Silver Efex Pro

I just bought a Nik upgrade and monkeyed around with Silver Efex Pro a bit. It's quite intuitive and a lot of fun. I have a lot to learn about BW, but this image of the Daniel gas station (WY) seemed like a good candidate. By the way, I think the pump says .37.

Comments appreciated.

I've not gotten into any of those Nik filters, especially with no job, but I really like this composition. The only thing that I wonder about is how it would look if the clouds had more contrast.

I'm with you Dave. I just got the Nik pkg and love SEP. The way things are going you'll need to move the decimal over one number.

Ooh, I love these old gas stations. And I like the conversion, the clouds could use a bit of a pop ... or maybe go the other way and vignette the edges to bring more focus to the building and the pump. This way you also take attention away from the power lines.

Silver Efex seems to be the one that gets all the press and for good reason, however I love the Color Efex Pro too. There's a couple of different options when choosing this software, I downloaded the full version, didn't use much of it but discovered the Grad ND filter. Its killer. From there I just picked out the least expensive package that had the Grad ND.

I agree that this image was achin' to be done in b&w, and this one looks great!
Part of me thinks that the clouds could use a contrast boost, but this image is all about the building, so it's not really necessary. Using a red filter to darken the skies would accentuate the building, though.
Hey, was the price of gas still visible on that old pump?

I really like this, Dave; perfect representation for this kind of subject. I agree with John that the sky would benefit from some added contrast, but that's the thing I'd consider tweaking.

I think this is a great image for black and white. I agree with the suggestion of darkening the corners. The upper left corner is already quite dark. By bringing the other corners down it would pull the focus into the building more and maybe that left side wouldn't feel as heavy.

I just downloaded Silver Efex Pro and HDR Efex Pro to see how they do with some ideas I have in mind. If I like them I'll probably get the whole suite. They seem to be great tools.

This is a great presentation of a neat subject. Cool shot.

.37 cents would put it about 1972 wouldn't it?
I wish I could afford that plug in as some of the best conversions I have seen were done with Silver Efex. I think this works really well with your shot and some of the suggestions would be worth trying. I like it!

Great shot, Dave! The sepia looks nice. I would drop the overall brightness of the image a bit and up the contrast slightly. Perhaps a bit of a vignette would add to the mood? Just a suggestion.

Nice. I like Americana. Smithsonian runs a contest with that as one of its themes. If this were mine I wpuld enter it there.

Wonderful shot, Dave. I love Nik stuff and have most of their plugins. I agree with some of the posters here that maybe the clouds can be pumped (bad pun) a bit. You can take the U-Point control and try it just over the clouds and see how it turns out. Also, today I heard 2 podcasts on the SEP2 which ships in February. It is really going to be great with amazing new algorithms (Greek to me, but it will be fun to use).

Dave I really like old buildings and this is a dandy! I didn't even notice the clouds/sky until I read the posts. Very nice subject. I know Morris guessed 1972 for gas price. I was driving 28 cents in 72 :)

Kinda like it as is, although I'm with Michael on the upper left/left side. Kinda heavy over there. I like the suggestions to darken the blue sky to even this out.

But the lower contrast clouds lets the higher contrast foreground stand out that much more.

I stared at this for awhile, then when I got ready to post I saw Jesse's comment, so I'll just say "ditto what Jesse said". I really do like this overall.

Thanks for the helpful suggestions, everyone!