Tag Archives: Software

The Christmas period gave me a chance to have a look at some of my older images and start to experiment with some new applications for processing images. Generally, I like to keep my images as they are shot, preferring global adjustment to local modification – I’m a photographer after all, not an ‘image maker’ or graphic designer – so my work is done in the camera rather than on the computer.

I recently got hold of Nik Silver Efex which can be used either through Aperture, Photoshop or Lightroom. Since my RAW processing is done either in Canon’s DPP or Apple’s Aperture, Silver Efex slots nicely into the workflow and I am hoping it will make me produce a few more black and white images.

Back in my days doing my MSc at uni I really enjoyed my time in the darkroom – I could go in there first thing in the morning and appear, bleary-eyed, hungry and completely dis-orientated in the wee small hours of the following day. Since the switch to digital though, black and white is not something I’ve done much of. Occasionally there’s been an image I’ve thought would work in black and white, or indeed have shot with black and white in mind, but generally, I deal in colour images.

Silver Efex takes me back to my darkroom days – fortunately though I don’t have to be locked in a dark room to use it!

The trick with black and white is that not all images suit the treatment. So I took a wander through my library of images to find some images that might work. These two images are both taken from my New Zealand collection – take a look at this post to see the colour versions….. – and were one’s I thought might suit a bit of black and white.

Do you do much black and white? If so, where do you perform your black and white conversions? In-camera? In RAW conversion? In Photoshop?