DxO Webinar: Creative Black & White with Silver Efex Pro

[Music] we'll be talking about Silver Efex Pro and specifically different workflows to kind of think about I have two different kind of tricks one is a workflow the other is a trick that you can use silver effects Pro for contrast adjustments in Photoshop and change blending mode really cool really powerful and opens up some interesting opportunities because of the algorithms that are built in his silver effects I also want to show you a sub ah ta technique which is a tank off of something that you would do in the darkroom called solarization or kind of and then we're gonna sort of spend some time utilizing silver effects Pro in a slightly different way than maybe a lot of folks have thought about it so we're gonna we're gonna process this image and I think this photograph I'm going to minimize my GoToWebinar control panel by the way so I can see all my palettes and what we have here is couple layers in Photoshop I'll talk about what what those are and why we're using them this is the original image and then here is the enhanced image in black and we basically are able to relight the photograph because here the archita here is sort of our faces in shadow and then a final image we kind of open up those shadows nicely so that we have a more compelling image in this case just a photo that's it's got some more impact so let's let's start here so I'm gonna delete my Silver Efex Pro layer and I want to mention that this isn't necessarily an advanced workflow our advanced webinar but it is a different kind of webinar than my usual webinars for silver effects pro usually I would cover everything in the interface and we talked about all those different aspects this evening I want to show you some different thought processes and techniques so we're here in Photoshop I'll just briefly show you this is the original composite image and then I used color effects Pro for a couple of enhancements namely cross processing as well as the tonal contrast filter as well as let's see it was a detail extractor filter and then I think a dark and light in the center as well just just to you know be clear with what I did going into silver effects bro I will briefly go over the interface because I imagine there's folks in here that aren't totally comfortable or or familiar with every single thing but I'm not gonna cover every single thing so I'll kind of just try to cover the things that I find important for this process so we're opened into silver effects Pro and silver effects is basically a black and white conversion software for our color digital images it's a really powerful tool and it allows us to you know take these darkroom techniques into the digital darkroom it allows us to save presets so that we can create consistent black and white images have consistent workflows and it yields us a whole lot of control with control points selective editing post-processing can work in both a global manner where you're affecting the entire image as well as a selective manner where you're actually going in and dodging and burning or controlling contrast in different areas you've got 48 presets that are built into the software there are ten sort of brand-new presets as of December of last year and these are now built into the software I've actually gone in this evening and created one more preset that is not built into the software I'm going to show you how to build this kind of preset and this is as I click on my preset here I take on the saba ta effect or a technique that you'd use in the darkroom that is often times called solarization there's a tone inversion and so it looks really funky and really weird and it has an interesting black and white effect and I'll tell you I'm not using this on every single image but it definitely is a cool effect that can be applied in interesting ways selectively hypothetically as well as in global manner which is what we're kind of doing here so I'm going to start from scratch I'm going to show you the before and after so here is the original black and white conversion and then here's what we get with this sub ITA effect which is this nice kind of graphic feel for for this photo it is different under different photos I'm gonna show you two different examples so that you can get a feel for that as well if you're not familiar for those of you who've worked in the darkroom this is probably something that you've tried before or maybe you're an expert in I'll show you how to do it here within silver effects now we're gonna start from scratch in this case so I've gone back to the all preset section in the upper left corner and just clicked on neutral to start over from scratch I'm gonna hide those presets because we don't need them over there and I'm just gonna really quickly take a look at the GoToWebinar control panel okay it doesn't look like there's any problems again if there is a problem if your audio cuts out give it a few seconds if it doesn't come back immediately like after a minute or so log out and log back in and you'll reconnect and you should regain your audio so um in a normal workflow I would recommend typically starting with the global adjustments or possibly your color filters or film types those are three different tools that you can start with in this case because I want to show you that Sabatier effect we're gonna go into the film types section which by the way there are 18 very popular black-and-white film types some of which don't even exist anymore there are still manufacturers of film it's actually going quite strong as well and we are able to digitally recreate those kinds of effects as if this image was shot with a particular kind of film we're not going to use any of those presets right now we're going to go into the levels and curves adjustment tool and for anyone not familiar with the levels and curves adjustment tool the the levels sort of section of this tool basically allows us to control on the left side the shadows so we can take the shadows and we can darken them down by bringing them towards the center creating a steeper curve it's going to give us more contrast or we can go ahead and drag this up and that's actually going to kind of mute the shadows it what it does is it actually takes the d-max and it it brings it down the darkest density the the blackest black now is really bright you can see that in the image and you actually you can see that represented in the histogram in the lower right corner as well we're gonna kind of play off of that but we're gonna change the highlights to begin with so what I want to do is create that tonal inversion for the Saba tá effect and to do that I'm gonna just take my my highlights my upper right corner curve adjustment I'm just gonna drag this down I don't know exactly where yet it is going to be kind of image dependent but then the second step is to take another so basically click on the curve itself add another curve or add another dot basically and drag this up and then what's happening now is I'm I'm telling the software that the the 255 value the very brightest value in the image that the highlights themselves are going to be now darker than all of these values right so the to sort of translate that and again I'm sorry if you're very familiar with curves but basically if if you take this all the way up our highlights are as biters they're gonna get if I start taking this down it takes those highlights the brightest values it brings them down and it actually in in silver effects Pro the curve kind of follows those highlights initially because the these sort of anchor points the the highlight anchor point and the shadow anchor point act as kind of guides for the rest but what we're gonna end up doing is sort of bringing these down and it takes a little playing to get used to and I want to make sure that this line never like pushes up against the very top because we're gonna lose more detail that way but basically I'm gonna create this really funky curve I might even go into the shadows technically in a Sabha ta effect you you wouldn't actually get shadows going much brighter but you know we're doing this digitally and we can kind of do whatever we want so we can create a more interesting effect that way and so that's what we're gonna run with right and so we get this really kind of interesting graphic contrast effect and like I said not going to use this all the time but it definitely is cool and neat and of course we can go in and control things selectively with control points so let's say we we love this effect and we want to run with it but there are some areas in the image that we kind of want to change or clean up well we can just close down levels and curves move into our global adjustments and go into brightness contrast structure and so on in fact I'm going to move into the contrast tools for folks not familiar with the global adjustments it's broken down into brightness contrast in structure and if you click on the little triangle that's to the left of any of those labels it's going to open up into another tool set where we can go in and utilize the soft contrast tool which is doing some interesting stuff both ways if I bring it into the negative I'm sort of bringing back some of the shadow detail that's kind of blacked out and if I bring my soft contrast this way to the right it creates this kind of softening effect a little bit and I actually prefer the softer look and feel in this case so I'm gonna run with that one but I do like the effect of kind of lightening up the shadows a little bit so I'm gonna take a control point in the Selective adjustments section take that point and I'm just gonna drop it in this shadow area and what these control points allow us to do is control the image selectively and specifically in silver effects we have control over brightness contrast and structure and then there's a little triangle expand collapse box it's at the bottom of each control point if you click on it it opens up into amplify White's amplify blacks fine structure and even selective colorization if you wanted to do a selective colorization effect so by dropping my control point down here in the water I can kind of open up some of these shadows a little bit I'm happy with that let's just take a quick look at the before and after this is a really kind of funky workflow doing some stuff and let's say I'm happy with that because it's been 14 minutes since we started I can save this as I preset and then we can apply this on other images whenever we might want to and in fact to do that I'm gonna open the preset browser back up so I've got to move into the upper left corner of the interface and then I need to move into the custom section of our presets and I'm gonna go ahead and just click the plus button in the custom section as you click the plus button this is how you add a preset and anything that you've done to your image in a global manner mind you will be saved into this preset by default so the control points are not going to be saved in this way which is kind of good because typically when we bring another image into silver effects we're gonna want to use selective control points in different portions of the photograph now I'm gonna name this us it's two bees no two TSI ba ta yeah that looks right and I'm gonna call this two because I have a preset already that's about ta affect one so I'm gonna save this right here and as I click the okay bot button the custom section is actually going to open up so it went from our standard preset library which houses all of the presets that are built into the software into the custom preset library which is where any presets that you've saved are going to be saved into here so what do we got so about TA effect - and sabha ta effect one so I've got my two presets and we're gonna be able to take a look at what these two different presets do as we open up a different photograph as well I actually prefer the first effect a little bit more but this is a little bit more subtle the second effect that we've created now that we're done editing our image we're going to go ahead and just click the okay button we've created a preset we've messed around with a Sabha ta effect which is again something that's gonna be very different and I hope I'm pronouncing that properly I only know the word from reading it I've actually done this in the darkroom quite a few times since high school and so I got excited when I thought about it and was like what can I show for this webinar it would be really kind of cool anyways there we go we've got our finished image in what by the way for folks who are new here when using silver effects Pro or any of the knick plugins in Photoshop what happens is your background image you have what's called a merged stamp visible so your your background pixels or whatever your layers are looking like there are going to be copied and then the adjustment is going to be applied to a completely separate layer so that we can kind of maintain the ability to go back to these other layers when necessary and that that actually becomes very important in another workflow two of the other workflows that I want to show you today I'm gonna go ahead and close this image I'm gonna just take a quick look at our GoToWebinar control panel cool Thank You Millie I appreciate that and I'm gonna keep these questions for for after why Oh X input value Y okay got it Michael I'm gonna keep these questions for later on why did you use color effects before importing two silver effects instead of global adjustments in photo lab or Lightroom got it right Matt I'm gonna answer that question later on as well okay keep them coming let's keep chatting so I just wanted to show you the presets on this image just because it's a very different photograph than the last photo so we're gonna open up into silver effects pro this was this was a photograph that was shot kind of on the side of another set that we were working on we were testing a camera for a camera manufacturer and we found some models and hired production crew and and worked in this really beautiful location the light was really beautiful so we kind of just shot on the side with our Nikon and Canon cameras as well anyways custom presets moving into our presets about ta effects so here's the Sabatier effect one right and so completely different kind of effect what what I'm interested in here what I find to be very interesting here is this tonal inversion creates this otherworldly kind of effect and it absolutely creates this kind of graphic sense if we look at this side by side you've got the original image and then we've got our sabha ta affected it's just so cool what it does to these bright highlight areas it inverts all of those tones and it does some interesting stuff on her dress there as well so that's that's the Saba ta effect one hears about ta effect two so a completely different effect and that's that's for two reasons well multiple reasons but mostly because the curve that I've added is so different for this sub ITA effect one and I also used the Kodak Tmax Pro preset and then I also utilized some contrast and a maybe some structure no structure just contrasts so the effect becomes you know very different between those two presets but if I were to apply this preset on another image from the same series I'm gonna get a nice consistent look between those images you know if if the the tonal range in contrast has a similar feel like let's say we have several images that look similar to this maybe some close-ups maybe some further out that's gonna be able to create a consistent look and feel between those different photographs all right let's say we love this let's go ahead and click the ok' button in the lower right corner it's gonna bring us back over into Photoshop and I'm really tempted to show you the another workflow with this image but I want to just move through this these images not as quickly as possible but I've got a bunch of photos to show you I'm just two more workflows really but one of these workflows I want to show you a couple times because you can get completely different effects depending upon how you go about thinking of your image so I'm going to close that image I'm gonna say don't save and then it keeps going to our our cheetah there so this image actually has silver effects Pro applied to it but we still have color right so this is a really interesting fun filtration fun effect and the beauty of what's going on here is it it allows us to use the contrast and texture controls that are built into silver effects pro their proprietary to silver effects pro but on a color photograph so I don't know if I need to explain this first later there's a huge death spot on my sensor in fact there's a couple so I kind of just got rid of it after the fact because it was really became much more noticeable after I added some contrast using silver effects so let's delete these layers this this photo even if you're not terribly interested in it I just find it to be kind of ironic and not necessarily funny but this is this is one of the Great Lakes and right now there are issues with flooding around the Great Lakes and you know this is a state so this was made probably by the county actually right or maybe the town but this is like the stop gap or the fix for you know the problem of the road basically running off into the lake anyways I'm gonna move into silver effects pro we don't need to talk about the photograph or its content so much I want to show you this technique so let's minimize those presets and what I want to do this this thought process is a little bit different in a little bit strange right because we have a black and white image now but I want to apply all of our effects to a color photograph so the we have to kind of think about how the color is going to render when we go into back into Photoshop and so if you're going to use this technique color filters will look really funky in strange if you utilize something like the red or blue color filter as a contrast control with the image in color I'm not saying it doesn't work it's just kind of difficult to see how this is gonna translate so I tend to avoid the color filter for this technique and I will sometimes use the film effects I'm sorry enough film effects the film types and then also all of the contrast controls and oftentimes control points so I really love what happens to this photograph with the Kodak Tmax Pro preset but I'm going to lessen our I'm gonna I'm gonna adjust the curve a little bit and I'm gonna add contrast selectively and globally but not necessarily using the film type that I've applied so basically I'm using this as a preset I'm adjusting this preset because I like what it's doing in the color sensitivity range as well as it's adding a little bit of grain if you don't want any grain added to your image knowing that you're going to be you know converting it back into color you could take your grain per pixel slider all the way over to 500 and that's going to get rid of any grain that might be applied on this photograph in fact let's do that that'll keep it clean for us I do like what this image looks like when it's got some grain on it but that's besides the point so back up to global adjustments for this really cool contrast technique so in global adjustments under brightness you have a sort of standard brightness adjustment but you also can control the highlights separately from the mid-tones separately from the shadows and you also have what's called dynamic brightness and that's the kind of killer image or a killer algorithm that's proprietary here within the NIC plugins and you'll find it I think within maybe a couple of the filters in color effects Pro if I remember correctly and then here in silver effects pro so what this slider does if I take it to the left this is gonna darken down all of the brightest values more so than the darker values right so it takes the brightest stuff and darkens it down but it retains shadow detail really nicely if I take this slider the opposite direction it's going to brighten up the shadows and brighten up the darker values but it's gonna try to retain the very brightest values and how that's different is that if you were to just take a brightness slider or maybe even an exposure slider to the left or to the right it's basically gonna darken everything down at the same rate if you will brightness and exposure algorithms will work slightly different thing than each other but this brightness and dynamic brightness are very different in terms of this dynamic brightness allows me to darken the photo darken those highlights but still retain in the shadow texture and shadow detail nicely so I like that dynamic brightness leave it about there we're gonna move into contrast in the contrast section you have a standard contrast adjustment you can amplify the whites amplify the blacks and soft contrast now amplify the whites this is going to allow us to well basically take the lighter values of every individual object and brighten them up so as you open up into silver effects Pro the the image kind of assesses edges figures out where those edges are and tries to look at and kind of create not a mask necessarily but delineation between objects and when you amplify the whites well it's happening is it looks at those lines and edges and objects if you will and it brightens the brightest values that are in those individual little objects in fact if if we were to zoom in so I'm gonna go into 100% I've actually made these files a little bit smaller this is a 36 megapixel file originally I made it 12 megapixels so it's faster for us to work with over the webinar because the webinar system is sort of intensive as we're trying to stream this stuff so it speeds up our whole process a bit so as I implied if we watch you know these guardrails you'll notice the highlight areas and the guardrails get brighter and some of the brighter values back here and these are the flowers and so on and the brush back there they're going to be affected but the shadows really aren't and it's a really beautiful tool and it's a really wonderful contrast adjustment but again you're really only gonna be able to find within a few of the filters and color effects and then here within silver effects where we have like the the total workflow with all of these different tools amplify blacks does something very similar but in the shadows in the darkest values I don't know if we need that necessarily I'm gonna leave that out I'm gonna bring that back to zero and I'm going to add a little bit of soft contrast creates a little bit of this glowing effect and then we move into structure structure is for the most part a texture adjustment tool and what it does is it takes that same sort of edge detection and detail sort of detection idea concept that the software is using as you open up the software and it basically is going to bring us more texture right it's it's not increase in I'm sorry it's not creating texture it's taking the information that's already there and it's kind of sharpening the edges of those areas a bit but it's doing it in such a way that it acts differently then let's say an unsharp mask or some other kinds of technical sharpening things it's called structure because it's it's aiming for these small textures and now we're getting this kind of nice pop out of the image in fact if we take a look at the before and after this is the image this is the original it's kind of linear a little bit flat here's the enhanced now we've got some impact now I've got two problems that I'm seeing as I've added some structure I'm darkening down these shadows more than I want to I think we've actually got detail in there and we can tell by moving into the zone mapping system which is in the lower right corner of the interface this system basically indicates to us where all of our values are kind of in the histogram and it's broken into eleven different zones and the zone zero would be black without detail so if I click on this you'll note that I have some areas over here that's black with no detail and then I've got some areas in the branches up in the tree that's also black with no detail I'm not terribly concerned with these areas although we can fix that with a control point I definitely want to fix this area on the left side of the frame with some control points and then my sky is a little bit bland and drab okay see that in my histogram but almost all of the tones in my sky fall in about zone eight and so that's that's a little bit gray it's a I kind of want of a little bit more contrast and texture out of those areas so we're gonna do that using some control points the first thing I want to do though let's take care of those little shadow details over here on the right side of the frame so again these control points what they're doing is allowing us to make selective dodging and burning effects brightening and dot sorry brightening and darkening down of areas and also controlling contrast really nicely and it's doing this without us having to worry about making selections which is my favorite part about it we just dropped the control point it makes a photographic looking selection it's going in and looking for the similar tones and colors and textures and then it basically it makes the selection for us as I've brightened that area I've noticed that some of the values in the details in here are a little bit muted now they don't look as good as they did so I'm gonna take another control point place it in here and I'm gonna add in some structure and maybe even brighten those values and add a little contrast just to sort of direct your attention towards those areas so it's not I don't I don't want that to be the focus but I want there to be some good detail in there to show how you know nature is kind of reclaiming its area all right so control point in this section I'm gonna turn off that zone mapping and the way you turn off the zone mapping is you just click on it again you can see my zone zero is in my lower right corner of the interface is highlighted I want to click on that again it turns it off and now I don't have to worry about those little lines showing up and possibly distracting me the next thing I do want to do though drop a massive control point right in the middle and see what happens if I start darkening that down adding a little bit of structure for detail and texture a little bit of contrast I'm pretty happy with that you start to see how dirty this camera sensor is though right and we would clean that up afterwards because those the dust spots were there originally in the capture but they're not as noticeable because the low contrast scene so I'm I'm using a shortcut to create new control points by the way it's shift command a and that's gonna basically yield me a little crosshair so that I can create new control points it's just a faster way of working let's say we're happy with our result I'm gonna take a quick look at the before and after using the compare button there's the before there's the after we've got a lot more pop more impact depth I'm liking it the last thing I'm gonna do is move into finishing adjustments we're gonna use a burn edge to just burn the bottom edge in just a little and we'll have it encroach into the center a little bit more and have it sort of have a softer transition as well so we're basically we're able to just burn the corner or sorry burn the bottom edge here the the burn edges tool allows you to burn each individual edge talking down each individual edge separately in this case I'm just gonna darken down the bottom it helps to sort of push your attention as the viewer in towards the center a little bit more when we're all done editing we click that okay button in the lower right corner brings us back over into Photoshop and this is going to yield us a black and white image the trick to getting the color back on the photograph is to go into the blending modes so I should mention you can only do this technique when using Adobe Photoshop unless you are also using another piece of software somehow with silver effects that has layers in layer masks so here we're in our layers palette and if I go into my blending modes and I switched from the normal blending mode down into the luminosity blending mode we're gonna get our color back but now we have the contrast adjustment from silver effects now oftentimes I kind of overdo my contrast adjustment and that actually ends up being totally fine because you can take the opacity of the layer itself and start dropping that down a bit so I'll bring this to maybe 80% and now we've got 80% of our silver effects Pro contrast adjustment the only complaint that I have in this image is now my stop sign doesn't look like it's the correct color so I would probably go in with some different techniques and kind of get that color back in the stop sign because that it's not only is it a memory color but it's like a it's a very recognizable memory color whereas you know everything else is sort of a believable color in tone with this added contrast the stop sign to me is not alright I'm gonna leave that one open because I assume we'll probably have a question or two about that technique all right so all right look a couple more webinar questions we look good so I like to check the go-to webinar control panel once in a while ladies and gentlemen just to make sure that there are no major technical problems because I don't have it up on screen most of the time this is baby Ellie the original photograph looks like this and what we're gonna do is actually apply several different layers of silver effects Pro and those different layers will have dramatically different effects on them so I've already got my large thumbnails on but hopefully you can see the difference in the actual black and white conversion I'll just show it to you so this first black and white conversion does kind of the opposite of what most folks would probably do with a portrait of a baby I'm applying a blue color filter to kind of create this really dark ruddy skin it's beautiful to me and it's kind of funny because it brings out all of that yellow the banana that the baby had just eaten maybe it's carrots I don't actually know and then basically we're we're gonna turn off this layer and reconvert from our color image I'm going to show you that this is an opacity of 82 but basically it's a completely different black and white conversion where I'm getting a much darker Bibb and then bringing out a little more texture in the baby's eyes and then this last layer we have never ever do to probably any portrait we're gonna reduce some contrast here or there and then we're basically going to use layer masks to create a composite image and the beauty of this workflow is it allows us to reuse the color information over and over and over again as many times as we want to create an image that couldn't otherwise exist right you'd never be able to do this with a piece of film you've got we've got multiple different color filters going into these things in multiple different layers of our black and white conversion so let's look at how to do this and we're gonna do it relatively quickly on the first one and I'm gonna reiterate it on another image with the cheetah and then another image with this sort of um I don't know it's a sorry as I switch over into images this is the Albany State Capitol building in New York anyways le so we're gonna click on silver effects pro as that opens I'm gonna take a sip of my water partner and the the thought process here is that I want to pay attention to certain parts of the image and not other parts so the the idea is that I'm able to you know reconvert this image from color to black and white which means I can take the best parts of the image or interesting parts of the image maybe and brush them together using a silver effects Pro well sorry using layers in Photoshop but combined with silver effects bro so in this case we're gonna move into our color filter I'm gonna click on I think the green color filter no I want the blue color filter and then I'm gonna go ahead and increase that blue color filter a bit you know what this is doing for for anyone who's never used this tool before the color filters emulate what a glass color filter would do when shooting black and white film and what that does is basically if you if you were to click on the red color filter anything that's red or on that end of the color spectrum let's say red yellow and into orange or red orange into yellow and maybe a little bit into green that's gonna brighten up those values and it's gonna darken down any of the colors that are on the opposite end of the color spectrum so neutral looks like this the red color filter finds her pink bib and her skin and it lightens it up because it's primarily on that end of the color spectrum if I go to yellow or green or blue what that's doing is its lightening the similar colors on that end of the color spectrum and darkening the opposite colors so because her skin is primarily red and yellow when we click on the blue color filter it's basically darkening those tones down so it has to do with transmission of light through these filters now that the in in the film world here in the in the digital world it's basically translating those colors in a different way anyways I like what's happening here I'm gonna move into global adjustments i I would most of the time kind of go in and play for a few minutes on each one of these different layers for the sake of our time here I'm not gonna go to extensive I just want to show you some things that have a lot of impact and then brush them together so that you can kind of get a sense of the work flow but the the what's what's so powerful about this is it allows you to do almost anything you want on all of these different areas in the image and then combine them together so I'm happy with this as our base so I'm gonna go ahead and click the ok button so we're gonna use this as the kind of base layer for the overall image I was basically only paying attention to her skin tone but I like what's happening so I'm gonna click the ok button the trick here is once we get back over to Photoshop before we go into silver effects Pro again we have to turn off the silver effects Pro layer and then click on the background and when you do that now we're going to be reconverting the image that's in color into black and white if you leave this layer on and you go back into silver effects Pro it's it's not going to work the way that you want it to at least in the way that this workflow works so you got to make sure to turn off that layer by clicking that little eyeball off on the layer go into the background and then go back to silver effects Pro this is going to reconvert the image from color to black and white and now we're gonna pay attention to a different part of the photograph in this case I'm gonna move into my color filters I'm gonna click on my green color filter I love what that's doing to the bib we're getting so much more contrast you can you can really read this but you still get a sense of the light in the in the material because of the lighting here I'm just gonna add a couple control points here and there to dodge and burn just a touch too much a little bit of contrast and then I'm gonna take a control point and place it on her eye be very careful if you're gonna go in and adjust eyes because it becomes quite obvious if you go too far in fact I'm gonna I'm gonna take this a little bit too far knowing that I'm gonna end up bringing my opacity of the layer down a little so I'm gonna go ahead and brighten her eyes add a little contrast and add a little bit of structure in the 50 megapixel file this was this was shot with a Fuji GFX 50 it actually ends up being a self-portrait of me in her eye which is fun but anyways I figured folks might see that so I was just gonna mention it now I want this control point duplicated put it in the other eye there's three ways to do that the one way that I'm going to show you right now is that you hold the option key down on a Mac or alt if you're on a PC while you're holding option or alt-click on the control point drag it away now I'm going to duplicate in the other eye now the other eye is a little bit more in shadow than before so then her right eye camera left so I'm going to bring the brightness adjustment down just a little bit because this eye is a little more in shadow just a little anyways it's kind of open light now let's say we're happy with this result we click the ok button that brings us over to photoshop now if I turn on my background layer my first silver effects Pro background layer nothing really happens but if we toggle these on and off you can see a dramatic difference so there's the original there's the new and what we're gonna do is use a layer mask so if you follow me in the layers palette here in Photoshop there's a little square that has a circle in it and I'd are not able to really talk about all the details of layer masking because we could go on for days but basically what we're gonna do is hold the option key down on them on a Mac or alt on a PC and add a layer mask what that does is it adds a black layer mask which is going to conceal our entire layer and what we'll do is we'll use a brush in Photoshop and it's got to be a white brush or some tone that's brighter than black we're gonna use a white one because it'll just end up being fast and easy and brush in our effect so I'm gonna tap B on my keyboard I'm gonna make sure my foreground color over in the tools palette on the left side of Photoshop is white and then I'm just gonna go ahead and paint the effect in and I should be using a Wacom tablet and I should be really paying attention to the edges of this but for the sake of time for our demonstration I'm just gonna do this really quickly I'm gonna go over the bib and I'm gonna go over any other area that I want to have come through so I want displayed from this particular layer so I want her eyes and the bib in this case see it now her eyes look kind of scary especially on you know compared to the dark ruddy skin tone I would actually like to print this image huge and then give it to her parents I think they would think it was both strange and maybe actually similar to her personality she's a lovely baby so let's say we're happy with this I'm gonna turn off these two layers I'm gonna go back into our color and then we're gonna convert one more time this time I'm not gonna pay attention to the baby I'm gonna kind of pay attention to more to the background and I'm gonna go I'm gonna go crazy here and take the contrast into over the soft contrast into the negative and that is gonna go really funky on the baby's skin tone but we're gonna end up with an interesting effect when we start combining those layers together and so this is where kind of getting used to and playing with these different algorithms kind of come into play these different sliders are gonna allow us to do all sorts of really interesting stuff when we start combining these things together it's just a matter of figuring out how they're gonna work together so let's say we love this we click the ok' button and we actually technically we could click the brush button but i think the brush button let's click it I'll show you what it does I think we're gonna be we're not gonna be able to turn on the background layers to see what's happening nope I lied we can so now what we've done is I've clicked the brush button and when you do that from the Nick plugins in Photoshop it actually turns on a new black layer mask for us so it actually did a little bit of the work for us and what you'll do is move into the Nick selective tool here click paint I'm going to minimize that for a second so we can see what's going on in the image and I'm gonna paint the effect in where we want it so I'm gonna size my brush to be a bit bigger and I'm gonna go ahead and brush this in where we want it to be I'm gonna avoid hitting the baby here because it did some weird stuff in the skintone but now we've got this name you know best of both worlds if you will or best of three different worlds if we say that I understand that folks might not necessarily like this process on this image with with the choices that I've made but it is an image that is like no other you know that you couldn't easily do this any other way and we've got this really beautiful wonderful way of combining these different layers together that can yield you some really beautiful and interesting effects now I'm coming up on time here 7:45 oh I forgot to do something you're selective editing mode so so I haven't I never clicked okay or to finish our brushing because usually I actually don't use that brush button I just generate my own layer mask for because of habit but when you're done brushing your stuff in or out using the Nick selective tool that we just did use you have to click the apply button to apply those settings so I'm gonna click apply that kind of finishes it off and now we can go into a different image I'm gonna do this one quick because it's 7:47 and we are kind of at a time and I want to give you guys the opportunity to ask any questions you might have and I imagine we have a lot of questions so one of the questions that I saw come in earlier was why didn't I use photo lab to to use control points on the image before converting the image in silver effects and that was that was in reference to the the architectural photo that we saw with the three sort of spires going up with the reflection of the water and we use the Sabatier effect I used color effects Pro and I used some of the filters that are in color effects Pro that do different things than what photo lab 2 is able to do for us so that's why I made that choice in this case if I were to reprocess this original raw file which I didn't do for this workshop or this webinar this would have been easy so technically this layer right here is actually a second raw processed image of her eyes where I brighten them up I could do that very easily in photo lab two at this point now the next layer is a color effects Pro 4 layer and i'm using tonal contrast again and i'm basically bringing out some more texture on her it's relatively subtle so here's the before and here's the after and you can see it kind of dramatically actually in the the tree that our cheetah is sitting on but that's that was my thought process there so um we're gonna go into silver effects i'm gonna do this one quick and actually it should be relatively easy because it's almost the same set of filters using the blue color filter but here taking the dynamic contrast down maybe not that far dynamic brightness rather adding some amplified blacks adding a little bit of contrast and what I'm doing or as I'm doing this I'm paying attention to the background I'm paying attention to the entire image in this case except for our cheetah and except for maybe the trees the fallen tree that she's standing on so let's say I'm happy with this overall result I'm gonna move in and start using control points so I'm just gonna darken these tones down just a bit and again I'm going quickly simply that so I can show you another example of that same kind of workflow take a quick look at the before and after there's the original conversion here's the enhanced image I have no idea why this was rezzed down to 6 megabytes or 6 megapixels should be 12 probably closer to 10 since I cropped square I guess so we made our advancements I'm gonna reduce structure it's gonna sort of smooth out that background because where I want you to be looking in the long run is that our cheetah right and so by reducing the structure I will be reducing the texture and therefore in the background and therefore hopefully directing your attention towards the cheetah a little bit more place a couple control points in the background I love these sort of zigzag lines that are happening so I'm gonna bring those out a little bit maybe drop a point here brighten that up 5 and very subtle if I can be and then I'm gonna click the ok button alright so from there I turn off my silver effects pro later click on one of my other background layers and then just click into silver effects again and this will reconvert this time instead of paying attention to the background I'm gonna pay attention to our cheetah I'm gonna actually brighten her up a little bit I'm gonna add some contrast on her let's let's go crazy and see what happens let's let's really brighten her up let's really add some contrast because now that we have a kind of base layer we're gonna be able to utilize an opacity if necessary should we decide we needed to do that this side of her face is kind of in shadow so I'm going to dodge that a bit and yeah I think I let's say we love this I'm gonna say that that's good I'm happy and again for the sake of time we click the ok' button or actually this time let's click the brush button again usually when utilizing this if I'm if I know I'm gonna be actually making something in spending time to do this process I'm also gonna plug in my my pen tablet my Wacom tablet and I'm gonna zoom in and I'm really gonna pay attention to my edges as we're brushing this effect in so this this workflow can be time-consuming so if you're a wedding photographer or an event photographer and having to deal with hundreds or thousands of images this would be something for portfolio work maybe not necessarily a bulk of a whole bunch of images so whereas the preset sort of workflow that we looked at earlier still yields you really great and amazing results and also consistent results this this is a you know a different kind of workflow for possibly either a different kind of photographer or at least different kinds of applications this would be for a print or you know a portfolio piece or a contest or something like that probably alright so I painted her in let's turn our background layer on I'm happy with that except I have this glow or found her right and the glow is occurring because my mask isn't very good and because of this you know massive contrast difference between her and in the previous layer and her in the background or her in this layer I am gonna start by just pulling the opacity down a little bit that's gonna kind of blend the two a little and then I need to click the erase button in the Nick control panel the Nick selective tool and then I will erase the effect out and again zooming in is gonna make this much easier I'm just gonna do this quickly so you can get a sense of it I think I messed up over on this edge a little here we go and then maybe even erasing some of the effect out in some of the areas where we could use a little shadow because lightening these areas isn't always the best thing to do right the the highlight areas that's gonna kind of be exaggerated nicely and then these shadow areas they're gonna help to give us a little more form so the highlights are gonna reveal the detail and the shadows are gonna reveal the form cool that didn't work paint lower my opacity yep so there are some a couple little limitations that I found I guess when using this as your when using the Nick selective tool instead of just utilizing a kind of standard workflow for your layer masks it didn't let me fade my selection and it sort of limited me a couple times okay so I would finish this with probably another layer in fact I'm just gonna finish it I'm just gonna show you what I would do so when I printed this initially I was slightly larger than this but what I did is I'd float it on a white field so I if this image was you know 8 by 8 inches or so or 10 by 10 inches I would put it on a piece of paper and printed on a piece of paper that's more like a 13 by 19 so it's the smaller image that's kind of floating in the middle of this white paper and it can be can look really beautiful and to do that instead having just square edges around it I would apply not always I'm generalizing I would apply a film effect or a film edge from silver effects so let me show you a trick first thing I'm gonna do so that I don't encroach into the image with this technique because the film edge that would be applying in silver effects encroaches into the pixels is in Photoshop I'm gonna expand my canvas out and that's that's basically going to make it so that when I encroach into pixels I'll just be encroaching into the white edge so and that'll make more sense in a second if I hit option command C on a Mac or I believe that's alt control C on a PC if I remember correctly it my canvas size that's the canvas size shortcut allows me to in a relative way at about a hundred and fifty pixels and this is gonna give me a hundred and fifty pixels of a white edge around all four of the sides of our image so we kind of have this white border and then from there oh that's funky anyways from there I would go into silver effects one more time maybe I would do this in color effects because I think I would probably apply a dark enlighten Center filter but long story short I would move into my finishing adjustments move into my image borders and choose one of these image borders I particularly like image border type one and you can see what it's doing it encroaches into the photo right so this white bar this tone border black tone border sort of a stroke around the image it's trying to emulate what you what could happen in the darkroom if you took your film holder and filed it out bow-wow file it down a bit but now I'm gonna just encroach until we're hitting the pixels of our the edge of our image so we're gonna lose a couple pixels and then I can adjust my image border to create a nice rounded edge or something that has a little more pizzazz to it you know with a nice thick edge if we wanted that kind of film effect stroke around the sides I'm gonna go ahead and just take the spread down to negative 100 and all this is gonna do is it gives me this kind of I would say a more organic kind of edge so instead of having the 90-degree really hard edge it rounds off those edges and then we can actually make it clean or rough and that's gonna change the feel of the edge as well long story short click the ok button and that's that ladies and gentlemen I'm coming up on my time I will gladly answer any questions that you have if I can answer them I realized halfway through that I never introduced myself my name is Dan Hughes I was the webinar trainer for Nick software from 2009 to 2014 and I photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester New York so I teach at University and we use these tools in the curriculum so all the freshmen learn HDR FX Pro and then I show these all these different plugins to different students in a couple weeks I'm gonna be teaching I'm gonna go into my friend Eric kinsman's class and talk to them about sharpening for output using sharpener Pro it should be fun anyways ladies and gentlemen I'm gonna answer these questions for the next 15 minutes or so but if you've got a head out I greatly appreciate you coming out hopefully you found this to be a beneficial demonstration this webinar is being recorded and it you should get an email in about 24 hours you should as far as I know with a link I do also know that that DxO has been posting these webinars on YouTube so if you go to the Nik software page on YouTube you can find some of these contemporary webinars as well alright thank you Joe Thank You Millie I greatly appreciate that hopefully these are its if this is a fun webinar for sure great it's a very different kind of webinar than usual and the techniques are kind of different mark great I'm glad that you like the Great Lakes stop sign technique that color definitely cool alright I'm gonna try and get through some questions here if I don't answer your question it means I didn't actually see it because there's a bunch in here and I not gonna be able to scroll all the way up okay so Jose you said you signed up for a bunch of webinars you never got an email with a recorded version okay as far as I know you have to at least login to the webinar Jose but because I checked the check the Nik software YouTube page all of the webinars have been recorded and as far as I know they should be sent out after 24 hours in a follow-up email I say yes Peter has a question is there any way when utilizing control points you could utilize them as a brush and not as a circle the way control points work there there's no way to change you can change the size of the area of influence but you can't change the shape of the area of influence or brush that out you'd have to use this kind of brush technique that we did in Photoshop but you can't do that in the Nick plugins unfortunately that that said the control points are not making a circular selection but making a selection inside of the circle of similar tones colors and textures Oh neat so James James has made a a composite preset so a recipe and color effects Pro that also creates a sort of solarization effect that's cool James thank you for that input if you have an email address okay let's see the next question so let's see here why cover this technique why David I'm not so at a question that came in that says why cover this technique I'm just seeing it now so I'm not sure what you mean I apologize do you intend to include the Sabatier effect in future version of solar effects I think it's cool I don't think I can do it myself Omar I don't think so I wish I had a good infrastructure for sharing presets that I made I don't know if they would put that into silver effects I'll I'll I'll ask because I can absolutely make you know I can technically make like five or ten different solarization presets that kind of do slightly different things based upon those curves and that would be an interesting set of presets if you like the technique right that one we answered does it have to be a smart object Eileen no so you can use smart objects when utilizing the Nick plugins from Photoshop but it doesn't have to be a smart object in fact we didn't use the smart object workflow here are the env sets your silver effects presets if there's silver effects how did you get him yeah Vicki Vicki I actually made all of those n VOC presets so all of the presets that are that were released in dis well in January I think it was when they were actually released I created four color effects HDR effects Silver Efex Pro and analog effects I I built those for Nick software okay Janet are you still there let me know Janet in the old days it was called solarization yeah Michael I I just sound fancier when I call it saba ta effect and actually what's funny is that a whole group of photographers you know kind of discovered that effect at similar times and kind of named it after themselves somehow sub ITA it stuck more I guess that's what we ended up learning and in school how about stating and oh how about stating in TXO software boycotting Adobe fin these are good questions the these effects these this technique couldn't be done within the photo lab software could you have opened the shadows with tonality protection slider yes III think I'm way back on these questions I'm not sure if folks are even still here I see that there's a hundred and sixty people still here but I'm not sure if the questions that I've got our folks had stuck around um Martin very good I'm glad you liked it the email with the link doesn't happen okay Richard I'm gonna so I've talked to DxO and they they said that they have fixed whatever the email problem was before I'm gonna I'm gonna try and figure that one out oh very cool Jose you said your RIT biomed alumni he studied under Michael pres I work with Michael Perez I'm I'm working on the RIT Big Shot with him and I teach in the photo science program as well that's so fun I'm glad you made it Jose that's very cool okay so I'm getting a couple bits of feedback here that the emails with the links actually aren't coming through so I I'm gonna I'll ask about that and I'm gonna go into the GoToWebinar control panel when we log out and take a look because I think I can actually change the settings in there and I don't want to do anything without asking DxO cuz I don't actually work for DXi I do these webinars for DXL because they trust that I can create these these presentations and I really like doing it because it's fun to share this stuff so let's see Brad you said you got off of the Adobe plantation good what editors exist that can use this workflow with layers affinity luminar yeah lumen are actually would work this way but I don't know if you can plug the Nick plugins into the sky Lum software I actually know very little about affinity photo so I couldn't I couldn't answer that one that one's on my list to check out because I haven't actually used affinity any chance there's a future webinar on how to use Nick for astrophotography I that would be great I don't have any Astro photographs although I could go into like the not NASA files NASA images and put stuff together and fits Liberator but I don't know if that's what you're asking necessarily I'm not really an astro photographer I love this stuff but I don't have the equipment my fred ted kinsman who's a fellow faculty member does do that though what's the quickest way to get rid of those dust spots alright so if i go back here the quickest way to get rid of these dust spots that are in here would be to just use the clone tool if i do where's my layers palette oh there it is if i use the clone tool on this layer though i don't think it's actually gonna work so stamp clone stamp tool make a selection near it it does it actually did clean it up pretty well i was thinking it wouldn't work really well because the layer is set to oh my brush is really hard the layer is set to a luminosity blending mode and that can do some weird stuff if there are color saturation differences or chromeless differences between these dust spots doesn't look like it though so all I'm doing here is sampling outside of where the dust spot is in an area that looks like it would you know create a clean kind of effect and cloning those out and I typically do that after after I make these kinds of contrast adjustments because I don't really see them and also if I don't do a good job on cleaning up the dust spots before I make the contrast adjustment I'm just gonna have to change it anyways I'm just gonna have to you know redo it nice job look forward to more webinars cool okay in somebody mentioned just now that Marvin said that you could make this kind of composite using affinity photo Thank You Marvin I'm not familiar with that software so I can't really talk too much about that Jose that's great I'm really excited so and I got another part mentioned - oh no Bart asked if it could be done in affinity proto and yes Bart apparently this can happen you know you can utilize this sort of multiple layer workflow and probably even this one because I imagine if affinity has layers in layer blending modes it would be pretty straightforward to be able to do that Kent gave me some detail here the French scientist Armand sub ITA published in 1926 oh no sorry in 1860 on October 26th the process Thank You Kent that's from Wikipedia gotta love that you know internet search it's great okay and so another thing that's weird Nick said you have been getting the emails so that's funky would you repeat the shortcut to activate a control point I'm sorry Mary I'm not following that that question would you repeat the shortcut to act oh if you want to create a new control point Mary you'd hit shift command a on a Mac and that would be shift control a if you're on a PC Marvin says I use Nick with the affinity photo software on Windows and on Mac Thank You Marvin is there a way to create a mask and go through dust spots when there are a lot I mean yes there probably was there is in Photoshop there's a very easy way to do it in Lightroom and there's basically literally a checkbox in Lightroom it it creates a kind of mask effect in Photoshop there's probably someone out there that actually has created a an action for that that that creates the mask so it's more it's easy to see the edges of those things yeah and Nick mentioned again that the emails have been coming through for him so it's funny because some people are getting those emails and some people aren't and I keep hearing that people aren't so do you anticipate a new version of Silver Efex Pro anytime soon Omar I don't know so the thing is is I again I don't really work for I do I I'm if you will contracted to do these webinars for DxO but they're based in France I'm based in Rochester New York I talk to them you know when there's problems in every few weeks we have update sort of emails but I don't really know what they're doing with the software I do know that they are developing the software because they continue to add presets and they our keeping up the updates so that the software continues to work as new pieces of you know host software comes out and new operating systems come out but I don't know you know what their plan is all right Omar no worries my pleasure George you said will there be more webinars coming up for year-end absolutely George yes for sure in George I'm sorry if if you I don't know if I pronounce your name or hey or George if you go by either but there are more webinars coming up and there's coming up this month I have another webinar well this is this webinar I think I have one more this month it's this one HDR FX Pro essential workflow I don't have any more I'm just one more right next week yeah next Wednesday I have got my last one on HDR FX bro but as far as I know we're gonna be continuing to do more webinars every month that's that's the plan right now you know I that's any sometime they could say you know we've got to stop but as far as I know we're gonna continue to have them anyways Thanks ladies and gentlemen I greatly appreciate you guys coming out I think I've answered all the questions if I have not you know feel free to log into any of these webinars I'd love to see you again and have a really wonderful evening oh I got a comment here just mentioned so Kenta said dust spot finder and Photoshop I'm gonna send this to everybody cool Kent thank you send to all so hopefully everybody gets so jump into that questions box I think I just sent this to everybody I just copied and pasted Kent's answer make a curve adjustment layer with several extreme wave points makes a weird solarization effect that makes the spots stand out another curves layer with an opposite set of waves can help other spots stand out most retouches use this effect Kent that's awesome thank you for sharing that I'm gonna try that once we get offline here so I don't embarrass myself with a hundred and thirty people here Thank You Kent Richard I appreciate that thank you so much all right how do really wonderful evening ladies and gentlemen and I hope to see you next week [Music]

Channel: Nik Collection

Views: 3,050

Keywords: DxO Labs, DxO, Webinar, Nik Collection 2, Nik Collection, Dan Hughes, Silver Efex Pro, Black & White, BnW, Noir et Blanc

Id: MADA79HEtO0

Length: 69min 12sec (4152 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 24 2019