People seemed to like the previous set of Silver Efex Pro re-enactment images, so with a bit more experience of the software, I thought I’d post another set of pictures with similar treatments.

This time they’re from a couple of events in October. The first ones come from a weekend when “my” regiment garrisoned the Tower of London. Even if for me the Tower is a building I used to pass every day on my walk to the office, it’s still quite a privilege to spend a couple of days photographing there, and for the re-enactors it’s about as sexy a gig as you can get. What made it especially poignant for these guys was that the regiment, the Tower Hamlets Trayned Bandes, is closely modelled on its 17th century predecessor which was raised in that part of London and guarded the Tower during the war. And it’s not every day you get to take weapons and gunpowder into a UNESCO World Heritage Site where the Queen keeps her bling, is it?

The pictures were corrected in Lightroom 3 but finished in Silver Efex Pro 2. They were not sent directly to SFX though. While that would be the most obvious route, it would mean that SFX would return to Lightroom a flattened TIF file with all the toning, borders and local adjustments baked in. Instead I prefer to initially send pictures to Photoshop CS5 as smart objects, and then invoke SFX. This means SFX’s adjustments are applied as smart filters, so they remain editable and I can always go back to these files and fine tune the treatment. And this fine tuning is something I often do. The other difference from before is that I no longer seem to be using the Selective Colour slider in SFX to restore the colour but instead do it in Photoshop with a copy of the image layer with its Blending Mode set to Color. It’s a close choice, but I prefer the accuracy I can get by creating a mask with tools like Select > Selective Color, Quick Selection Magic Wand, or even just the Brush, Quick Mask and blur to hide my handiwork. You can see with this example how detailed some of the masks can become.

The other event was one Sunday at Knebworth House, an hour or so’s drive away, and was during the recording of an episode of a major ITV police drama series. We’ve been asked not to mention the programme name or the storyline, but a few hundred re-enactors had been hired as eye-candy and I was able to hang around and take pictures. Fascinating though it was to watch the filming (how many people does it take?), what I enjoyed most was the smoke they used to keep a consistent look throughout a long day and to provide atmosphere. In an ideal world, shouldn’t every photographer have 150 metres of smoke-pumping tubing?

*You’re talking roughly £160 for the Nik Silver Efex Pro software, and it does “only” do b&w. But it is a very well-designed program, powerful and easy to use. While I was also using Photoshop CS5 here, you can use it purely with Lightroom or just Photoshop Elements.

I’ve been experimenting a little with Silver Efex Pro 2 recently (in connection with the second edition of my Advanced Black and White book) and thought I’d post a series of re-enactment images, mostly taken over the last few months, that I took through SFX2 after initially processing them in Lightroom.

As you see, I added various tones and there’s a lot of use of control points, particularly with the selective colour option which I found very easy to limit to just faces. I also added fancy borders and was struck by how helpful the Vary Border button proved to be. I usually mistrust auto or lucky dip buttons, but here you do choose the basic border style but can then add a little bit of variation into the effect.

On the other hand, the problem with Silver Efex Pro 2 mangling keywords remains (UPDATE October 2011′s update v2.002 resolves this problem). And note, it’s not Lightroom’s fault (“I don’t agree with Nik” as we Brits might say) since it can be reproduced without any Adobe software on the computer. That this remained unfixed was very annoying, but otherwise Silver Efex Pro is clearly growing on me.

My latest article on re-enactment photography is in Digital SLR User magazine Sept 2010, out now.

6 pages of hot tips on shooting beards and gunpowder….

And if that isn’t enough, last week the Sealed Knot were on the BBC’s Celebrity Masterchef programme!

This shot is from last weekend’s re-enactment. It was on the site of the battle of Cheriton – in fact it was also on its anniversary – and almost everything was shot at IS0800, even in full daylight. Underfoot it was more like the Somme or Ypres so was I glad I went in my full Lake District waterproofs and boots? Yes, that weekend we changed to British Summer Time.

Added another SSP for Lightroom-generated gallery of photos of Swiss Medieval re-enactors. Some of the shots were outdoors but those which worked best were taken in Chillon castle’s great hall at lunchtime. The wonderful directional light, low December sun bouncing in off the lake, had immediately had me thinking of the Dutch painters of the 17th century, but I was also very aware of how scenes of ordinary people in their daily lives – not typical subject material for 15th century painters.

Now I’ve just got to figure out how 21st century drop down menus can co-exist with 20th century Flash. The problem affects you if your existing site uses DHTML menus, such as Dreamweaver CS3′s Spry menus used here. The menus appear to display behind the SSP movie in Windows browsers, and apparently it’s all because of a well-known problem of Flash and DHTML. I’ve logged the issue with SSP’s developer and think I may have found a bug. The real solution may include going back to work on my Flash site, of course.

As it may be the last post before I vanish to the Lake District for a few days, I’ll add a Happy Christmas to anyone reading this blog.