articles/Landscape/themonochromespecial-page4

The Monochrome Special - part 4 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

by Tom Lee Published 01/04/2009

Commercial Solutions

Many commercial plug-in and software companies have sought to add utility of monochrome conversions with bespoke solutions of their own. Nik Software's SilverFXPro is typical, but one of the better offerings. We reviewed the product in October 2008 but we asked Tom Lee to provide some images and comments of his longer-term real-life use of the product.

RAW - HSL/Grayscale

When this panel opens you see the full colour image and there are sliders for adjusting Hue, Saturation and Lightness of the colour image. If you check the 'Convert to Grayscale' box these options are replaced by a Grayscale Mix slider set, in which the luminance contributions of the primary, secondary and some tertiary colours are controllable. This is a little like having the biggest complementary filter set in the world! Again, a knowledge of the way film, mono filters work is helpful in guiding you how to move the sliders, but you can, in truth, juggle with them until you like the result. Be warned though that you can spend hours playing about with the sliders.

The RAW file dialogue box opens with the image in full colour and from here you can adjust a colour image or choose to check the 'Convert to Grayscale' box. This changes the view to that shown in the middle screen grab. The primary, secondary and some tertiary colours may be adjusted to vary their contributions to the tonal Lightness values of the image. Although there are no pre-sets available from this menu, clicking on the blue link at the bottom reveals the workflow settings box as shown from where the bit depth, colour space and resolution may be varied.

The bottom screen grab shows the Split Toning dialogue panel. Here, different tones may be applied to, for example, the highlights and shadows, which mimics the effect that is possible with silver halide toning in which successive applications of different toners may be used to affect the image in the same way. The digital workflow has considerably more control!

• The Monochrome Special page 1
  
• The Monochrome Special page 2
  
• The Monochrome Special page 3
  
• The Monochrome Special page 4
  
• The Monochrome Special page 5
  
• The Monochrome Special page 6
  
• The Monochrome Special page 7
  

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