Google buys NIK: all plug-ins for $149

[greenmorpher]

Worth a look? How do they play with PL?

Best regards
Geoff

Geoffrey Heard
General Manager
Bushtrack Enterprises Ltd
http://www.bushtrackpng.com

[Pjotr]

ColorEfex4 and SilverEfex2 arent working correct for me with PL17.53 at 64 and 32bit at Win7 64bit. They are both crashing PL. Its a known problem here. The rest works properly for me. Just some false colors at Viveza2 at the preview window.

Regards Peter

[OldRadioGuy]

ColorEfex4 and SilverEfex2 arent working correct for me with PL17.53 at 64 and 32bit at Win7 64bit. They are both crashing PL. Its a known problem here. The rest works properly for me. Just some false colors at Viveza2 at the preview window.

Regards Peter

I get the same results with my tests, Peter.

Hopefully, the Hubers can take a look and make the adjustments necessary for PL and these two excellent plugins to be compatible.

In Photoshop Elements ColorEFex4 and SilverEfex2 produce a series of layers, making the adjustment in parts, and then finish with a single layer containing the plugin correction above the original layer. In Lightroom, the plugin is called as an external editor, making the correction to a TIF copy.

Google, the new owner of NIK, is certainly applying a much better -- and cheaper -- pricing structure to these plugins. Let's hope we can get the two best known of the group -- ColorEfex and SilverEfex -- working in PhotoLine.

Bob

[greenmorpher]

Let's hope that we can get them working properly, and that Google continues to develop them. I;m mystified as to why Google would buy NIK.

Cheers, geoff

[OldRadioGuy]

Let's hope that we can get them working properly, and that Google continues to develop them. I;m mystified as to why Google would buy NIK.

Cheers, geoff

Geoff, initial reports indicated Google purchased NIK for another technology that NIK owned, not the plugins. I don't recall the name of that application, however.

Bob

[bkh]

Geoff, initial reports indicated Google purchased NIK for another technology that NIK owned, not the plugins. I don't recall the name of that application, however.

Snapseed, a mobile photo editor. People are verry worried about the future of NIK plugins since they don't fit into Google's product line. We might be seeing a final clearance sale here.

Cheers, Burkhard.

[SCX]

A lot of users of the "other" program consider the NIK-plugins as nearly a must-have, which is a little bit strange for me, after they have spend 1000 Euro for the "other" program already. I myself consider these plugins a little bit overrated. I bought color-efex 2 for 20 Euro a few years ago and now it is not even installed anymore. A very popular filter is tonal contrast, which is quite hard to imitate. Fortunately, I found a tutorial for the "other" program and what a suprise, it works with PhotoLine as well. It doesn't work as good as the plugin I have to admit, but it is good enough for me. But I own this special filter as well, because it came with a book of Vincent Versace.

SilverEfex is nice, but I tried to do the same with PhotoLine and it took me only a few minutes to copy the result (but I like "normal" looking b/w-fotos, it is certainly more difficult with some styles). Only the previews a very helpful, but I have created an action for that and now I hardly use SilverEfex1 anymore (it came free with a fotomagazin).

I tested Dfine and it is a very good denoising-software, but not the best in my opinion, and now I don't need it anymore, because the raw-konverter recently are getting very good at these parts.

Very nice are the control-points. It is a very simple and effective way to alter images (viveza) or creating selections.

I like doing most of the stuff in PhotoLine and learning things and how they work. I am not to successful in these parts, but I try

In the current situation I wouldn't recommend the plugins. The versions are not all compatible with PhotoLine because NIK tried to implement them better and better in the "other" program and no one knows, if there will be updates/upgrades in the future because of Google. And no one knows, if they will work at all on future Windows/Mac-versions.

If you want to use them, the Lightroom-versions are standalone-programs. Just create a TIF in PhotoLine and drag it to the plugin-exe and you can use it. Then save it, load it in PhotoLine again and continue the work.

[greenmorpher]

I recently saw a Silver fx image on DPReview's m43 forum. For the subject -- it looked like a very nice result indeed.

I remember -- years and years ago -- reading a description by Ansel Adams or someone of similar ilk describing how they took a particular photograph. Exposure was such-and-such, to match with the b&w film being processed in so-and-so way with such-and-such developer for a non-standard time to obtain a certain dhnamic range on film, then printing would be on such-and-such paper, and so on. All culminating in selenium toning which he chose over silver toning for this reason and that!

Whoa! The whole process planned before he snapped the shutter. And, of course, he took only the one 4x5 exposure. Or was it 8x10?

In fact, I recalled that the other day when reading a thread on exposure (or brightness) on the DPR m43 forum. It’s worth a look for photographers, I think.

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/51163136

Which arose from this thread:

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/51136862

Cheers, geoff

[SCX]

Don't get me wrong, Silfer Efex is a good plugin. It is just not to hard to get decent results without it. It is faster of course, because it is specialized, so if you make a lot of b/w-images, it could be helpful. Version 1 works nearly perfectly with PhotoLine (avoid transparency on layers with NIK-plugins), version 2 doesn't work as far as I know. So you have to use the Lightroom version, which is a standalone-version as I have already mentioned.


This exposure-stuff is great in my opinion. I do this for some time now (I read this actually in a book) and it works very well. I did a series of testimages first to learn how far I can go with my camera. One problem with cheap cameras like my own is, they show only the complete histogram. So it is possible, that the histogram looks ok, but one channel nevertheless is blown out.

[greenmorpher]

I have the second from the bottom Olympus m43 -- the E-PL3 (now replaced by the E-PL5). It offers four histograms simultaneously if you want them, or the single histogram, or just information, or nothing. The E-PL5 has a new 16 MPX sensor which offers much improved dynamic range over the 12 MPX sensor of the E-PL3, but I can't upgrade at present so I'm doing what I can to improve the results I get by paying a lot more attention to exposure and expanding my knowledge of PP.

The exposure part I can handle -- the PP is more difficult!

Cheers, geoff

[SCX]

They are very nice for fast and easy effects, if you have some problems with postprocessing techniques. You can get them even free at the moment, if you already own one of the plugins. Unfortunately, the most interesting plugins (SilverEfex2 + ColorEfex4) won't work with PhotoLine, therefore you have to create a TIF in between. The workflow would be all the basic work with PhotoLine, create a TIF or JPG, open it in one of the plugins, than add an effect and save the image.

Some effects would be really complicated to do in PhotoLine, some are very easy. For example, there is an effect Bi-Color-Filters in ColorEfex4, which I like quite a lot sometimes. In PhotoLine I just add a vektorlayer, put it in the overlay-mode (I hope this is the correct term) and use a gradient with it. This would take no longer than start the plugin (which is really hungry for resources, my processor fan starts making noise as soon as the plugin has started), especially, if you made an action for it, and I can stay in the non-destructive PhotoLine workflow.

Other stuff like image-borders could be done with PhotoLine as well, but is more comfortable in ColorEfex. Again, a non-destructive workflow in one single program like PhotoLine is nice too.