Nik Software

Today I had the pleasure of attending a training session with one of Nik Software's Pro trainers. This was a big buzz, I knew of the software, in fact Nikon Capture NX2 is made by the same company. Now these guys know what they are doing when it comes to designing class leading Aperture, Lightroom & Photoshop plugins and through the training today I got to see exactly how these plugins work to speed up the editing process of images.

To start with they have 5 different plugins, Dfine, Viveza, Color Efex Pro, Silver Efex Pro and Sharpener Pro. So what do they all do.

Well simply Dfine is noise reduction software. It analyzes a image in continuos tones and applies noise reduction to that area, it try's to avoid areas of detail. It works extremely well and I have tried it on a few high ISO images with stunning results.

Viveza is their best selling piece of software, if you use Nikon Capture NX you would be familiar with Viveza. With this software you can use what

Nik call "U-Point" technology. This allows you to adjust just certain areas in the image by dropping control points on them. New in version 2 is a structure slider.

Color Efex Pro is a bunch of filters, and the image here has a couple of these applied to it. Midnight, Darken/Lighten Centre, Dynamic Skin Softener, Glamor Glow & Bleach Bypass, again using control points you can use the filters in selections on the image instead of the whole image. You could do this in Photoshop by itself but I would think a good 1/2hr would be used. With Nik Software these filters took less that 5 minutes and although a little rough gives a good idea of why these are such a time saver.

This second image used Silver Efex Pro, this plugin is for converting to B&W. It will emulate film grain and is the best B&W converter period.

It has a split tone added to the image in a Sepia tone.

The last one is Sharpener Pro, this is the best output sharpener I have ever used, selective sharpening is dead easy and it even helps for loss of depth of field.

All up the 5 plugins are a photographers dream, making some things that would take quite a while in Photoshop, just a couple of clicks with Nik Software