Thanks for any help,
Larry

Rick

These images were processed in Aperture using Silver Efex (wicked fast and great controls). Like it much better than anything else I’ve tried (especially ability to emulate film stocks and save my own presets).

Then… published using Photoshop Express.

Here is the link – http://www.photoshop.com/user/rastervector/?galleryid=b4995b059e794b87ab7dadbaf94adc6a&wf=share&trackingid=BTAGC

Here it is embedded (I hope)

Not necessarily. Its important to understand the vast differences in processing here and how a plug-in like this isn’t necessarily any different in terms of using it (currently) in Aperture or doing the work in Photoshop. IF you prefer the results using this product in Photoshop, enough said. But its not like you’re doing this in the Raw pipeline. And yes, there are advantages to that.

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Not only you get the privilege of paying to enter, you also wave all rights to your image. I don’t care who runs this, in a normal world this would be a scam.

Both programmes are pretty expensive so I’ll have to spend a bit more time evaluating them before I make a decision which to purchase.

I would be interested to read anyone else’s opinions of the two. Perhaps Scott will do a comparison.

I forgot to mention at the time, but I really appreciated the pointer to your white paper on color spaces last week.

The reason they work in Aperture and not LR is because what Aperture does is fully render the image to pixels when applying any of these kinds of plug-in’s. So its really no different than using LR and exporting to Photoshop and then using Photoshop with a 3rd party plug-in. Well in the case of Aperture, you don’t “need” Photoshop to do this, but the final results are the same. IOW, its NOT applying this work on the Raw data or in the Raw processing pipeline. Neither Aperture nor LR have opened the actual processing Raw pipeline to plug-in’s (unlike say Bibble which does apply Noise Ninja directly in the Raw processing pipeline).

>Speaking of Lightroom, on quick reading, Silver Efex Pro looks similar to Lightroom’s B&W conversion capabilities. With so many techniques vying for B&W conversion, I’m wondering how they compare.

One difference is that in LR, the edits if you will ARE happening on the Raw data in the Raw pipeline, making this truly non destructive. And to get geeky, there are advantages to applying these edits on high bit, linear encoded data as LR operates on its data in the Develop module.

There’s metadata editing of Raw processing commands and there’s a plug-in altering rendered pixels. That’s a pretty significant differences in terms of processing, speed and all things being equal, quality.

IO too like doing most my B&W conversion in LR though. We’ll see how it goes.

Gav
seimeffects.com