In the Clouds..
While Razor Hone Creek thwarted me yet again (there’s a double waterfall drop I’ve been eyeing but it’s dangerous to access), I was fortunate enough to enjoy some of the beautiful weather around the Mount Baker Ski Area and photograph some of the wild cloud formations that where trailing all around Mount Shuksan. It was a glorious bluebird type of day with unusually light crowds within the ski area. Over the course of just a couple hours, the constantly changing clouds kept creating dramatic views of Mount Shuksan.
I took about 20 or so shots of the scene but after reviewing the shots I realized that the photos would be better suited for conversion to black & white. The photos are fairly monochromatic to begin with with shades of blue dominating. The sunshine was also casting some dramatic shadows across the steep slopes of Mount Shuksan. A black & white conversion would help accentuate these features and increase the overall “power” of the scene.
During my early days of processing my photos, I used Photoshop Elements to perform my black & white conversions. The Elements version I’m familiar with (Version 6) provided a few quick settings for certain styles/looks and then a couple sliders to tweak them as desired. All along I knew that Photoshop CS was supposed to be a more powerful tool for black & white conversion. Once I finally stepped up to the full version of CS5, I found the black & white conversion process a bit daunting. Gone were the presets that I could start with and, in their place, were a number of sliders which at times seemed to do nothing!
There had to be some better way to do this and so I decided to download the trial version of Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro. This program is really an add-on to Photoshop CS (or Elements) and it’s sole purpose is to convert photos to black & white while providing the most flexibility in an easy to use manner. It’s not cheap (currently $180 but there are a few discount codes you can get from the web) but it gets high praise for the job it does.
Once you fire up the filter, the Nik Software dialog loads your photo (AND respects the Smart Layer functionality of CS!) along with a few dozen presets that you can chose to start your conversion with. Now, truth be told, a number of the filters don’t seem terribly useful (there are several sepia type filters based on different color tints for example). After playing with the options, I kept gravitating towards the “High Structure” style preset.
I found that the High Structure preset did a great job and I didn’t feel the need to make any drastic changes. There were some additional options such as simulating a variety of black & white film grains (I tended to like the Kodak 100 TMAX Pro) but I ultimately decided NOT to use one of these filters because it added TOO much grain for these particular images. Turns out that the only adjustment I felt I needed to make was to reign in the highlights just a little bit for one particular photo to prevent them from washing out.
Despite the impressive power and ease at which you can convert your photos, I’ve had a few glitches that I have yet to explain while using Silver Efex Pro, namely a cryptic error message telling me that the product had failed. This would typically happen when the filter dialog was loading or when I was ready to apply the filter. There was also a time when the dialog wouldn’t open but it added the filter into the list of layers in CS5. I frankly don’t know what caused this but usually a restart of CS5 would suffice. I will be purchasing a copy of Silver Efex Pro (a new version is just about to ship) and I just hope that these little quirky issues don’t follow me with the full version.
Anyways, here are the photos I chose to convert to black & white:
