Colour photography survived the switch from film to digital pretty well. Some might argue that today's digital cameras produce rather insipid results compared to their favourite transparency films of old, but in general you can get colour shots to look excellent with a few curves tweaks and a saturation hike here and there. And the noiselessness of some DSLR images makes transparencies look like they were shot on sandpaper.
It's not the same with black and white. Yes, digital cameras often do have mono modes, and there are a million and one ways to convert colour shots to mono in Photoshop. Yet none of them quite seem to capture the gutsy, punchy look of old-time mono film. And that beautiful grain structure? Few Photoshop techniques even come close to emulating it.
But Nik Software's Silver Efex Pro reproduces the look of your favourite black-and-white film so convincingly it could bring a tear to your eye and a lump to your throat. It'll also send you scuttling through your Aperture library for those thousands of latent mono masterpieces that previously could never be made to come out right.
Silver Efex Pro offers a range of preset effects from infra-red to push-processing. All you have to do is scroll down through the thumbnail previews arranged in a vertical strip down the left-hand side of the screen and click on any one that takes your fancy. Or, if you want to take over manually, you can use the control palettes on the right-hand side of the screen.
Silver Efex Pro simulates a wide selection of classic mono films that can be accessed via a drop-down menu, on which you can try out different black-and-white 'contrast' filters. There's an interesting technical point here. You can use the Channel Mixer in Photoshop to recreate a 'red' filter, but because this relies heavily on the red channel alone, it tends to produce lots of noise and edge effects. But the High Contrast Red Filter in Silver Efex Pro doesn't. Not only that, it's stunningly effective, darkening blue skies until they're almost black.
There's a lot more. Shadow and Highlight sliders recover any detail lost during some of the more extreme processes, and there are sliders too for manually adjusting Brightness, Contrast and something called 'Structure'. This adds real punch to flat-looking images by emphasising detail with localised contrast hikes - rather like large Radius settings in Photoshop's Unsharp Mask filter. It's difficult to explain, but very effective.
Finally, as if all that wasn't enough, you get a version of Nik's U-point technology where you can add control points to make localised Brightness, Contrast and Structure adjustments. In other words, it's just like dodging and burning in a traditional black-and-white darkroom.
If you can't find the effect you're looking for among the presets then you surely will by juggling film types, grain levels, filters and more using Silver Efex Pro's copious toolset. But the most striking thing of all remains the way Nik's managed to recreate the feel of black-and-white film so perfectly. The grain, the midtone contrast, that subtle thing photographers like to call 'tonality' - it's all spot on. If there is a criticism it's that sometimes Nik's clever behind-the-scenes masking processes produce edge halos, but these only appear during pretty extreme adjustments. If you simply like dabbling with black-and-white now and then, Silver Efex Pro is a pretty expensive toy. But if you live and breathe black-and-white photography, it's worth every penny.
Verdict
Needs Aperture 2.1 or later
Author: Rod Lawton
MacUser Online