You would have to use a selection or a mask in Photoshop or the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom to achieve the same effect. This brought out the detail in the model’s hair and eyes, but left her skin untouched. Only the shadows are affected, leaving the midtones and highlights alone. Clarity is increased uniformly across the frame, affecting the skin tones as well as the hair.īottom: Shadows Structure set to 100% in Silver Efex Pro 2. Middle: This is what happens when you increase Clarity to 100% in Lightroom (note that you wouldn’t normally push it that far for a portrait, I did it here to show you the effect). Top: A neutral black and white conversion, with no increase in Clarity. The above photo shows three close-ups of the same portrait used earlier. There is also a Fine Structure slider for increasing mid-tone contrast in areas of fine detail. But while in those programs the Clarity slider affects all the tones in the selected area, in Silver Efex Pro 2 you can choose to adjust Structure independently in the shadows, midtones and highlights. Structure slider is similar to Clarity in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. Soft Contrast is ideal for portraits, while Contrast is better for subjects like architecture and the landscape. These portraits show the difference between Contrast and Soft Contrast.

There are more tools for enhancing texture The original colour photo is shown top left.Ģ. You can buy Develop Presets for Lightroom, but it will be difficult to find some that give you as many options as those in Silver Efex Pro 2. This places the plug-in ahead of Photoshop, and probably ahead of Lightroom too. Silver Efex Pro 2 has 38 presets that you can use as starting points for your processing work, including vintage looks as well as modern ones. Rather than provide a comprehensive review of the software, I’m going to look at some of the things you can do with it that you can’t (or would be much more difficult) in Photoshop or Lightroom. Today I’m going to look at what many people consider to be the best black and white plug-in around – Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro 2. But the last few years have also seen an increase in the number of plug-ins built to do nothing else, other than convert photos to monochrome. You can convert colour photos to black and white in Photoshop and Lightroom (or your Raw conversion software of choice).

Nik silver efex pro 2