A couple of days ago Google/Nik announced that you can download all of their very good software for free. SilverEfexPro has long been recognized as an excellent and easy to use plug-in for black & white conversions.





The shot above is a "one-click" conversion of a photo I took in Namibia a few years ago. I have only tried it with Lightroom CC, but it gives excellent results. Anybody who post-processes should have it. And it's free.

Here's a link:


https://www.google.com/nikcollection/


Here's the same shot, but I selected a different "one-click" preset.





It's pretty simple to achieve some dramatic results. Just for reference, this is the color version I used for conversion.

A couple more landscape examples:






You can also play around with old film camera effects.









For free software you can't really find any faults.

Great software. I have been using the whole package for several years, but as PhotoShop CS5 and CS6 plugins. Highly recommended for using with LightRoom, PS Elements, and other PhotoShop applications:

a. Analog Efex Pro (to transform photos so they look like very old images and such)
b. Color Efex Pro (numerous effects to enhance an image)
c. Silver Efex Pro (the one you used above)
d. Vivesa (can be used to illuminate and enhance the whole image, or just a small area of the image)
e. HDR Efex Pro
f. Sharpener Pro (allows to sharpen the whole image, or just any portion of the image)
g. Dfine (digital noise remover)

The whole package:
https://www.google.com/nikcollection/