September 18th, 2024
Having started to take photography seriously just over a year ago, I still don't know what to do with my images most of the time. Social media is a bust, and I don't have the reach or the audience be selling prints, and while I love taking pictures just for the sake of taking them, sometimes other motivation is well needed. All this to say I sometimes enter photography contests on Photocrowd.
Recently one such contest called "Black and White Landscapes" appeared. "Okay, let's see if any of my images work in B&W", I thought. And having had the Nik Collection installed for a few weeks (I installed it conjunction with DxO Photolab when I ditched Adobe and Lightroom, more on that in a future post), I decided to try the Silver Efex app/plugin. I'd heard Tony Northrup rave about it, but I'm not really one for B&W - I cheekily think people use it to be "artistic" even with bad photos - so it remained unused. Boy was I missing out. The B&W modules in the common raw developing softwares have nothing on this. It. Just. Works.
The same picture edited for colour and converted to B&W with Silver Efex.
Converting images to B&W through just Lightroom, Capture One or DxO Photolab requires a fair bit of tweaking to avoid the washed up grey standard result, and even then, I was never convinced. With this, all you have to do is navigate through the built in presets (which will get you 90% there) and then tweak a little bit to taste. The presets are already amazing, and they all have this quality to them that almost looks like you are working with film scans as soon as you apply one - it's honestly voodoo. You can of course edit from scratch, the results will be way better than the B&W modules either way.
The Film Type and Grain, and the Finishing Adjustments panels are particularly powerful, with all the famous film stocks (and more!) to choose from.
Here it is at work on an image I never thought would work in black and white:
Color Edit
Regular B&W Conversion
Final Edit
I discovered a whole new love for B&W. I apologize to every monochrome image I criticised in the past. And to imagine I could have let the trial period finish and not try this...
Miguel