Nik Silver Efex, that is. I spent near ZERO effort taking a photo today. Hey, I can have a day off once in a while, huh? It was a lawn care day in between rain showers so I was dragging a little after things were done. My wife and I went out to grab a bite to eat and I stopped at a small garden in town to see if I could grab a shot. I was really lazy, the light was fairly low, but I grabbed a few shots around the garden and left. I actually thought they wouldn’t turn out very good because I was shooting with low shutter speeds and not taking time to compose well or even hold the camera somewhat steady. I ended up liking the composition of this sundial shot the best but the original color shot seemed to lack something. So I tried a black and white conversion with Nik Silver Efex and it was OK but lacked something also. Going back to Nik I thought I would try the infrared preset, which I don’t use very often. It looked pretty cool on its own but, being my usual self, I thought I would bring some of the color back in. I reduced the Nik opacity a little then boosted the saturation of the greens, for the plants, and red, for the bricks, on the color layer. I ended up kind of liking the image. Whew! Pentax K20D, DA 17-70
Timepiece
© David Guidas
What I Pic 
The colors are definitely a very soft pastel, that is an interesting technique to accomplish this. I have been doing some reading on B&W conversions again, plus today was some new stuff about coloring the tones after converting to B&W. It’s pretty interesting and I plan on giving it a shot this week. I should be finishing my last of a long series of Photoshop books tomorrow and then I begin my books on LR3. I have experimented a couple of times with Nik but haven’t really spent any time with it yet. The default settings worked pretty well, and I didn’t even touch the right hand side bar in Nik so I know I’m missing a lot.
Well, sometimes zero effort really pays off!
I like the overall desat effect, and the I/R preset looks good too!
Yeah, gotta love Nik!