Silver Efex is one of those plug-ins every photographer should have if you work in black and white. Pure and simple. It's worth re-exploring this software again since it's well worth the money and is on special at Amazon at the moment.
In these days of digital image editing, “Is that real or has it been Photoshopped?” is a common question. It's also the sign of a common misconception about photographs. No photo is real, and even images never touched by an image editor are still interpretive representations.
Few things reveal the subjectivity of photography as starkly as black and white conversion, for the simple fact that there’s no objective standard for what gray tone should correspond to any particular color. For example, in a black and white photograph you might choose to represent a sky as a dark tone or a very light tone.
How you choose to map a color scene into grayscale is one of the most important stages in black and white work. Nik Software’s Silver Efex Prois a $200 plug-in for Adobe Photoshop and Apple’s Aperture that does nothing but black and white conversion. You won't find a more sophisticated tool for converting color images to grayscale. And because Silver Efex's grain and film emulation are best in class, you can create images that look like traditional black and white photos.
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