I downloaded the 15 day free trial of the lightroom plugin for Silver Efex Pro and decided to give it a go. It

is the most powerful tool for creating professional quality black and white images from your photographs.

The tool is pretty self explanatory but there is also a comprehensive user guide available.

I picked a photo from my recent weekend in Margate which I thought would look good in black and white, and tried out some of the different settings.

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The original: taken on a d80 at 9am in RAW format, edited in Lightroom using Auto Tone.

There are a couple of main ways to do the editing, firstly from the pre-defined styles, which covers things like undexexposing, overexposing, pull process, push process, different filters, and even holga and pinhole. There is a neutral image always available to reset any settings.

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Processed in Silver Efex Pro using the Pinhole style - makes it look like a moonlight shot.

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Processed in Silver Efex Pro using the Soft Skin style.

Some of the more interesting settings are using the stylistic qualities of 18 different black and white films.

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Processed in Silver Efex Pro using the film emulator for Kodak ISO 32 Panatomic X.

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Processed in Silver Efex Pro using the film emulator for Ilford Delta 100 Pro.

This tool is definitely worth a download and play with and it gives a lot of predefined options for making some really impressive black and white images but I'm not sure I can justify the $199.95 price tag for a tool that'll be used now and again.