DxO Webinar: Silver Efex Pro Essential Tools with Dan Hughes

[Music] [Music] so my name is Dan Hughes I was the Nik software webinar trainer from 2009 to 2014 I did all sorts of other things for Nik software help them develop several pieces of software and I then moved on to Sky ylim software and now I actually teach photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology and I actually use these pieces of software the NIC plugins in the curriculum as well talking about all sorts of different things from converting color images to black and white to thought processes in directing the viewers attention in an image all sorts of stuff like that and so I want to hit upon some of those points today while walking you through the silver effects Pro interface and getting to know how all of the tools that are built into the software I'm gonna be launching the software from Photoshop but note that the software works almost exactly the same way whether you're launching from photo lab 2 or Lightroom the the software's gonna work almost exactly the same way the major difference is that in Photoshop you have layers and therefore you have layer masks blending modes Smart Objects all the things that come along with Photoshop all the stuff that we're talking about today though maybe except for a trick or two will apply whether you're using a silver effects pro from Lightroom or Photoshop or Photoshop so we're here in Photoshop this is my Nick selected tool this is how we access all of the plugins and there's actually a couple ways to access the plugins from Photoshop this this tool here which is what I tend to use and then you can also go up to the filter drop down menu down to the Nick collection and just click on whichever of the plugins from the suite you are interested in using let's go ahead and click on silver effects protune the software's gonna launch it's going to convert our color image to black and white for us and it wants to do this in a straightforward and pleasing way meaning the the image isn't just d saturated the photo is being converted to black and white in certain way rendering let's say the red color at a certain luminosity and that's going to be different than blue or green or magenta or so on and so forth so it's actually a really wonderful way of converting from color to black and white and is actually common practice for most new pieces of software that are that are coming out so we're in silver effects let's start on the left side of the interface here there's 48 presets that are built into the software the first 38 of them are have been built into the software since it came out since silver effects protune came out and what I find great about them is they're used for single click fixes so if you like one of these you just click on it or you can actually just look at it in the little browser on the left side and you can see what your image would look like if you utilize that preset so it's sort of like a heads-up display really easy way of getting the potential of the image for example here's a full contrast number 24 so that has a really interesting look on this image and then if I go and click on silhouette I can actually see in the preset that that's probably not going to be the best preset for this image at least if my conversion the intention is sort of like a regular image if you will like if there is a very specific use that where I needed a silhouette then this preset might work but in our case here I don't think it's as effective anyways these presets are a really great way to see the potential of your image a really great way of seeing the potential of the tools and then also and oftentimes you can just click one time you might be happy with these results and then you don't have to do anything else as you get familiar with the software though you what at least what I end up doing is I will use a preset as a starting point and then I'll move over into the tools palette on the right side and I'll start making adjustments to the sliders that have been adjusted in that preset now I'm gonna scroll back up to the top we're gonna talk about presets later on in the webinar as well I use a lot of presets I saved my own presets I'll show you how to do that as well and the beauty of the preset is all of those things we just talked about and then also you can create a consistent look and feel over a whole swath of images so let's say you're a photographer who wants to design a book or you have two or three photos that you want to print and you want them to look the same on the wall or similar on the wall or you use your images online for Instagram or Facebook or something and you want them to all to have a sort of similar consistent aesthetic creating your own presets and then applying those presets and kind of just massaging the image however you're necessary is going to be a really effective workflow as opposed to you know using the high contrast preset for one image and then hanging that next to another image in let's say a gallery or in your house using the low key that could work you just have to kind of think about how that's going to work on the wall so I guess all I'm getting at is that these presets are really great and really powerful and I would recommend creating your own and then using them in whatever consistent manner is necessary for your process okay so presets on the Left moving over the top portion of the tool bar here we can actually hide the preset bar by clicking on this little button here and another interesting part of this software is if you just scroll over one of these tools it'll actually tell you basically what that that tool is going to be doing for you these three buttons are preview buttons with the compare button I'm going to talk about those later in the demonstration because we'll be using them throughout but if I click the compare button right now you're not gonna actually see any change so we haven't done anything to our picture so not a super effective tool to show you right now anyways moving into the right side of the interface we have a zoom capability and basically there will be a default zoom in the in my case because I zoomed in to 25% and set it there if I were to hit the spacebar I can zoom in and zoom out as a shortcut and that's gonna zoom to that zoom percentage if I wanted to zoom in to 100% I can click on the drop down button a little triangle there and I can click on any of these different percentages and we can zoom in quickly and easily and then we can use a navigator that pops up move around the image as well you can actually move this Navigator as well if you click and drag the Navigator you can put it on the other side I think it just sort of bounces between the left in the right corner I'm not sure it might go into the bottom yeah it wants to stick into the corners though so it's kind of a sticky tool all right I'm gonna hit the spacebar that's gonna zoom back out the last two buttons that we have in the toolbar on the top would be the change background color button so this is really nice it cycles between different tones of gray or neutral so black white and gray and actually it's not really white it's just a really light gray and this is super helpful because you might want to look at your image on different toned backgrounds and that's how you cycle through it the last button in the upper right corner it just hides the tools palette on the right side and actually a nice little shortcut which by the way all of the shortcuts that are built into the Nik collection are posted in a FAQ on the Nik software DxO website so you can find them there a really quick nice shortcut that you can use is tapping the tab key this is a common button it'll just hide or view your tools palettes on the left and on the right alright so we've covered that portion of the interface pretty quickly here we're going on 15 minutes I want to go into the end VOC presets this is a new collection of presets that were just recently built into the Nik collection I actually had the honour of creating these presets and so these are these are presets that I've created you know over a series of months and then delivered to DxO I think in December of last year and these are presets that I use pretty often and actually all of these presets they're kind of designed to just give you a very different look than what's built into the presets that were already in the software and they're all ones that I use so the dark pop and the dark glow are two presets that I've applied to numerous of my own photographs and so I'm super happy and proud that they're in here we're gonna start with this dark pop preset and actually if I talk we knees different presets especially if I had different tools open you're gonna see all of the tools lighters adjust as we affect those presets because all the presets are doing is using the tools that are on the right side of the interface so it's a nice way to think about it and it's a good way to kind of learn what these different sliders do aside from just sliding them around moving over to the right side of the interface I'm gonna click on the word brightness which by the way anytime you see a little triangle that's to the left of one of these labels if you click on that label it's gonna open up into a sort of subset of tools so in our case with brightness you have a kind of standard brightness adjustment but then it also breaks down into highlight brightness mid-tones and shadows so you can control the different tones of your image selectively if you will but in a way that's going to basically only adjust that targeted set of tones so if I take the shadows slider to the left what's happening is the software is looking at the image and looking using the histogram and that information and it's basically darkening the stuff that's on the left side of your histogram that's down here in the lower right corner of the interface if I take the mid-tone slider up into the right all of the mid-tones so like the middle gray tones in the image they're gonna get lighter and then if I took my highlight slider all the way up to the right we can enhance the contrast nicely and we're basically just controlling those values in the right side of the histogram moving into contrast the contrast tool there's a standard contrast slider which it basically what that does if you slide it to the left it's gonna flatten out the photograph I always just point out the histogram there as we make these contrast adjustments and that gives you a good idea of you know what where your image ends up in terms of tones so if you reduce the contrast we kind of get this bell curve shape in the histogram whereas if I take this slider to the right it's gonna stretch out those highlights the mid-tones and the shadows we're gonna get a massive increase in the overall contrast and you can see that reflected in the histogram as well so depending upon the look of the photo that you want you can go in and adjust obviously the tones as well as the contrast I think I actually skipped over dynamic contrast didn't I I totally did let's jump back into the brightness slider it's it's it was silly of me to jump over this dynamic brightness this slider is a brightness adjustment I'm gonna double click on it which will home that slider and if I drag this slider to the right it's gonna brighten the image right and that makes sense but what dynamic brightness does is it actually brightens the shadows more so than the highlights when you slide it to the right right so what this does is it creates a brighter image overall kind of a high key image at this point and but it retains highlight detail right so it's trying to brighten the photograph but retain the very brightest values so that we don't blow them out so if we were to do a kind of comparison here dynamic brightness is at 100% you can see that's this bright image but there are not there's no highlights there's no really bright values that are blown out that are without detail whereas if I take my brightness slider to the right you can see a difference in the histogram and you can see a major difference in the look of the image so dynamic brightness is kind of like a brightness 2.0 slider it's a smart brightness slider and that attempts to brighten the image if you slide it to the right but retain highlight detail or if you drag the slider to the left it attempts to darken the image but retain shadow detail right and so now we've got this really moody low-key photograph just by sliding the dynamic brightness slider to the left so it's one of my favorite tools and one of the beauties of silver effects as well as a lot of the other algorithms that are built into the Nick plugins is the fact that they're proprietary right so this dynamic brightness slider is really only within the Nick plugins and I think this one if I remember correctly there might be a couple filters in color effects Pro that have a algorithm a tool that's similar to this but basically you'll only get this look out of silver effects Pro and so that's really interesting and cool because now you have a different tool in your tool belt that doesn't really exist anywhere else another thing that I find really amazed and and I sort of think DxO for this is the fact that this piece of software silver effects Pro 2 has been part of my photographic workflow since 2009 and it basically hasn't changed which means the images that I was outputting in 2009 I've been able to have a relatively consistent look and feel although it's evolved since then and I've had a tool set that could deliver what I'm looking for so I like this because software changes so quickly you know within a few months and then the look that you get out of the software is so different I'm super excited and happy that these NIC plugins are going to be you know moving into the future indefinitely at this point right as far as as long as the XO is interested in sort of retaining this III don't know by the way I'll probably get a couple questions based upon that comment about you know what is DxO gonna do with the plugins I have no idea but what I do know is for now they are continuing to update them so that they work with contemporary operating systems and they've just updated to the Nik collection too so they are developing the software we added in these presets and then it's also being upgraded for high resolution screens and so on and so forth so I'm happy because I'm able to utilize my tools and they're being updated so that they'll function properly on these new computer systems ok off my soapbox so into the contrast slider so you've got your standard contrast slider you have an amplified whites slider which is basically gonna go in and target the lighter tones of each individual object and then amplify those lighter tones amplify blacks does kind of the opposite what it's looking for as I slide this slider to the right is it's looking for the darkest values of each of these individual objects and basically in amplifying the blacks darkening down those shadows it's a contrast adjustment slider it's a really powerful tool and both of these sliders you can use both globally so that it affects the entire image and then also selectively so that you can go in and use control points you point technology to amplify whites and amplify blacks now we spent a good amount of time on this image already I've been explaining the brightness and contrast we utilized the dark pop preset let's just take a quick side-by-side preview of the before and after on the Left we have the original we've sort of darkened down the image added a little bit of contrast I think I would use some control points here are there on this image to dodge and burn and direct the viewers attention through the image but for the sake of time and because I don't want you to get too bored because we're just editing one photo all day at this point I'm gonna keep moving and we're gonna move on to the next picture so I'm gonna click the ok button in the lower right corner of the interface that's going to bring us back over into Photoshop and basically what's gonna happen in Photoshop is the original background layer of pixels the image itself has been duplicated and then the adjustments that we made in silver effects are applied to that duplicated layer so you can see in my layer mask I've got my original image and then I've got my silver effects pro 2 image there and so another thing to keep in mind is that you've got layers layer masks blending modes it's a non-destructive manner or a non-destructive workflow because we can always go back to the original background and have this image been shot raw and then opened as a smart object the plugins in Photoshop will operate using smart object capabilities as well so let's move into the next photograph we've got a nice sort of studio portrait here of my buddy John I would generally start with a preset but because we've already kind of talked about presets I'm gonna go ahead and hide them for now and I want to talk to you about the structure tool and then I also want to point out the color filters on this image and these color filters for anyone who shot black and white film are shoots black and white film these filters work just like putting a glass filter wood in front of your lens so if I click on the red filter it's basically going to lighten up any that's on the red end of the color spectrum so that be you know red and yellow and red and orange and then the yellows and then if I click on the blue color filter it's going to lighten up anything on that end of the color spectrum and darken down anything on the opposite end of the color spectrum so if I click on the blue color filter because John's skin tone is primarily made up of red and yellow his skin is gonna go very dark right and then I click on these different color filters you can see how those tones transition and change based upon that color filter so this is a very common tool to use in analog film photography I find it to be a very powerful tool here not only because you have sort of these five standards of color filters which by the way there were more glass color filters than this or there are more but these are sort of like the five most common ones you can actually create your own color filter as well by clicking on the word details you have a hue slider which would be choosing the color of your color filter and again what's gonna happen is whatever color you choose like red it's on red right now it's gonna lighten up those colors and tones and it's gonna darken down anything that's on the opposite end of the color spectrum this is an image with just skin tone and a background so it's hard to kind of get a real feel for what it's doing but the beauty of this is that you can create your own and then you can even adjust the strength right so this would be even more powerful than what most folks could do with glass color filters because of several reasons first of all you've got the ability to choose it after the fact whereas when shooting film you would generally choose a color filter or maybe two colored filters and shoot a few exposures with the class filter in front of your camera here you shoot you know a perfect color exposure and then when you're converting the black and white can generate these same kinds of results so I like this red color filter I'm setting it to 77% I'm going to close the color filter section and move into the structure tool I also very quickly just want to go to the mic go to webinar control panel okay yep we're at the maximum number of people here it looks like there's a a bunch of people trying to get in okay a lot of questions coming in I'll definitely save them until the end of the webinar there's a little we've got 501 people which is the maximum number of people for this webinar so I'm glad you made it and there's more people trying to get in now so soft contrast because we talked about amplify whites and amplify blacks I will be using soft contrast throughout the webinar if you slide this slider to the right it's it's kind of like an adaptive contrast slider and what that means is the software is looking at the image it knows where the edges in where the areas of the image or the stuff is in the photograph and as you slide this slider to the right you can actually kind of see John's outline in the background right and what this algorithm does is it is you slide to the right as it creates this soft glowing effect it's a soft contrast if you slide it to sorry I'm sorry if you slide it to the right it gives you an increased amount of contrast and it kind of creates this soft glowing effect if you slide it to the left it's the total opposite it's this harsh kind of flattening of the tones and again you can see that reflected in the histogram as I slide that left and right I will add just a little bit of soft contrast in this image to kind of soften the blow of the overall photo I'm going to amplify the whites a little bit and then I also need to go into my brightness into my shadows slider and I'm gonna increase the dynamic brightness increase the shadows just a little bit to bring out the details in his shirt because before I think even in the original image you could barely see any of those details in the shirt and now we've got this nice sort of soft glowing overall photo of my buddy John so moving into structure structure and let's zoom in a couple times so structure is basically a texture adjustment John's got really good skin as well for considering he's in California and as outside all the time but the structure slider if you slide this slider to the right you can see what it does it increases the that already exists in the image so I'm gonna double click on structure it homes that slider and then I'm just gonna slide that slider slow to slowly to the right and you can see now we're getting this really nice texture out of the overall image now one thing to note though is that sometimes the structure tool and it sometimes these kinds of if you will sharpening tools can do some funky things around edges that are like out of focus so watch this area back here around his head and his ear if I double click on structure you'll actually see those tones change a bit and so you know where as I might like structure at like 60 percent on the parts of the image that are in focus it doesn't look so good on the stuff that's out of focus so what I find myself doing more often than not is actually only using a little bit of structure globally on a lot of images and of course I'm speaking generally right now and then using control points I will selectively increase or decrease the structure to direct the viewers attention through the image like John's eyes here are a little bit dark and they could use a little more texture so what I might do I'm gonna skip over these structure sliders for now move into the Selective adjustments section and use a control point to selectively dodge his eyes and also add a little bit of structure let's see what happens so control points by the way for anyone who's not familiar basically allows us to just point at an object place the point on the object and then control the different adjustment capabilities of the software on that object so in this case I place a point on his eye I'm gonna size the area of influence which is that circle that's going around the point we'll talk about those more in a little bit and then from there I can control brightness contrast structure amplify the whites amplify the blacks fine structure and then there's even a selective colorization slider so if I wanted to reintroduce color into our black and white image we could totally do that and then this also kind of gives you an indication without looking at the mask because there is a way of looking at the mask that this control point is making to see what this control point is actually affecting right so if I size my area of influence to be very very small we're only going to be affecting these similar tones colors and textures as I drag my control point around what's happening because I've taken my selected colorization slider brought it all the way up to 100% is you're kind of seeing the mask that the point is making now what I want to do though is I really only want to affect his eye I don't want to affect the flesh or the white of his eye I just want to adjust the pupil sorry yeah the pupil and maybe a little bit in the iris um so right yeah anyways we're gonna click the plus or the control point button I'm gonna place another point in on the flesh of his eye and what happens is as you add more control points each control point actually gets smarter meaning as I put a control point on his eye here I'm telling the software that we want this point to affect his eye and if I put a point on the skin underneath his eye I'm telling this control point to independently control that part so they talk to each other and now I can kind of go in and make a much more precise adjustment so the the more control points you add the smarter each control point gets so I'm going to increase the whites I've added a little bit of structure I'm going to increase the brightness just a little bit you do have to be very careful if you're gonna adjust eyes and portraits because it's it's it's easy to kind of go overboard like if I bring up this to 70% or something it he sound he suddenly looks like the son of Rasputin or something right it's so that that doesn't work but if I just bring the brightness up maybe 20 percent or 15 percent now your eye is going to be drawn to his eyes because basically they're brighter and the human eye you'll has a viewer of an image or as a viewer of a TV show or a movie or something as it's gonna be attracted to the brightest most contrast the most saturated areas aside from the human form and human face so those are sort of like that hop down your eye is always going to go towards the human form and the human face and the eyes and then most contrasting brightest and most saturated areas so if I want to attract your eye as the viewer I'm gonna add contrast I'm gonna add brightness and brighten in that area up and probably add structure or sharpening because this stuff is going to look more in focus if I do that if I want to distract your eye away from something I'm gonna darken it down I'm going to maybe blur it and I would probably reduce saturation although that doesn't matter in our case here because we're converting images to black and white if I want to show more form and shape as if my lighting was what's better than it was I can go and place control points and I can go and dodge and burn darkened down those shadows and it's gonna seem like we've got more dimension from that light and again what these control points are doing as I place a point it's looking for the similar tones colors and textures that we've dropped the point on and then we're able to then adjust the brightness the contrast the saturation and so on no not really saturation in this case because we're in silver effects but generally speaking I also use a shortcut shift command a and that's going to generate a new control point so I'll show you that in a second so right now I'm done with this control point I want another point over here rather than having to go over to the control points button here I can just hit shift command a on a Mac or shift control a on a PC and then it my cursor turns into a little crosshair and I can drop the point on the object that I want to adjust so I'll go ahead and darken that down and now we're getting some nice form and some nice shape out of our portrait of John in fact if we look at the before and after I use the red color filter and we kind of adapted it and then a couple control points to kind of Dodge the could the image and it's a very different looking photograph now right went from somewhat ruddy and underexposed to a little bit more of an open portrait actually I'm happy with our result except I want to finish with finishing adjustments and that is if I click on the right side into our tools palette here I'm gonna add a vignette under the image the finishing adjustments basically are exactly that they're used to kind of refine the overall photo at the end of your workflow in fact a general order of operations and of course I have to speak generally because your your workflow might be different depending upon the images that you'd be shooting and what kind of controls you want to use the general workflow in design methods here in silver effects and then most of the NIC plugins is to start with a preset because that's gonna do the bulk of the work for you ideally therefore you don't have to spend as much time trying to slide sliders around and so on and then you work from the top down now the the only time that I wouldn't work from the top down is if I'm gonna be utilizing color filters I'd actually probably start with a preset and then use a color filter if I'm gonna play with those and use them and then go to global adjustments and kind of work my way down from there you know the idea there is that you go from a global adjustment the big broad stuff down into the more specific stuff so applying even yet each of these finishing adjustments has a little pop up or drop down menu and then our presets built into it you can always though you can click on a preset if you want and use that but you can always just create your own so again there's a little triangle here and we can click on the word vignette and it opens up into our vignette tool we can lighten the vignette or darken the vignette or in my case that I kind of said that opposite we can lighten the vignette by sliding the slider to the right we can darken it by sliding that amount slider to the left you can change the shape of the vignette and then you can change the size which is how far into the middle the effect encroaches so if I just want a very sort of broad darkened edge I'm gonna take that slot size slider to the left and it's going to reduce how far into the image that vignette is going to be affecting and lastly in the in the vignette tool you can place the center of that vignette so if you click the place center button the the default is going to be right in the center of the image but if I wanted to maybe shift it down or up or to the left or to the right you click the place center button and then you can go in and kind of replace the center so I'll say that's the center of our vignette and it sort of shifted it very kind of subtly let's let's take a look at that in a more extreme value so I've taken the amount slider down to 100 negative 100 if I move my center over here you can see now we encroach further into the left and into the top I'm gonna go ahead and shift this back and then I need to reduce the amount of the vignette let's bring that just make it kind of subtle and then actually I'm gonna encroach a little bit further and so one more a quick look at the before and after I kind of maybe I added a little more contrast than we need let's reduce that just a touch there we go and then actually even darken this thing down with dynamic brightness there we go I like that so if we look at the left in the right image we've got completely different photos I kind of like both that's my problem too sometimes is that I'll make three or four versions of the same image and then decide what I like and actually sometimes I'm gonna click the ok' button by the way sometimes I'll actually make two or three versions of the same image and if I'm in Photoshop I can actually blend those together and I'll we don't have enough time to go into detail about how to do that but I'll show you what what the final image looks like or can look like when you do that so I have another image here this is my my nudie niece she's very beautiful a little girl and I've this is probably closer to what my workflow would generally look like especially if I'm mixing a couple layers of silver effects so this is a photo that was shot on a fuji film gfx camera and it's right out of camera it looked pretty good but I went into Adobe Camera Raw no sorry this one I think I adjusted in photo lab to tweaked the color a little bit because I think my color balance was a little bit off in camera and then I actually brightened the image up a little bit I brought it into Photoshop and used color effects Pro so you can see just a shift sort of I think I added cross processing and a dark enlighten center filter using color effects and then I went and converted from color to black and white using silver effects and I said okay that's cool I like this but the the contrast down here in the tone or the value of the the bib here isn't exactly what I wanted so I I turn off my silver effects layer click into this color effects layer which basically yields me my color information one more time right so I can start over I can reconvert the black and white image and then I created this version where the this is 85% so basically I created this version where the skin tone is a little more ruddy I've got more contrast in the yellow stuff that's on her face from from eating her breakfast I think she had carrots in a banana and anyways I utilized a layer mask here to kind of generate the contrast that I liked more in in the bib so now I've got my final image and I've kind of converted the photo to x one using the yellow color filter and then one using the blue color filter and getting that nice dark tone but it's just a trick that you can use in more advanced kind of would flow using the Nick plugins whether that silver effects or whatever tools you're you're utilizing at the time alright so we've got a couple more tools to get into I want to just check my GoToWebinar control panel yeah it looks like there's more people trying to get in cool nobody's having any problems I can see a bunch of questions coming in you're using Photoshop expected dxo Buttle yep so in jazz good question so um jazz was actually just saying disappointed that we're using Photoshop you know expected to go from the DxO editor which is bundled with the Nik collection too so if you don't have the Nik collection and you purchase the Nik collection now you'll actually receive a copy of DxO photo lab and and that's this software and it's an extremely powerful RAW processing tool and what the heck why don't we just present this image from here I do want to crop this photo so we'll go over into this image I'm gonna change my crop to square so I'll go one two one and then I'm just gonna go and change the positioning of that crop and this is for so folks who are using the Excel photo lab right now or maybe folks who only use Photoshop or Lightroom this is a completely different raw processor it's extremely powerful it's built by DxO who is of course the owner of the Nik collection now and they have integrated the Nik collection launcher meaning we can use photo lab 2 and we can use the Nik collection in a kind of all-in-one workflow actually before I do that I just realized that my exposure I need to change my selective tone and bring my highlights down just a little bit and then maybe even see what the DxO Clearview algorithm would do to the image yeah that's better ok let's just I just want to show you the before and after if I click and hold the compare button this is the before and here's the after and what I did was I used the DxO Clear View algorithm that added some nice texture darkened down some of the shadows but retained detail and then I also darkened down the highlights to get some detail in our clouds we probably take it further but long story short to launch the software from the DXF photo lab - you move into the lower right corner click on the Nik collection and then your plugin selector comes up a little browser now we had a question earlier about the way that Nik software handles 8-bit or 16-bit per channel files both Lightroom and photo app to allow you to have these settings kind of in a in a little browser form and if you click into the settings section here you can basically tell the software whether you want to be using a JPEG or a TIFF file or if you want it to be 16-bit or if you want it to be you know 300 dpi PPI or 240 or whatever you can adjust that in here so that should answer that if you're in Photoshop you would use the modes the mode drop-down menu or probably in a in a better workflow if you're shooting raw you'll make sure that you're opening the raw file into Photoshop as a 16-bit per channel file so I've gone ahead and clicked on silver effects Pro the software's going to launch and you'll actually when we when we come back over into DxO what you'll notice is that we'll have a duplicated image so in Photoshop you have a background layer and then you have your duplicated layer in Lightroom and then DxO photo lab you will have your original raw file or your original file if you didn't shoot RAW maybe JPEG or TIFF and then you will have a duplicated version so you'll end up with two different files in your in your workflow which is fine great it's just a little difference between using the software from Photoshop or using the software from the other two host software's alright so let's talk about control points control points you you add them by clicking the control point button or the shortcut shift command a they allow you to selectively dodge and burn and adjust color if you're within let's say the visa to or other other plugins you have different capabilities but basically each control point as you add a control point is going to make its own selection and it's making its own selection inside of the circle though it's not making a circular selection unless the object that you've placed the point on is a circle right or if I make this really small and I place the point like in the big in the middle of this large sky it's gonna kind of make a circular selection right you can see that as I bring the brightness slider to the right but as soon as I start bringing this out what's happening is the control point is recognizing that we've placed the point on the sky and that this control point probably you really shouldn't be adjusting this completely different object over here so the the control point makes a smart selection and allows you again to control brightness and contrast and structure and all of these other slide adjustments by the way if your sliders don't pop up like this like if you open and add a control point on an image and you have brightness contrast and structure the way that you open it up is by clicking this little triangle and that's gonna launch or expand into the other tool set that you have the capability of using so let's quickly take a look at what this selection looks like with the control point this is this is one of the most important tools in the software by the way or I would say so from you know my humble opinion the control points are going to be giving you the most control over selectively dodging and burning in attracting or pushing the viewers attention towards other objects and especially with a black and white image this is important because we don't have any color to speak of for the most part we generally are converting the color to black and white and therefore we're left with tones and shapes and the way to direct the viewers attention is by lightening certain areas in darkening other areas to kind of direct the viewers attention through the photo and so one thing that works well often is a thing called checkerboarding and that's where you have a light to dark to light to dark kind of contrast or kind of composition and then this is what's going to help to kind of create these shapes and all of these nice leading lines as well so to direct the viewers attention through the image we're gonna add control points onto these different objects and areas and basically dodge and burn and try to direct the viewers attention to the image now the thing about this is that these control points they are making a selection oftentimes you want to see what the selection is and to do that you move into the Selective adjustments into the control point area here and you literally click on the words control points this is going to open up into a list of all of the control points that you have on your image on the left side there's a little checkbox that will turn that particular control point on or off so you can see a before and after you have the name of the control point which you can't change by the way it's just they're just name control points 1 through however many control points you've have and then there's a number and this number is is the size of the area of influence so this number set to 70 right now that basically means it's covering 70 percent of the picture it doesn't mean it's affecting 70 percent of the image it's just covering 70 percent of the image what it's affecting is the stuff that is illuminated when you click on this little checkbox that's to the far right of each of these control points and the beauty of these points is that they're making a very photographic looking selection so then when you make an adjustment to brightness or contrast or whatever the overall effect is going to be photographic looking now what you're seeing here is anything that's white has the complete adjustment or whatever the sliders are set to we're going to affect that area completely so this area in the clouds it's getting all of the the brunt of the effect you can see this area of the the sky as well as getting a lot of the effect but you're seeing almost none of the remaining contraption affected by this control point and that's why it's black or very dark gray now if you click on your control point you start dragging it around you can actually see the real-time selection that's being made so I drag it down into the reflection shadow of the contraption I drag it into the trees obviously sizing the area of influence we're gonna get a different effect right and a different kind of tolerance if you will and basically I'm gonna place this point here and I want to create more of a checkerboarding so that's why I've dodged this area I've brightened it up now I want to turn off that selection so I'm gonna go back over into the tools or the selective control point area and I'm gonna go ahead and click on that checkbox that's gonna turn that off and voila now I've got my beautiful control point adjustment now before I add more control points on the image I actually want to utilize a film type on this photograph and because the film type here is a global adjustment because it's gonna sort of do this wide swath adjustment to the whole photograph I kind of want to do that before I go in and I make very specific dodging and burning decisions because I need to see what my global image looks like now in film types let's close down the different tools you have a drop down menu that have kind of the 18 most popular films that were out when the software was developed except for paint atomic X that had been discontinued in like 1985 or something like that really beautiful film now each of these film types are going to emulate what this image would have looked like had it been shot with that particular film and what it's doing is its overlaying film grain it's changing the way that colors are being converted from color to black and white and then it also has a a curve that's applied to it based upon that particular film type so if you like one of these but maybe it's not totally perfect for your image you can of course go in and change what's going on there so let's say we like the old Ford HP 5 plus 400 I can click on it then I can move into the grain slider and we can add more grain by sliding the grain slider to the left or we can well technically we can make larger grain by sliding the grain per pixel slider to the left or if we want less grain or no grain we can slide that slider all the way to the right and basically we're only going to have whatever noise was in our digital capture now watch this one this is a cool little thing that you can sort of think about so um in film you're gonna have a certain amount of grain in highlight areas in mid-tone areas and in shadow areas because on film it's the grain that makes up the image right but here in the digital sort of world it works a different way because those photo sites are gonna go in and be you know you're getting your pixels out of your image rather than going really deep into detail there and explaining what this this grain is doing you are actually emulating the film grain based upon the tone of the image so if I go in and I adjust the brightness or the contrast in the photo you can see the grain actually dancing around and that's because now we're getting different amounts of grain in the shadows amid the highlights based upon that shadow mid-tone and highlight so it the the grain tool in the film adjustment it's not just slapping grain over to the image and calling it a day it's completely based upon the image itself and then the contrast itself and the objects in the image so it's definitely an interesting tool and it makes a really beautiful grain and and this is a great tool if if you have a like a high ISO image and you've got grain and your image that doesn't look particularly good you can go in and throw a little bit of this film grain on there and typically it'll be more convincing as grain and it'll look it'll look a little bit I don't know more highfalutin or something it seems to be prettier than a lot of high noise images moving into the color sensitivity sliders this is how the colors actually convert from color to black and white so the sky there is blue and cyan and if I wanted it to be darker in its conversion I can actually take this slider and I can basically adjust the way that those tones are being converted from color to black and white folks who are familiar with the HSL tool the hue saturation and luminance tool in let's say lightroom for example you have a similar set of controls as well works the same way the beauty here is that you can you know match this or pair this with all of the rest of the tools that are built into silver effects here we go so color sensitivity and then the levels and curves so this is the curve that's associated with the Ilford hp-5 film if we wanted our mid-tone to be a little bit brighter we can go in and adjust that you can add new points to your curve you can you know take your highlights down and so on and mute the whole thing like if you wanted a dark muted image or anything you might want you have a level and curve capability built right into your silver effects and again this one was when we clicked on HP 5 the curve that was established from the HP 5 scans that were used to create that film emulation a lot of lot of stuff went into developing this software if you you couldn't tell already so we're coming up on the amount of time that we have for the webinar I want to transition into a Q&A here I know we've got a lot of questions ready to go we we didn't actually get through all of the finishing adjustments so just very quickly I want to go over this you have a toning section here you have twenty four presets built into the toning section from there you can actually adjust and create your own tones so we can increase or decrease the strength you can change the paper hue or the silver hue which by the way what that does silver hue is going to affect the dark values in the image so if the silver hue is set to blue you'll see all the shadows are going to be more blue and then if the paper hue is set to a different color in this case now it's set to yellow we're gonna get this kind of split toning effect and at this point it's pretty extreme because the strength is so high but in this way the paper hue slider is going to affect the highlights and the silver hue slider is going to affect the shadows and now when I start to dial back the strength of the overall effect we're going to be revealed with this really kind of subtle but nice split toned effect which in this case is kind of works nicely with the two colors oops close to finishing adjustments um underneath finishing a gel or underneath vignettes you have a burn edges so this is kind of like a vignette but it literally just burns the edges down you can go in and create your own version of that as well so if I wanted the top edge of the image burned and then we wanted it to transition softly and then go way into the image we can kind of go in and do that one edge at a time as opposed to the vignette tool where it's going to be affecting all four sides at the same time let's burn the left side just a little bit transition that in set the size and then dial that back just a touch and by burning these edges down even very subtly at something like four percent that's going to kind of push the viewers attention towards the middle of the image and in this case since it's a square image that one to one it works pretty effectively finally image borders so the image borders basically give you the ability to create a little finished edge act as if you were in the darkroom and you had a 35-millimeter or what a 6x6 holder in your Omega enlarger and you scratched out your you took a file and filed out your your film holder this is gonna yield you a similar kind of effect and you can change the size you can change the spread or the thickness of the stroke that's around the image and then you can also have a more clean or a rougher edge there so let's say we're happy with these let's take a quick look at the before and after here's the before here's our after after we finished our black and white conversion we click the Save button in the lower right corner that's gonna bring us back into our host software and we will have our original image in our grouping and then the black and white converted photo right next to it and in my case since I told it to be a 16-bit per channel TIFF file this is saved as a 16-bit per channel TIFF file alright so ladies and gentlemen I think that's that's about time for our presentation I think we've got a lot of questions that have gone into the GoToWebinar control panel so I'm gonna try and answer a couple of these and I'll stick around to answer as many as possible but I'm actually conducting this webinar from New Hartford New York and after the webinar I'm gonna be driving a couple hours away to help my sister and brother-in-law at their camp so I want to stick around and answer as many questions as possible but if we've got you know 500 questions coming in it might it might take us a while so I wanted for anyone who's not gonna stick around for the Q&A thank you very much for joining the webinar today hopefully you found it to be beneficial I love doing this stuff it's quite enjoyable to just get to talk about how this software works and hopefully you found it to be beneficial as well thanks again for joining and feel free to type any questions you have into your questions box how do you save a custom preset yep David good call I did say I was going to show you that one why don't I jump over into Photoshop because I've got a couple other images open so if I wanted to save a preset in silver effects we would make our adjustments and then um on the left side there's a custom section I'll show you I'll just gonna talk through it as this is loading um let's say I use the N VOC preset dark selenium and then I just increased the structure some more and I say okay I love this I want to save this as my own preset what you would do is move into the custom section here on the left lower left corner of the interface click the plus button in the custom section and then name the preset something so let's name this one dark selenium - custom for webinar and then click OK and once you've named it and clicked ok your custom presets will come up and it will be saved in alphabetical order great question David thank you for reminding me um Kevin you said the the grain amount per pixel I'm not sure how there can be more than one possible thing happening to each individual pixel did I hear it wrong - did you say that grain amount is per pixel I see so in the film types in the grain section basically what's happening is the software is trying to create a certain number of grains per pixel on the image so if there's you know this is 48 megapixels right and so for each pixel right now I have 500 grains per pixel I'm not sure if that translates really well but basically if I were to slide my grain per pixel over to one grain per pixel now if we zoom in basically each grain each pixel is represented by a piece of grain right so I've zoomed in to 400% so we're away in here but but now as I slide my grain per pixel slider to the right we're getting less grain per pixel therefore we don't see as much of it hopefully that is helpful when using the bundled DxO editor our edits saved so that when you reopen file for later all control points are retained good question no so if you launch the Nik plugins from Lightroom or 4d from DxO photo lab as soon as you click the Save button that's a totally separate file that's been saved out in the history in your Nik collection or the control points those things are not saved so that you can reopen and re-edit but if you're using Photoshop and then you use smart objects all of these settings are retained so you can reopen and re-edit the image in a you know if you will totally non-destructive process because you can you can see exactly where you've placed your control points and move them around and so on now if you're using control points in DxO photo lab to you you are able to kind of go back into control points and adjust them how you see fit but as soon as you go into the Nik collection from DxO photo lab those things are not saved because it's a totally separate file so I had a question that that just came in and I kind of answered at the very beginning of the webinar the webinars that we've been doing recently have been recorded and it was to my knowledge that they were to be sent out 24 hours after the webinar is conducted and that that setting apparently wasn't on at least in two of the webinars I just conducted the IR webinar infrared webinar and then an analogue effects Pro webinar well here's three as well as the most recent one which would be sculpting light they were recorded they are available I don't know how or where they're available so I'm gonna ask DxO exactly what's happening with those and if they can be made public either on the DxO website or on the DxO Nik software YouTube channel that said I turned on the setting for this webinar so that you should get an email in 24 hours and it will have a link to this webinar this recorded webinar so you actually can hear all of this over again if you want to do that hey Gordon glad you made it alright so moving forward tonality protection another question that came in so uh the tonality protection sliders that are in the global adjustments basically allow you to retain highlight and shadow detail so let me show you this I'm gonna click into the histogram I don't have any value that's super bright or super dark everything in this image is kind of muted but if I were to go in and add a bunch of brightness and wow I need a lot of contrast for this image okay something Wow nope you know what's happening I think in my levels and curves yeah I have a muted there we go okay so talking about the tonality protection sliders let's reduce this contrast I need to not have such a bright image sorry I had to set this up a little bit the these two sliders here attempt to mute or to retain highlight or shadow detail so if I slide my highlight slider to the right what it wants to do is take anything that it thinks is too bright and shove it to the left in the histogram darken it down so the highlight protection or tonality protection highlight slider is going to try to protect those highlights from being blown out or if you take this shadow slider to the right it's going to attempt to retain shadow detail there I don't think there are any shadow details to try to retain in this image all right absolutely Pat thank you for joining thank you for the kind words as well can you demo using the brush tool sure sending them out to participant doesn't allow me to watch webinars you missed if a recording exists it would be helpful to have a library yes Bob good good comment there I'm gonna see if we can have these webinars published somewhere whether it's on the DxO website or on the Nick YouTube channel the thing is Bob is that you know I do these webinars for DxO but I don't actually work for DXL and and there in France and so not that that necessarily matters but it can take a little while for - for things to happen because of the differences in time so I can email them now but nothing might happen for another day or two depending upon if they're able to change those things and Jack just mentioned that the IR webinar is on YouTube cool thank you for checking and thanks for letting me know Jack and us know what is the physical address for DxO Gordon I had no idea to be honest with you I know that there in France that's about it is there anywhere on the DxO website that writes out what each of these sliders does Cynthia I don't think so the in around 2010 on the Nick Software website there were a few PDF documents that kind of did that but I don't think that that exists anymore thanks Bob can you demonstrate how to re-edit and solar effects after saving Photoshop yes so Lee and then we had another question about using the brush tool let's let's talk about those things really quickly so I'm gonna go into finishing adjustments I'm just gonna turn this film I'm not the film the image border off and then I also am gonna turn the grain off because if I'm going to be mixing two exposures together I need to make sure that the grain is the same basically and that's or I need to like think through how I want my grain to be and we don't have enough time to do that so I've turned off those settings I'm gonna click the brush button in the lower right corner and the the brush capability here is built into the Photoshop version of the software and what happens hopefully as we go back over to Photoshop is our NIC selective tool actually changes so now we're in the tools section and we can fill in our entire layer right which fills our excuse me it fills our layer mask with white so that we can see our entire image if I click clear it actually blacks out the layer mask if I hit paint I can paint my lair in using the brush tool and actually this is operating for people who are familiar with and comfortable using layers and layer masks the this is simply a tool that's built into Photoshop already and I would recommend if you're not familiar with using layers and layer masks you know jump onto YouTube or your favorite photo learning website and learn about layers and layer masks because they will open up a whole world of capability and basically this tool the paint erase clear fill button is just utilizing these layer masks so I I never use this tool because I'm always just doing it with this with with my sort of Photoshop capabilities because this is actually a little bit limited compared to what you could be doing with different custom brushes and gradients and so on and so forth but let's say we like what we've got here so I've painted the effect into the top portion of the image and I didn't really do a very good job masking you can see that reflected in in my layer mask but let's say I'm happy I click the apply button and now the brush tool is basically made it so I've only brushed it into those particular areas now my next question was how do you like pair different black and white conversions together so here's how I would do that I would make my initial black and white conversion as we did I'm going to turn it off in my layers click on my background layer and then just go back into silver effects Pro - and the there are a hundred different mindsets or thought processes for this kind of workflow what I tend to do is I will look at the image and kind of convert the photograph like let's say of Ellie the baby that we looked at earlier I will look at that image and kind of create a once over black and white conversion that I really like focusing on maybe just the building or just the person the subject in the portrait and then I'll click the ok button and then I'll be able to go back into silver effects like what we've just done and maybe focus on a different part of the image so now I'm gonna go ahead and darken down the entire photo and we're gonna have sort of a half high key half low key image starting down the mid-tones I'm gonna brighten up the mid-tones and what we're gonna do is just paint the effect in not enough contrast paint the effect in where we don't have that other layer in fact let's just say we're happy with this i click the ok' button by the way I'm not sure how effective this workflow is going to be on this image because it's not an image that I'd probably use the technique on I will maybe do it one more time and I'll just like focus on the building or one of the buildings so that you can see the major difference so now I have two layers of silver effects and one of them looks like that actually looks like this and then the other one looks like this so not even that different really I didn't really do that many things that were too different but now I'm able to using my layer masks I'm actually gonna drag this layer up above and you can see what's happening now I'm able to mix two different black-and-white conversions together in fact let's just do this one more time to drive at home I'm gonna turn off these two layers my two silver effects layers click on background go into silver effects let's just lighten the heck out of the state capitol building here by the way as this is launching in April of 2020 I think it's gonna be April 18th RIT is gonna be running what's called the RIT Big Shot which is where we go to a really cool architectural location at night we turn off all the lights in that location and then we ask the general public to come in and help us paint with light on the object or on the subject and so we're gonna be running this this big event April of 2020 and if you're anywhere near Albany New York that's when it's gonna be if you can make it to Albany New York I would love to see you there I know that that's a long way out right now but basically we're doing scouting for for this event right now and then we're having to line up all of the stuff that we want to include and you know all the partners we want to work with and you know set up meetings with the state to try and get permission to even do it so I've got a new black and white conversion I'd click the ok button this time I'm just gonna paint the effect in on the State Capitol building and this is we're learning how to use layers and layer masks and different brushing techniques and selective tools in Photoshop would be helpful as much as I love control points and they're a huge part of my sort of personal photographic workflow I couldn't do basically half of the work that I do without knowing how to make selections and adjustments in Photoshop so basically what I've done here is I've generated a layer mask I'm not going to be too careful with my masking it'll be quite obvious when we turn on the other layers but now my State Capitol building is going to be brighter have more contrast and give us the result that might be interesting and I've gone over the edge it's pretty bad but now we turn on that layer and turn on this layer right and so you can see the difference and where this comes into play is lesson this kind of image and more in let's say a portrait where somebody has one colorize like I don't know bright green eyes you can use a blue color filter to make them go dark but then you can use a red code filter to make the skin go bright you know there's there's a hundred million different things that you could do in that regard okay yes in Diana you can use the brush tool without it being a smart object and David just mentioned there is a book yep called Nik software collection I'm gonna send that to everybody David so Tony Korbel and I think Josh half tel wrote that book there several years ago and it's all about the Nik collection and it would all be appropriate I think they reeled that book before analog effects Pro came out also um Vincent Versace was a photographer out of LA and the Nikon ambassador also has a lot of content about the Nik collection and he's very good as well okay Oh what was the common Julian so what site would we go to to learn more about the event in April 2020 if you literally google the RIT Big Shot Rochester Institute of Technology I think it's just RIT big shop the website is in dire need of updating so don't don't don't judge us on that the project is really cool the website needs to be updated cool it now really quickly I'll give another minute or so if you have any more questions go ahead and type them in I think I missed a couple but there are so many comments that have been coming in that it's hard for me to go in order and read them so how do you copy and move the control point there are a few ways of doing that I'm gonna turn all of these layers off show you that really quickly and then we'll probably hit the road so control points there there are numerous tricks with control points one is copying and pasting control points another would be grouping control points so if I move into my Selective adjustments I place a point up here I brighten this area up substantially I want that control point to be that size but I want another duplicate control point over here if I click on the point I can hit command C on a Mac or ctrl C on a PC and then command V and that's gonna make a crosshair and as I place my control point that is a duplicated control point so any of the sliders that we've adjusted will be reflected in that duplicate the other thing that you can do is hold the option key down and if you hold option and click on the control point you can drag that away and that's gonna be a duplicate as well that's option on a Mac Alt on a PC and that that's that tends to be the tool that I use is option click and drag because I can just kind of make fifty control points really quickly if necessary if I wanted to group these control points together because I wanted to affect them all at once I can highlight them there are two ways to do that you can hold the shift button down and click individually on each control point that you want to activate and once they're active you hit command G on your keyboard and now any adjustment you make to that grouped control point is going to affect those points or let me go back shift command G on groups those control points I'd be shift control G on a PC shift command G on a piece or on a Mac if I wanted to highlight them the other way you can just click and drag so you click somewhere not on the control point but in the image drag your mouse and this is going to give you this bounding box and then you can make command G to group them good questions alright red filter lightens and darkens why good question so the red color filter if you click on that it's gonna lighten anything on the red end of the color spectrum it's gonna lighten up any reds yellows and oranges and it's gonna darken down blues purples in scions if you click on the blue color filter it's going to lighten anything on that end of the color spectrum so it's gonna lighten blue cyan and purple maybe a little magenta and then it's going to darken the stuff on the opposite end of the color spectrum so it's gonna darken the yellow green yellow orange and red yeah can you use capture one as a host software yeah technically Linda I think you can tell you can basically launch an image from capture one pro into silver effects the same way you'd use any of the sort of plugins capable of acting as a stand-alone software I don't remember the exact way of doing it but I do know that you can do it and Linda that one I think if you were to Google launching Nick plugins from capture one Pro or if you were to search that on YouTube you can probably find a short video Oh fine structure yep Penelope great question fantastic name so fine structure I don't think I covered fine structure so thank you for mentioning that and we're coming up on some extra time here I'm totally cool and thank you guys for hanging out by the way but fine structure structure is basically a texture adjustment if I increase the texture right you're gonna see more of those textures it pops a lot more especially these fine high frequency areas like the window panes and the excuse me the rooftop here the shingles that are on top of the building you're gonna see those sort of a little bit better it kind of sharpens those areas fine structure does the same thing but it kind of dials down or dives down into a finer sized objects finer sized areas so if I increase the fine structure I'm going to see that texture enhanced but but sort of that a smaller or a how do I describe this it's it's a finer level if you will which probably isn't that helpful this image is not helping me to describe this either I'm gonna double click on fine structure yeah I think all of these things are a little too high frequency you can you can start to see it in some of the marble work I'm zoomed way in we're at 400% on this image so it's gonna look pretty pixelated but just to get an idea so this is with fine structure at zero here's fine structure at 100 you can see it basically adds the little tiniest bits of contrast into these areas to bring out the structures so I find myself using structure in combination with fine structure and I tend to prefer the look of the regular structure more that's completely subjective do you ever do a conversion of black and white and then blend luminosity to highlight clouds in color version for sure so John there's there are blending mode tricks and that's a really great trick I you know we could sit here and talk about all of these different tricks for hours and hours and hours but you know I probably should hit the road pretty soon here what we're gonna do here there will be more silver effects webinars coming up this is the last webinar of mine probably until September but I'll make sure that on the docket will be like a silver effects intro kind of like this one or you know description of all the tools and then immediately after that like maybe two days after I'll do a tips and tricks where it kind of dives into other kind of more advanced things so if you can make it to both of those because it would act as a refresher and we'd go further and yeah and then the tips and tricks one would be just to kind of move along and get some other stuff cool Bob thank you yeah that's a very different webinar than the IR one for sure ir one was very hard this one was much easier to to do can you do an advanced webinar with ticks yeah got that yep Diana I think that's a good idea very good thank you for the kind words everyone all right let's hit the road here thanks again for joining have an absolutely fantastic day and I hope I see you guys next month if you can make it two more webinars this month Joseph Flynn Ashby has a bunch of webinars go to the Nik software upcoming webinars page oops wrong one and you can see what's listed out in the next few weeks learning support upcoming webinars check that out joseph has a bunch of coming up anyways thanks again ladies and gentlemen [Music] you

Channel: Nik Collection

Views: 5,789

Keywords: DxO Labs, nik Collection 2, Nik collection, Dan Hugues, Silver Efex Pro, Webinar, BnW, Black and White

Id: vY_0Z2QvnF0

Length: 77min 2sec (4622 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 05 2019