Google NIK Collection — Silver Efex Pro Tutorial
Create Beautiful black and white photos with the now FREE Google NIK Collection.
Until recently The Google Nik Collection has virtually been a secret. Professional photographers have used it to their advantage for a long time, not being put off by the high price of purchase. The set of plugins used to cost near to $500 dollars before Google purchased NIK. They quickly reduced the Google NIK Collection to around $150 to tempt in more users, including me, before they finally made it free in March 2016.
Download the Google NIK Collection — https://www.google.com/nikcollection/
This is a great move by Google and will ensure more and more users become ingrained in their ecosystem. It is a tactic that Apple have used successfully and it will surely work for Google in this case as it will likely start feeding you back into their image storage and cloud solutions as the application develops.
The crown jewel of the Google NIK Collection is undoubtedly Silver Efex Pro. Silver Efex Pro is used to convert images to black and white. It offers powerful controls over brightness, contrast, structure and detail and also includes a number of film effects. The key to the success of Google NIK Collection and Silver Efex Pro is the fine control provided by the Control Points. This lets you control specific areas and tones of the image giving you a large amount of control over your image with relative ease. Control points are also now featured in Snapseed so you may already be familiar with them. Get Snapseed for iOS | Android.
Silver Efex Pro is particularly good at processing landscape or cityscape photographs that are destined to be fine art images and this has been my main use over the years for the Google NIK Collection. I particularly enjoy the tone filters that add a beautiful hue to the image and I often gravitate towards the selenium and blue tones.
In the video I introduce the Google NIK Collection and go through Silver Efex Pro demonstrating all the important controls and how they work. Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom are required to run the Google NIK Collection so check out the link below.
Get a FREE trail of Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom — Click here.
Download the RAW files for the above images to give it a go yourself — Click here.
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