Doing a lot of black and white, I thought I’d give Nik’s Silver Efex Pro Aperture plug-in a quick trial. I’ll be mischievous and say that like other so-called Aperture plug-ins, it’s better described as a strap-on – it’s an external editor that’s launched from Aperture and which sends it a rendered tiff file. But the “integration” is smooth enough – you select some images in Aperture, choose the menu command Images>Edit With, and they’re opened in the Silver Efex Pro’s modal window.

Presets are down the left, a set of adjustment panels are down the right, and you can set up a Before/After comparison – all rather Lightroom-style. Adjustments mimic the effect of coloured lens filters, the colour sensitivity of well-known b&w film stocks, and control the level of grain. You also have dodging and burning via Nik’s U-point, and various toning or split-toning effects. Overall, Silver Efex worked well enough, and I particularly liked how you can vary not just the grain size but also its softness (I always liked high acutance developers like Rodinal for the gritty look).

I do have doubts about how some credulous users are bound to imitate the supposed typical T-Max or HP5 tonality rather than focussing on making the image look its best – what I call presetitis in Lightroomspeak. As far as I can see, while there’s a split Before/After view, there’s no equivalent of how Lightroom lets you send the image’s current state over into the Before area at any point – something I find really handy for gauging progress. I’m also not too keen on the idea that your adjustments don’t apply to all the selected images and that you’d either have to repeat your adjustments on each picture, or save them as a preset and then go through applying the preset to each image in turn.

It’s also $200…. I’m not sure if that’s for a cross-platform licence or one that includes the Photoshop plug-in too. I suspect not. $200?

Also see comments at AUPN and Inside Aperture.

Update:
Trial over, my view’s not changed. I do a lot of black and white and felt it was very nicely designed, has a good and pretty convincing set of features, but is significantly overpriced.

If you know how to do b&w in Photoshop CS3, I don’t think Silver Efex Pro adds much unless you routinely add exactly the same filters AND clarity / wide area sharpening AND grain AND can’t figure out actions, layers etc. I don’t think the end results are better in an absolute sense – just nice having a bunch of b&w-oriented controls bundled into one place.

If you don’t know how to do such things in Photoshop, then it is a shrink wrapped solution that will have you going round proclaiming “you can’t do that in Photoshop, you need a dedicated solution”….

I felt the grain was particularly attractive, though with all these b&w apps I always wonder about how accurate the film recipes actually are – is that HP5 in ID11 or Perceptol or how about Rodinal? Maybe these recipes are spot on, and maybe there is some creative sense to mimicking film. I’m just not  a believer.

On balance, I just didn’t think it was good enough value for my money, but it is good.