Some new toys!

Semi Leo on a gorgeous acoustic bass guitar

Some of you may be aware that I'm very fond of Nik Software's Silver Efex Pro.  I find this to be a wonderful tool for the processing of digital monochrome images.  Recently, Nik Software was obtained by Google and a pretty good deal for the acquisition of all the Nik Software was announced.  More than slightly tempted I have to admit to now being the possessor of most of Nik's software.

When shooting the bands one big problem I face is noise in the images.  Often the light levels are low and I have to use high ISOs.  At other times the choice of light colour is great for the atmosphere but really doesn't help when I'm taking photos.  Red is the bane of my life!!  Nik Software have a suite of product that seemed to offer some opportunities to address the noise and sharpening issues as well as perhaps let me be a little more creative in the way the images are interpreted ... and in colour too!

Bear in mind that I'm no expert here and, to be honest, will need to watch the on-line videos multiple times to get better appreciate just what can be done with these new tools.  So far, however, they seem to provide some wonderful options and I'm delighted with my new toys!

So, with the new toys installed on my machine I headed off to see Aqstik Soul in Botany.  Light wasn't bright and was pretty "flat".  No real contrast on the face or instruments.  This was ideal really for the tests I wanted to conduct at home.  Truth be told, I'm still working on the images to see how the Nik tools work, but thought I'd share one shot from last night.  The first image in this post is an unprocessed underexposed pretty bland image with no real atmosphere or emotion.  The second image in the post is after a few tweaks in Nik's software suite.

By no means a perfect image, but there is something about it that intrigues me.

There's much more "texture" in the shirt and Semi's face has more depth and structure to it.

Perhaps let me know what you think - it'd be good to hear what other folks have to say.  Right now I need to get back to my experiments :-)