool color on the top and a warm on the bottom. Kind of interesting color but actually looks too pretty. The soft focus isn’t really helping much with the surreal thing either in fact it looks  a little bit like glamour glow, the mother of all prettifying filters with tons of adjustments all of them good. Hell I have to do it, I cannot stop myself so here it is a glamour glow version with a cool glow color. Some advice to Color EFX users and would be users. Just get the glamour glow out of the way, the first thing you do when you are playing with any image is make a glamour glow version and then forget about it. This filter is so seductive it could make a bad picture of a pile of dog crap look pretty. It’s the heroin of filters. See what I mean a picture of an old crappy tree with no leaves brown grass in the winter time looks sexy. Okay enough of that. Back to work. I sort of like the color of the bi-color filters and sort of want the not too sharp thing but a little more surreal.

How about a fake polaroid transfer. I am not a big fan of the fake old process look but the polaroid transfer filter is actually pretty good and may give me some ideas even if I choose to implement them differently in a final visual concept. This one is not over the top smeary and texture-y. I actually like this and gives me some ideas for another project but not for the tree. My final decision for the tree was the image at the top of  the post. The IR black and white. It’s actually credible for an IR simulation and like most of the filters has enough flexibility to get a lot of different looks. Any of these effects can be reproduced in strait photoshop but would take a bit of effort to reproduce. Having a big box of crayon colors available can be a big help developing a visual concept and help spur ideas for how you envision treating a particular project or subject matter. I do not advise randomly playing with bad images helter skelter as a work process and is certainly not the value of a package like Color EFX. Sure go ahead and play around with your version of a crappy old tree image to generate ideas or get a handle on what the final visual treatment of a body of work might look like but once you have a few ideas your best bet is to go shoot the images with a good idea of where they are going to end up rather than the reverse.

I got my Nik Color EFX here. As always comments and criticism are always welcome. Hopefully this was at all useful to anyone considering Color EFX. One other note is to plan ahead when purchasing Nik products. They are available for Aperture as plugins, Adobe, and Nikon Capture NX2. There is a dizzying array of ways to purchase them and it helps to know where and how you want to use them prior to pulling the trigger to get the best deal.

RB