I’m always looking to streamline my workflow, and now that Aperture, my photo-management software has opened itself up to third-party plug-ins, so I’ve started exploring new software options to process my digital images into black & white. I recently downloaded a plug-in called Silver Efex Pro, after reading some good reviews, and some intriguing videos on their site. Today I finally had the chance to install it, and give it a try, and first impressions are pretty amazing.

First off, the file size of a processed file is about half that of a similarly processed file worked on in Photoshop. I used the above image as a test, and tried to approximate the work I did in Photoshop with the Silver Efex plug-in. The results might not be obvious above (top is Photoshop, bottom is Silver Efex), but to me the Silver Efex image is far superior, and ends up being much closer to the image I saw in my head when I took the photograph. Where in Photoshop i’m pulling together different tools not specifically designed to create black & white images, the tool palette in Silver Efex is tweaked for it. What’s particularly nice is the way you can target certain areas of the image to create very targeted effects, and the developers have done a great job of making those adjustments blend in with the rest of the image. Working in Silver Efex feels very much like I remember the darkroom, and speaking of film, they’ve included 18 film presets, which I was initially very sceptical of. Typically when someone says they’ve come up with a filter to make your images look like film they slap on layer of digital noise and call it film grain. The filters in Silver Efex do much more, and emulate the different densities, curves, and grain, to great effect. When I was shooting with the Leica I used Tri-X, and when I clicked to add the Tri-X 400 filter it was like bumping into an old friend that I hadn’t seen in years.

All-in-all I’d much rather spend my time shooting, and pay to have a bunch of nerds come up with various algorithms to make processing my images easier. It’s definitely possible to achieve similar results in Photoshop, but the way Silver Efex is able to blend everything is pretty amazing. To get something similar in Photoshop would take a pretty deft hand. I’m still on my 15 day trial, but I think i’m going to have to crack the Visa out of exile for this one.