There are many ways to create impressive, beautiful black and white photos. One way is to shoot images using the black and white simulation settings in your digital camera.  Another way is to convert your color images into black and white during post processing. The drawback to converting color to black and white is many times your images come out looking dull and flat.

Don’t worry, there is help to get the exact look and feel that you want for your images, B&W Effects by Topaz will help you create better black and white photos. Topaz B&W Effects is a software plug-in that helps you convert color photos into beautiful monochrome images. This is NOT stand-alone software; you DO need a host program, like Photoshop or Lightroom. To check which programs are compatible go to the B&W Effects website and click on the “compatibility” tab at the top of the page. Get a Free Trial of B&W Effects Now!

I started using Topaz products when I first needed help to reduce noise in my HDR (high dynamic range) images particularly the HDR images taken at night.  I discovered Topaz DeNoise as by far the best plug in that eliminated the noise but also kept my shots sharp. So when I wanted to create better black and white images I naturally wanted to try Topaz’s B&W Effects.

I have had the pleasure of using Topaz B&W Effects over the last several weeks and I must say I was not let down.  The software is amazing, very easy to use and it delivers incredibly diverse results.  Their “conversion engine” emphasizes tone and texture to help you create compelling and dynamic images.

If you have used Topaz’s products before then the interface will be very familiar as it is similar to the other modules.

B&W Effects Interface

Down the left hand side, you will find the Effects Panel.  The effects are grouped into collections, Traditional, Toned, Stylized, Cyanotype, Albumen, Opalotype, Platinum, My Collection, Favorites and Snapshots.

Below that is the Preset Panel. The row of icons at the top of this section allow you to set/reset presets, add a preset to favorites, delete, import, export and capture a snapshot of the current settings.

Next is the list of presets for each collection.

Along the top bar are icons that allow you to compare the adjusted image to the original, zoom in and out and change the display mode.

Finally down the right side is the adjustment panel, this is where you can customize the look and feel of each of the presets or create your own.

Preset Panel

Once you choose a collection from the Effects panel, you will want to look at each of the presets for that collection.

There are literally hundreds of presets. This is where you must experiment to find a starting point for your vision.  Let B&W Effects do the heavy lifting and get you close to the look that you want to achieve and then later you can fine-tune the image to get the exact look. When you hover over each preset a window will pop up allowing you to preview what the effect looks like.

Clicking the menu button at the bottom will bring up options like preferences, check for updates, tutorials, user guide, tech support etc.

Adjustment Panel

The adjustment panel is down the right hand side of the window. The top defaults to the preview navigator. To change this to Zone Mode, click on the stylized “Z” along the top navigation bar.

Zone display mode uses the Zone System, which is a photographic technique for determining optimal film exposure and development, originally designed by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer.

I prefer zone mode as it is a visual aid that recognizes the various tonal values in your image on a scale of 0 (pure black) to 10 (pure white). The digital zone display mode detects shadows (0-3), mid-tones (4-7) and highlights (8-10) in your image. This is especially helpful for determining where the image is over or underexposed.

Next are the quick buttons. These are great for immediate enhancements. You have the ability to apply a range of color filters (the colored circles), change contrast, exposure (brightness), adaptive exposure, and get access to the dodge and burn brushes.  The droplets are quick toning, to change the overall tone with options for selenium, gold (blue), copper (red), sepia and antique dye.

I call the last section the main adjustment panel, this is where you truly have the tools to create an outstanding image. There are 4 tabs:

• Conversion – tools for basic and adaptive adjustments as well as contrast and tonal control
• Creative Effects – creative stylized tools including realistic, graphic and artistic effects
• Local Adjustments – selectively apply image adjustments (burning, dodging and selective color) using smart brushes
• Finishing Touches – apply finishing touches such as vignettes, grain and toning

Conversion

Ultimate control over your black and white conversion comes from the conversion tab. Here you will find basic exposure, adaptive exposure, color sensitivity, color filter, and the curve tool.

Basic exposure is what it is…basically brightness with control over blacks and whites. Then there is adaptive exposure that changes the highlights, low lights and mid-tones of your image. It allows you to enhance both detail and depth and can create HDR-style looks. By increasing the regions slider, you are changing the way exposure is distributed across your image.

Color Sensitivity changes the luminosity of each color so that areas that contains the color will be brighter or darker.

Color Filter applies a colored filter to your image.

Don’t forget to check “Process Details Independently” at the bottom, which allows you to adjust exposure and details separately.

Creative Effects

I do not use these very much; you have 4 choices under this tab:

• Simplify – removes details under a certain size.
• Diffusion – softens and diffuses the light
• Posterize – give your image a poster effect
• Camera Shake – self-explanatory, can be used to introduce motion

Local Adjustments

Under this tab you use the brush to dodge, burn, smooth, enhance detail or bring color back to your image.

The edge aware slider works well with enhancing detail on certain areas of the image but not on others. It also works with the dodge and burn brush, and with smoothing a region. If you really want selective color (bringing color back to a specific area of a black and white image), it works wonders with color control. I am not a fan of selective color so it is not a feature that I will use.

Finishing Touches

In finishing touches you can add film grain, frame borders, vignettes and more.  You also have the ability to adjust silver and paper tone. This adds toning to either your paper (white tones) or the silver (grey or dark tones). Alternatively, you can use quad tones a powerful adjustment that allows for 4 different tones to be selected and applied to different tonal regions with in your image. With 4 grey tones you can enhance contrast and details or choose 1 color or 4 and artistic effects will be applied.

 Conclusion

If you are looking to create better black and white photos, B&W Effects is great and I highly recommend it. It is easy to use and yet very powerful. It provides almost unlimited adjustments to enable you to create your perfect vision.

Sample Images

Discount

If you decide to give Topaz B&W Effects a shot please use discount code bestphotohdr for a 15% discount. Buy B&W Effects Now

The post Create Better Black and White Photos Using B&W Effects appeared first on Best HDR Photography.

I first discovered high dynamic range photography several years ago when I found Trey Ratcliff at Stuck in Customs.  He is a master at HDR photography and I loved the way many of his photographs looked.

When I started messing around with high dynamic range photography I only used Photoshop and just could not get the look I was after.  With HDR photography you combine and tone map multiple exposures into a single high dynamic rage image. Many times my photos looked like the awful images that many people think of when they think of HDR photography, over saturated messes.

Photomatix Pro 5 (version 5.0.5)

I started looking at the software that the pros used in processing their HDR images.  What I found was Photomatix.  It was and is highly recommended and seemed to be the most popular, widely used software for HDR photography.  Photomatix Pro 5 is a standalone program.  You do not need Photoshop or any other program for it to work. Although the newest version does have, a plug-in included for Abobe Lightroom.  I prefer to finish my photos in Photoshop but you certainly don’t need it to use Photomatix Pro 5 effectively.

Update and Improvements

In the newest version, there have been some substantial updates and improvements. Some of the best new features include:

• Contrast Optimizer, a new tone mapping method used for a more realistic look.
• Exposure Fusion, can now be used for creating a image from a single RAW file.
• Automatic Deghosting is greatly improved.
• The Refreshing Preview slider is awesome, make sure you change this in the preference dialog under the General tab. You will love the way this works!

There are more new features and if you are a using an older version of Photomatix I would highly recommend you upgrade.

Using Photomatix

Photomatix Pro 5 is simple to use.  As you can see, you have 4 options when you open the interface.

• Load Bracketed Photos
• Load a Single Photo
• Batch Bracketed Photos
• Batch Single Photos

After you load in your photo or photos a new window, opens with more options as to what you want the software to do.

• Align source images – options include hand held or tripod mounted
• Remove ghosts – if you have movement in between the frames of your photos then deghosting tries to eliminate the ghosting.
• Reduce noise
• Reduce chromatic aberrations
• Options for a RAW conversion – you can change the white balance and the color profile.

Merge to HDR

Once you have made your choices click on Merge to HDR and away you go.   What happen’s next depends on the options that you chose.  If you chose Deghosting, a window will open that gives you more control over the deghosting process.  You can deghost the entire image or you can choose to selective deghost. I would recommend trying to use the ‘selective deghosting’ as deghosting generally will soften your image.

When deghosting is finished, Photomatix starts the merging process. A new merged image, with the default setting applied, will open with an interface filled with options.

34 preloaded pre-sets are listed down the right hand side and the sliders that adjust various levels are down the left hand side.  At the top of the sliders are the 2 ways you can process your image.

Tone mapping

Tone Mapping is the process of converting the tonal values of an image from a high range to a lower one. This process compresses the tonal range of an HDR image of the scene in order to reveal its details in highlights and shadows. Photomatix offers 3 different methods of tone mapping, detail enhancer, contrast optimizer and tone compressor.  Each of these once selected will give you more enhancements such as brightness, white clip, black clip, color saturation, tone compression, lighting effect and more.

Exposure Fusion

Exposure Fusion is the automatic blending of the photos, essentially taking the best parts of each image and blending them together. Exposure Fusion also has a number of different methods of processing your image, Fusion/Natural, Real Estate, Intensive, Auto, and Average.  As well, each of these options has more enhancements such as, strength, shadow contrast, local contrast, highlight depth and so on.

At this point, you can let your inner artist take over, play with the pre-sets and move sliders until you achieve the desired look.

If you are unsure of what a slider will do hover your cursor over the name of the slider and an explanation of what it controls will appear in the lower box.

Once you have your desired effect click ‘Apply’ and Photomatix completes the fusing/tone mapping process.

Finishing Touches

A Finishing Touches window pops up with the completed photo, allowing you to make a few more adjustments to the contrast, color and sharpening so you can achieve a perfect replication of your vision.

Below are the 3 exposures that I used to create the photo at the bottom, in this example I used RAW files.

I used Exposure Fusion to complete the image, there was a little bit of noise in the sky so I did run it through Topaz DeNoise after Photomatix did it’s thing.

If you want a little more in depth tutorial, I would suggest RC Conception’s book The HDR Book: Unlocking the Pros’ Hottest Post-Processing Techniques or if you prefer video, Trey Ratcliff has an excellent tutorial called The Complete HDR Tutorial. Both of these resources cover the use of Photomatix in detail.

RAW or JPEG

It is important to note Photomatix does not require images in RAW format. Photomatix is designed to work with multiple photos taken under different exposure settings, and it works great when those images are JPEGs.  Sometimes I think it works better with JPEGs.  JPEGs are already processed in camera and are ready for print so I think that your results from Photomatix require less adjustments to get a pleasing final image. If you are having a tough time getting the results you want with the RAW file give the JPEGs a try it might surprise you.

This shot of the Red Deer River is an example of a tone mapped HDR using JPEG’s. I took this the same day as the above photo while visiting Dinosaur Provincial Park.

 New Age of HDR Photography

With ever improving software, we are in a new age of HDR photography.  There are many photos out there that you would not be able to say definitively that they were HDR or not.  Unfortunately, HDR photography may be forever associated with the haloed, over saturated, over processed, dirty cloud images that were common place in the early days of the style.

With Photomatix a photographer can take a much more refined and realistic approach and produce awesome images with no resemblance to the old style HDR photos.  You can still have the freedom to produce hyper-realistic photos that are tastefully processed.

I highly recommend Photomatix Pro 5.  Whether you are using one image or a series of bracketed images Photomatix will produce superb HDR photos.

It is easy to use with a simple slider based interface. There are plenty of options available within Photomatix to enhance your HDR photos. It has many pre-sets installed and if you are looking for more, Trey Ratcliff has a package of pre-sets for Photomatix on his website.

I use it and happily recommend that you should use it too.

Discount

If you decide to give Photomatix a shot please use discount code bestphotohdr for a 15% discount.

The post Photomatix Pro 5 Review appeared first on Best HDR Photography.

First let me explain, what is noise?  Noise in digital photographs is a term used to describe a visual distortion similar to “grain” found in film photographs. Although grain is sometimes a desired effect, noise looks like pixelated discoloration and is definitely not wanted in photographs. As sensor technology has gotten better and the in camera processing has become more capable, noise  has become less of an issue for today’s digital cameras and the average photographer.

However, no matter how good digital cameras get there will always be noise. Noise is still very much a problem when shooting at low light, or at a high ISO and when processing HDR (high dynamic range) photos. When creating HDR images you often create some, or a lot, of noise in your photos, especially the sky or at night.

Getting rid of noise is easy, you can blur your image and the noise will disappear.  Before the development of decent noise reduction software we did just that, if a blue sky had a lot of noise you could use the smudge tool and painstaking blur the offending skyline.  However a blurry image generally isn’t the goal. The goal is a noise free, clear, crisp image.

Enter Topaz DeNoise – Noise Reduction Software

Topaz created a powerful noise reducing tool called DeNoise.  It is easy to use but needs to be used with a compatible host program such as Photoshop, Lightroom, or iPhoto.

How does it work?  I’m not sure, but according to Topaz’s website:

“DeNoise generates a custom full-resolution noise profile for each image it processes. This makes it surprisingly accurate at finding the difference between noise and detail – often even more accurate than humans!

Other software either use pre-built noise profiles or only look at a very small section of the image. Although the DeNoise technology is much slower, you’ll forget all about speed when you see the image quality of the final results.”

Adding noise reduction software is a huge time saver and using Topaz DeNoise gives you less noise, more detail and really gives your photos a professional finishing touch.

Easy to Use

The control panel is extremely easy to use.  You can start with the presets that run down the left hand side of the panel.  DeNoise can be used with any type of image file from JPEG to RAW/PSD/TIFF.  There are 12 presets starting with JPEG – light going all the way to RAW – strongest with debanding.

On the right hand panel is where you find specific adjustments. You can get the exact look that you want by using the sliders under Noise Reduction, Detail Recovery, and the Debanding drop down menus.

That is it, no harder than that.  In most cases I have found that the presets have done a great job of analyzing the image and getting the adjustment just right.

DeNoise in Action

Lets take a look at how good DeNoise is at reducing noise.

This is a photo I took at night in South Beach, Miami.  Unfortunately it was an extremely busy street with no chance to use a tripod.  So I had to up the ISO and hand hold my camera, when you click on the image, you can see there is far too much noise and it is distracting.

So I ran this image through DeNoise and used the Raw – stronger preset.

You can see that DeNoise eliminated most of the noise.

Here is a before and after view.

Topaz DeNoise gives you the peace of mind to raise your ISO without fear of ruining your photos.

I have used other noise reduction software in the past but since I picked up Topaz DeNoise I can honestly say it is the only one I use. I highly recommend downloading a copy and giving it a try.  It will improve your images.

The post Topaz DeNoise – Noise Reduction Software appeared first on Best HDR Photography.