Played around enough with NIk’s SIlver Effects that when the Black Friday sale came around I bought it. Time will tell if I find this a valuable purchase but here’s a picture I took from Istanbul converted to B&W and with the grain turned up.

A friend of mine is using the Sliver Efex plug-in software from Nik. I’ve downloaded a free 15-day demo to play around with it as I’d like to have more tools to work in black and white. It’s a cool space but one I don’t know too much about. I am worried, however, of learning yet another graphics tool when I’ve already invested in learning Photoshop, Lightroom, and in a less relevant example Illustrator and OmniGraffle. Anyway, above is a picture of Kabuki and myself from our Istanbul trip which I flipped into B&W with a simple preset that comes with the software. I did a few very minor adjustments but this is my first try. Not bad. I like the dramatic contrast of this filter. Below is another setting with the same photo.

Don’t really like this one as much but i guess it has a more aged look to it with a little sepia toning, softening of the details, and a little grain. Anyway, I think experimentation period one has come to a close as i need to start packing for my trip to Amsterdam this morning.