
By providing control over the location of the center of the vignette, its size and the brightness in the brightest and darkest spots, getting the right vignette becomes a very easy task.Ī quite useful filter for portrait photography, Glamour Glow is a reproduction of the Orton effect. While creating a vignette in Photoshop is relatively simple, once again Color Efex provides an easier and more intuitive way of doing it. This is Color Efex’s alternative for creating vignettes.

The disadvantage is that the tool works for all the colors within the image, but many times this is enough and it saves the user the trial and error involved in other methods. While there are a couple of native options (Hue/Saturation, Color Balance, Photo Filter), the Brilliance/Warmth filter from Color Efex provides a much more intuitive approach by simply providing a slider where you can turn your image ‘Cooler’ or ‘Warmer’. If there is one basic adjustment that Photoshop could make simpler is the white balance of an image. However, unless important adjustments are required, the possibility of making changes in Color Efex makes it possible to save some intermediate steps. The different parameters give some control over the final image, even though they can as well be adjusted using adjustment layers in Photoshop. Once the dialog is open, the user can change the filter color, the strength, the brightness and the contrast.

This particular filter is not that different from making black and white photos in Photoshop. For this purpose, I will be using the following image from a lighthouse in Morocco. In this post I want to go though five of the most common filters from the Color Efex plugin. What makes this (and others as well) plugin so attractive is that some complex processing techniques that would normally take several steps in Photoshop only take a single step when using it. One of the most popular plugins out there is Color Efex from the software company Nik.

While some free options can be found, investing some amount of money can speed up the post-processing workflow to such an extent that, in the end, the initial investment feels insignificant. However, sometimes the Photoshop approach to some of the processing techniques is not the most straightforward, and thus different plugins and pre-programmed actions are available out there.

This is a consequence of the popularity that the program has achieved throughout the years that comes both from a long heritage of users but also from a very powerful set of tools that allow the users to do pretty much whatever they want. 5 Useful Filters from Nik Color Efex for Photoshop Even though there are many different image processing software packages out there, for most people, when someone mentions post-processing, the first thing that comes to mind is Photoshop.
