It’s been demonstrated time and time again that the BW in Silver Efex is in another category from anything PhotoLab can do in BW. This is just a nonsense post.
PS. I’d prefer that PhotoLab could do BW easily and well, as it’s a pain to have to use another app. It’s an even bigger pain to create mediocre BW photos in PhotoLab. PhotoLab will not give you this kind of wide grey tone with good contrast like Silver Efex.
I know. I’ve tried. These Silver Efex processed images look like BW photos. BW from PhotoLab looks like colour images converted to BW. And in Silver Efex reaching this level of BW was quick and enjoyable. In PhotoLab it’s torture.
Enough negative: tip for great BW images in Silver Efex. Do not make your colour images high contrast. Make your colour images very even contrast. Add the contrast and definition in Silver Efex. If you send high contrast images (my normal colour processing, see below), then there’s no way to create subtle grey tones.
The processing in PhotoLab for finished colour images and for high quality Silver Efex TIFF negatives is completely different. The high contrast colour image above looks great in colour but would be mostly extremely dark and extremely light shades in Silver Efex.
And yes, it’s terrible that installing and reinstalling Nik is so damn difficult. I’m still on Nik 3 as I can’t bring myself to go through the hell of installing later versions and trying to backgrade if I don’t like them. Nik 3 still works great on an M1 Mac, and I prefer the the Nik 3 interface with control points with the controls compact and on top of the images and not in the sidebar.