Silver Efex--any Opinions?

[celluloidprop]

My only knock on SEP is that some of the film profiles are waaaaay too contrasty and you lose highlights and shadows right off the bat.

Doesn't really bother me, though, if I stick to the APX100 and Neopan 100 profiles.

[andephotographic]

Is the SEP plugin in for LR3 like a lite version of the full thing?

Edit: Nevermind, I have the thing for a couple years now and only just realised how to burn and dodge in the program! Doh!

[maggieo]

Originally Posted by celluloidprop

My only knock on SEP is that some of the film profiles are waaaaay too contrasty and you lose highlights and shadows right off the bat.

That's true, but with control points, it's dead easy to tweak the image to make it just right, or just move the global contrast slider down a bit.

It reminds me of my Alesis synthesizer. The presets, as they are from the factory, are kind of rubbish, but with a wee bit of a tweak, they can sound fantastic.

[ChrisN]

One interesting thing about SEP is that it will run as a stand-alone program (at least if you download the "for Lightroom" version). It lacks a dialog box for opening files, but you can simply make a desktop shortcut to the SEP executable, then drag-and drop your image file onto the shortcut to open the program.

[Phantomas]

Just to throw my two cents in there - I use Alienskin Exposure, which has a lot of B&W and color film presets, all further customisable. From top of my head you have a lot more film choices in Alienskin than in SFX. I've only recently installed SFX but haven't gotten used to it yet, mostly because I keep going back to Alienskin plug-in.