If the original file is anything else, like a JPEG, you can edit a copy of the original with NO Lightroom edits applied, or edit the original itself. You have to select which Nik toolset to work with from the Lightroom menu. Some experimentation will help when you first download the Nik Collection.
For example, you would use Analog Efex Pro if you want a vintage film look, but would most likely use Color Efex Pro if you want to bring out the colors in your landscape photo.
This set of tools is perfect for mimicking film of all types, as well as vintage cameras and lenses. Besides applying filters that give a certain look, you can also add creative effects like scratches, light leaks, and multi-lens. One big time-saving tool is the ability to create a double exposure quickly and easily!
You select your second exposure from your computer and then adjust things such as placement, scale, and opacity. You can dictate what type of film to mimic, apply colour filters, vignetting , grain, and other basic adjustments. There is also a variety of black and white edits to use as a starting point, with different levels of exposure and contrast.
The best thing about this tool is that it makes the process user-friendly and then allows you to make adjustments on the new HDR image. This is because the HDR tool uses multiple photos, rather than one selected image to work on.
To access this collection, select your bracketed images to work with. The final photo will now be saved in your computer folders, but will NOT be automatically imported into Lightroom. If you want to do any further adjustments in Lightroom, you can simply import that photo and continue adjusting. The Dfine collection helps reduce noise and can be fully automated or manually controlled. Since then, the French software company has been steadily adding new features and some its own algorithms to the Nik Collection toolbox.
With the introduction of Perspective Efex in the previous release, the Nik Collection has a total of eight plug-ins. Silver Efex Pro 3 and Viveza 3 are both updated with modernized UI's and some new tools; suite-wide, 'U-Point' controls are more versatile more on this later and 'Meta presets' in the selective tool allow for multiple plug-ins to run sequentially with one click. Last year's iteration of the suite, Nik Collection 3, debuted a new Perspective Efex tool, improved the Selective Tool menu from which plug-ins can be launched, and added support for non-destructive multipage TIFF editing in Lightroom Classic.
This year, it's Silver Efex Pro and Viveza which have received most of the love, with major version increments and a brand-new user interface for both. DxO has also made it possible for Lightroom Classic users to copy and paste Nik processing settings between images without reopening a plug-in, or to quickly recall the last-used settings if you forgot to save them as a preset and want to tweak them further.
And a new Meta Presets function has been added to the Selective Tool which can combine the actions of multiple plug-ins in a single click. The change is significant for both apps, as neither had been visually tweaked in more than a decade, but it's most noticeable for Viveza, which until now couldn't even be resized to fit your screen.
Unfortunately, while these two plug-ins now look much better, some others still feel very dated, and there are inconsistencies even among the more recently-updated plug-ins. Dfine 2 and Sharpener Pro 3 still have a geriatric, non-resizable UI like that just replaced in Viveza 3, while Perspective Efex's various sliders, buttons and controls seem to have been lifted straight from DxO ViewPoint 3, and don't visually match any of the other plug-ins in the suite.
The Nik Collection's tools come in several vintages with radically differing interfaces. The Dfine 2 shown above and Sharpener Pro 3 plug-ins have the oldest UI, and can't even be resized to fit your screen. As a result the overall suite feels less coherent than it should be, and is something we'd like to see DxO address. DxO has also updated the popular U-Point technology underlying both Silver Efex Pro and Viveza, simultaneously making it more powerful and easily-targeted, and yet also less visually cluttered.
Previously, U-Point's array of control sliders appeared adjacent to the control point over your image when it was selected. Now, almost all of them are instead located in the right-hand adjustment panel, and only the control point area is adjusted directly on the image itself. You can either drag a slider or the outer periphery of the selection circle. You can now also tune the luminance and chrominance values for each control point, making it easier to adjust its coverage area appropriately, and likely reducing the number of control points you'll need to use in the first place.
Alternatively, you can zero out both of these new sliders, and get a graduated radial filter around a given control point, instead. If you find yourself needing to use a significant number of control points, you can now individually rename them so they're easier to keep tabs on. You can also still group them, just as in the past.
And helpfully, the control points and their locations can now be saved in your presets. For Viveza, there are ten new preset looks to choose from, and you can also save and share your own presets.
You can now access a new Copy and Apply Parameters dialog as an export preset, and from there you can copy and paste settings for each plug-in between images without needing to reopen the plug-in itself.
And for the Dfine, Viveza, Silver Efex and Sharpener plug-ins, you can also recall the last edits made after reopening the plug-in, making it simple to recover your settings if you want to further adjust them or save them as a preset. Speaking of presets, there's one more change of note in this regard, and it can be found in the floating Selective Tool panel from which the individual plug-ins can be launched.
As well as the eight existing plug-ins, it now includes an additional option: Meta-presets. As the name would suggest, these are presets which combine the results from multiple plug-ins in one click, making them extremely quick and easy to apply. The downside is that other than a brief text description which comes up if you click the question mark icon next to the Meta-preset name, you have no way to preview results of the preset.
Nor can you alter it, or make your own presets to match your workflow. In most other respects, Nik Collection 4 is similar to the previous version. And that's true of performance, too. Like its predecessor, Nik Collection 4's previews tend to lag behind your adjustments by a good second or so.
We'd like to see DxO work on that in a future release, as not only does greater performance mean less time spent editing, it also helps to make it easier and more intuitive to fine-tune the adjustments you're making. The Nik Collection has long been a fan favorite that can deliver impressive results, and not just in the hands of experienced photographers, but thanks to a wide selection of presets, less experienced ones as well.
It still suffers from a fairly inconsistent UI that varies widely from app to app, but the individual apps themselves are reasonably intuitive to use, if perhaps not quite as fast as we'd like. That said, it's encouraging to be getting regular yearly updates from DxO, and we're hopeful that further UI and performance enhancements are on the way. I bought Nik 4 a few days ago and after intensive use I am very pleased.
In PS you get acces to the plug ins either by the filter menu or with the Nik selective tool, a small window that can be moved as needed. Unlike the statement that some plug in have a window that cannot be adjusted to full screen, I had no problem on my Win 10 computer to adjust all windows to full screen, which is neede due to the size of numerous sliders. Much better on my 24" screen in full size. You would right click the below folder the software is in, choose "Get Info" and then grant the permissions.
Second post on this now and I am afraid things have got worst Despite all the positive spins around the latest version the performance on a brand new Power Book with stack loads of ram is underwhelming. The delay between adjustment and viewing the result is unworkable. The removal of the sliders from the U Point vane makes the ergonomics of hand and eye coordination very hard Raised support tickets progress at one email per day Request for links to download the previous versions are hampered by the fact that DXO has also deleted all records of previous purchases and activation codes I have been using Silver Efex ever since it appeared on the market.
The beauty of the control points was that the sliders were right were your eye would focus and it worked perfectly well as an old fashion dodge and burn tool in the darkroom. One could work their way around an image quick with adjustments very efficiently.
Now your eyes are in one place and the sliders somewhere else which on a large screen can even be outside you peripheral vision. It may be ok for some general adjustment but not if you are balancing tone and texture locally. The time delay is also far too slow and this is on a brand new Mac Book Pro with stacks of ram.
To make things worst if I try to launch my stand alone older version 3 it now takes me to the web site and say it will overwrite with the new. No matter what ever clever new algorithms have been introduced the UX of the product has been neglected.
The problems centre around the UI, with some sliders requiring double clicks to actually move them and some not working at all. I guess that I'm not the only one whose had these problems, but it would be good to know why it works on some computers and not others.
I ask as the hints may help DxO fix their issues. That, combined with it uninstalling Nik Collection 3 convinced me not to buy it. Update: still not working for me on June I give them credit that they have kept in touch on my case. I was sent a new message to remove my old Nik and then try the new link. Didn't work and now I have no Nik. If it was just me they wouldn't be working on patches. DxO does work but for me personally, Nik is more important.
Viveza and Silver Efex are still almost unusable in Capture One. V3 worked flawlessly. I'm evaluating the collection prior to purchase and am most interested in Silver Efex and Viveza but although I have the option to use non-destructive edits switched off I'm finding the processing lags in Viveza about 1. Is anyone else experiencing this? For info, I'm using a iMac 27", 3. Should be plenty of horsepower right?
There's no way I can work with a " lag time on the control points displaying my adjustments. As I'm new to the product I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong? I've been studying tutorials on YouTube and I don't seem to be doing anything out of the ordinary Sorry but I think you MAC is grossly under powered to perform the tasks in a timely manner. Good luck. Thanks for your reply although as I said I have no problems with any other software that I run including Photoshop and Lightroom Classic.
Everything runs smoothly and quickly. Is there a recommended specification for running Nik Collection 4?
Check activity monitor for swapping. Your Mac's 8 GB Ram might be a bottleneck. If so, add at least 16 GB of Ram for better performance. I checked it out using Activity Monitor and with a simple control point just adjusting brightness it's relatively quick and AM says 3GB of swap. Using another control point but modifying 5 settings takes a lot longer to display and uses 5. All of the other plug-ins in the collection seem to be working a lot better even with the latest Nik upgrade which I installed this evening.
I'm having a hard time justifying the price of the software when one of the main components which attracted me to it is performing so poorly and added to that, I'd be upgrading every year. Decisions, decisions Sorry for the late response. The straight stick d files open up at over MB.
If you stack images or do panoramas you need the speed. The files are only going to get larger. You cant do much heavy lifting with most lap tops. I might buy the new NIK just for the silver efex. I've written to DxO but to be honest I'm not expecting a reply anytime soon judging by the number of complaints on their forums and other pages I've been reading. There are a lot of people experiencing the same problem and the general consensus of opinion seems to be to stick with SFX Pro 2 which of course I don't have with many people rolling back their upgrades to Nik Collection 3 which, according to what I was reading, doesn't have the same problem.
If they come back to me I would consider buying Nik Collection 3 with SFX Pro 2 if they'll sell it to me and then wait for a later upgrade once the issue has been resolved. I wrote to DxO about the problem and they got back to me and then I sent them a bunch of information and diagnostic files. They said they would get back to me when the development team has had a look.
That was 2 weeks ago and I've not heard anything. My trial period will expire in 12 days so it's not looking good. I also asked them about buying Nik 3 with SFX 2 and got no reply at all. It's a real shame about this issue because SFX looks so promising and if it worked I would gladly pay for it even if I didn't use the rest of tools in the suite.
Unbelievable dump. Oh dear, I have hundreds with numbers as first characters and now the user preset panel is messed up randomly. For me this update is unusable. Damned, they are going to make this whole plugin suite unusable I fear!
I use SEP for a few hours now and I'm heavily disappointed: The interface is not better than before too much contrast outside the sliders but for control points their usage is improved with placing the sliders within the sliders panel. That's all for me what's improved. Reducing the amount of specific sliders like shadows adjustment takes 10 seconds and more to take effect!
You have to move the mouse to another part of the monitor. That is, it engages all my Ansel Adamsy instincts to fight for the best shadow and highlight detail and full dynamic range. I don't miss the smell of the chemicals or the grain of the Tri-x. I bought the latest version happily just for Silver Efex Pro. The presets are familiar and like test strips so I can get the basic look I'm after quickly. Then I can fine tune as needed. That would be game changing for real estate photographers.
I have emailed DXO about this in the past and they said they don't know if it will ever work that way. Nik 4 Viveza is disappointing because the new control point settings are available only from the side panel and it's hard to correctly grab the tiny and short sliders.
It doesn't sound like you've ever used the NIK collection - it's a lot more than filters. Twice a year DxO comes with a 'much better version' of it's software while in practice not much changes.
The biggest problem still exists and that is proper scaling in Photoshop menu items are way too small on high res screens, like for example in viveza.
I downloaded the free version a few years ago after google I think? Thanks a lot for the honest, balanced, and perceptive review of the latest Nik Collection, Mike.
Whenever I read your name in the byline, I know that I'm in competent hands. The unevenness across the different plugins remains an issue, but where it excels the Nik Collection is still hard to beat, and I'm glad that DxO keeps evolving it. I think it's better, at least more controls. But Topaz noise reduction is superior to both in my opinion. For Canon users, Prime Noise is like adding a stop and a half of low light capability. It's not marketing noise, but real world experience.
Canon shooters should run, not walk, to buy DxO Photolab. I was hesitant to buy the product from DXO the first time they took over the development of the product. I assumed they would provide ongoing patches and updates, but that didn't happen. You get 30 days and I guess that's it. And rather than updates the entire suite of products. They have elected to update one or two individual program, maybe patch some in the suite. And then change the suite revision number to suggest that the entire suite was upgraded.
Personally, just adding new built-in pre-defined filters is not something I view as a significant enhancement that would required a software rev change. I also noticed that they have stopped posting the individual components revision numbers on their web site.
If you decide against Nik and want to find an alternative, this article I published should help you. Find out how to improve your photography using the Nik Collection. Follow the advice in this deceptively simple book to significantly improve your landscape photography.
In fact, lesson 3 is so obvious that most photographers ignore it completely. First name Last name Email. Thank you for your support. Important Problems with the Free Nik Collection There are though some issues you need to be aware of. If you want to improve your Landscape Photography fast, follow this book. How to Get Your Book Enter your details using the form on the right.
Follow the instruction in my confirmation email. The email might also include discounts for my other courses and books so be sure to read it carefully. To get the most value from the Nik Collection, we recommend that you start with a day free trial. This way, you will become familiar with every plugin DxO has to offer. If you need more time to decide, you may download the legacy version and continue to use the scaled-back version with your photos.
You may discover this is good enough for your needs. If not, a lifetime license is available for purchase. In case you decide that Nik isn't right for you, there are plenty more Photoshop plugins for you to choose from.
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