New Nik Collection 8 Review

We’re well into new software season now and here is the newest of the new – my Nik Collection 8 Review. I reviewed Nik Collection 7 last year and there is a separate review of Silver Efex too.

Nik Collection 8 Review

Nik Collection for those who don’t know is a remarkable set of plugins that has benefitted in the last couple of years from being comprehensively re-engineered by parent company DxO.

The plugins come in two flavours, the traditional plugin and play with filters and presets (The presets are collections of filters) and for the more technically minded, Sharpening (x2), HDR and Noise Reduction.

The most well known plugins in the collection are Silver Efex and probably Viveza but these two are augmented by Color Efex and Analog Efex.

The plugins can be used with or boast some level of integration with DxO PhotoLab, Affinity Photo and Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. They also work as standalone applications, reading tiff files as input and producing a tiff file or jpeg as output. They do not work with RAW files or DNG as input. This is not a major issue as any of the applications boasting integration with Nik will perform a conversion from RAW to Tiff on exporting to Nik.

So what does the new update bring?

What’s New?

DxO PhotoLab Integration

If you’re a DxO user then this is a maintenance upgrade. New icons and a refitting of the workbench so that workflow is clearer, select filter or preset on the left, adjust it on the right.

Sending a file back to DxO PhotoLab produces a tiff file in your PhotoLab library..

Affinity Photo Integration

If you’re an Affinity user, then your integration is bare bones – you can export a pixel layer to Nik, but sending the file back simply overwrites the layer you were working on with no means of adjusting the edit a second time in Nik. I have to say this is disappointing, if understandable. Creating deeper integration with Affinity would be a different work stream to the one creating integration with Photoshop. Adobe of course have a much larger user base.

Adobe Photoshop Integration

If you’re an Adobe user, then you’ll be very happy, it looks as though the bulk of the development budget has been spent on creating deeper synergy with Adobe Photoshop. My first reaction to this is very positive – Photoshop boasts AI enhanced selections and masks, the ability to export a mask into the Nik Collection opens many doors.

As a Photoshop user, with the new Nik integration, your workflow will be faster, easier to learn and best all, the flow is two way. You can save your work as a new layer, as a hidden layer, as a new layer with mask or as a smart object. You can even export a Control Point from Nik Collection into Photoshop where it appears as a new channel that can be applied as a mask not a new layer.

Color Masks

There is a new local adjustment in the form of a Color Mask, operating in a similar way to a luminosity mask this new feature allows us to select a color range and then adjust highlights, midtowns, shadows and blacks. This new mask is present in all the plugins.

Silver Efex Improvements

The only plugin to benefit from any major innovation is Silver Efex. The introduction of a Color Preview to help users decide which color to adjust in the Color Sensitivity panel is genuinely useful. The concept of color sensitivity is a feature of black and white film stock and the use of coloured filters to enhance or subdue areas of the picture. It’s obvious for example that a blue filter will affect the sky, but not so much that the sensitivity slider affects any colour containing blue as a significant part of its RGB makeup.

Other than that the major improvement in Silver Efex is that the workbench has been decluttered so you start with the loupe and the histogram, levels and curves. You the choose a filter or preset from the left and the corresponding controls appear on the right in the workbench.

Video

More About Photoshop

At first glance, the focus on Photoshop seems a little strange, why not Lightroom?

The answer is obvious once you think about the implications. Adobe Lightroom is the biggest rival to DxO PhotoLab and many photographers don’t use Photoshop at all since Lightroom introduced its own version of masks. The problem is twofold. Firstly why make your biggest competitor even better? Secondly, the implementation of masks in Lightroom is different to that in Photoshop (Why? I have no idea) and is a work in progress.

The effect of integrating Nik Collection masks with Photoshop effectively brings the ease of working with Lightroom masks to Photoshop and adds a lot more variety accessible in a few clicks of the mouse. As any Photoshop user will attest, this will be seen as a bonus by the apes of user that depend on Photoshop – Graphic Designers as well as some Photographers.

The execution of the integration is flawless as far as I have been able to discover in the week that I’ve had to play with it. It does exactly what you need it to, fast and accurately. The combination also opens up interesting new wrinkles creatively – for example if I create a mask in Colr Efex and export it back to photoshop as a layer with mask, then I can paint in to the layer in photoshop, selectively adjusting the areas I want to work on and by adjusting the opacity, moderate the effect of the mask after the initial creation.

Conclusion

As a long time Photoshop user I’m really impressed with this new release, it is likely to change my workflow in many cases and I’m sure I’m not alone in giving this the thumbs up.

How it will be received by the DxO community is a moot point. There is a certain amount of antipathy directed at Adobe by photographers who are sick of paying out month after month with nothing in return (Adobe products stop working if you stop paying). For these photographers DxO PhotoLab and Affinity Photo have provided a safe haven where they don’t feel they are being held to ransom.

In the end this was a business decision and I have no doubt that it will bring fresh license income to DxO, safeguarding jobs and paying for more improvements in the rest of the portfolio. The next twelve months will be interesting at the very least!