The magic of Control Points… how can I explain it other than showing you how using Control Points have given me so much selective editing capabilities. It still amazes me every time I use them to either add or remove an effect from my image.

Let me demonstrate with this image of a Zebra that I recently took at the Oakland Zoo. When I was reviewing the images that I took that day, I knew that I wanted to convert this color image into black and white to emphasize the stripes on this Zebra. To do that, I went to my go-to program, Silver Efex Pro 2, because it never fails to produce stunning black and white results.

© Laurie A. Rubin

I tend to quickly go through the Presets that are available on the left panel to get some ideas as to how I want my image to look. Since I can click on a Preset and see immediate results, this speeds up my workflow process so that I am not spending a lot of time trying to come up with inspirational ideas.

In this case, I selected the Preset, Film Noir 2, because I liked the high contrast in the stripes of the Zebra, and the Border type. I decided to lighten up the background. First, I added Control Points to some of the black areas on the Zebra that I wanted to keep nice and dark. These are constricting Control Points. In other words, by placing a Control Point on the area that you do not want to have affected, or changed, you can simply place a Control Point on the area without making any adjustments to the actual Control Point itself.

Example of a Control Point added to retain the dark stripe on the Zebra

© Laurie A. Rubin