On Fri, Feb 5, 2016 at 1:59 AM, Godfrey DiGiorgi <[email protected]> wrote: > > I don't use stuff like "Silver Efex 2". That's using someone else's expertise > to > simulate a look of film. To me, that's a cheap cheat—artificial and sterile. > I have no interest in "simulating film", or anything else, at all. I render > my photos > into monochrome or color as I see perceive the subject to have expressive > value, > as it reflects what I saw when I looked at whatever the subject might be.
Godfrey, you would do well to have a closer look at Silver Efex Pro. Simulating film is but one of its special effects features, but for me the real power of it lies in its black and white conversion tools. The ability to increase contrast just in the midtones, or the coarse and fine detail extraction tools are very powerful. The Soft Contrast slider is a terrific tool. There are presets provided to let you quickly try some different overall looks, but I also tend to avoid them, preferring to build up my own from scratch. It's true that everything you can do in Silver Efex Pro you can also do in Photoshop with enough fiddling and time, but it's so much more convenient to use SEP. Think of it like Lightroom versus Photoshop. Same kind of creative enhancement and time saving. I use Silver Efex all the time, but I almost never simulate film with it. -- -bmw -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
