Black and white conversion plug-in

[PeterAit]

I am trying the demos of both these programs and cannot convince myself which is better. I'd appreciate input from anyone who has an opinion to help me decide.

Thanks

[nemophoto]

This was discussed earlier. FWIW, I actually own both and use both. It partially breaks down into: 1) do you want the process mostly preset and determined for you (Exposure), or 2) do you want more customization over the conversion and more tweaking (Silver Efex)? To throw another into the mix, I also use the old standby (no longer available), Convert to B&W Pro.

Exposure has more film types preset, and for your money, you get a really super set of color films as well. (I use the Exposure-color) on almost every thing I do. Silver Efex has the fantastic ability to apply local contrast, corrections, etc. to particular sections of an image as well overall. I converted a shot I took in Tahiti about five years ago. I had tried several stabs at it over the years, and never really liked what I got. Finally, with Silver Efex, I was able to create the B&W I saw in my mind.

They are both great products, and in a way, complimentary, rather than competing.

Nemo

[JeffKohn]

Silver Efex is very powerful, and can produce some great B/W conversion. But it's buggy as hell, at least when running in the 32-bit version of Photoshop CS4 under a 64-bit OS. I don't know if it's running out of memory, or what, but I found that about every 3rd or 4th time I run the plugin it will either fail to do the conversion or completely lock up Photoshop. The larger the file I'm working on, the more likely it is to happen, it also seems the longer Photoshop has been running and doing other things is also a factor. This leads me to believe Silver Efex is trying to allocate huge contiguous chunks of memory, and blows up when it is unable to do so. IMHO there's no excuse for not having 64-bit versions of plugins by this point, especially for a larger company like Nik that should have more development resources.

[nemophoto]

I have to second the opinion that Silver Efex is buggy. Actually, as a Nik Software user of the last 10-years, I have found that this latest series of plug-ins are extremely buggy. (I also have Sharpener, Viveza and Dfine.) I still have my 10-year old Nik Sharpener on my computer (along with versions 2 and 3), because it's faster and easy and never crashes. It seems as all these companies make their software with ever greater bells and whistles, only to make them slower and buggier.