DxO’s Black Friday deals may have been and gone, but there’s a new Christmas deal where you can save 20% if you buy two products, so that’s any combination of DxO PhotoLab 9.2, Nik Collection 8.2, DxO PureRAW 5.5, FilmPack 8 or ViewPoint 5. You’ll also get between 3 and 12 months of priority support, depending on the size of your order.
Nik Collection
The Nik Collection is an important collection of plug-ins once published by Nik Software but then taken over by Google when it bought the company. Google then made the Nik Collection free but it has now been bought for future commercial development by DxO.
See related articles below and read the full DxO Nik Collection review
How to get an authentic looking vintage black and white look
So far in this series I’ve looked at black and white conversion tools, basic black and white tonal adjustments and the different ways you can use digital dodging and burning to bring black and white images to life. But if you want to make them look actually old, there’s a bit more to do. It’s not one single technique you need, but a whole bunch used together.
You’ve heard of graduated filters, but what about Nik Color Efex’s Bi-Colour Filters?
Bi-Colour Filters are just one of the Filters in Color Efex, part of the Nik Collection. What they do is apply one color to the top part of the picture and another to the bottom. This might sound like a bit of a cheap novelty, but it’s surprising just how effective this Bi-Colour Filter can be – and how often.
What is solarisation in photography and how do you recreate it digitally?
Solarisation is a darkroom printing technique made famous by photographer Man Ray, and it involves re-exposing a print to light half way through its development time. This results in a partial reversal of the tones in the image, so that you get a mixture of a positive and negative image.
How do you create a color infrared look? Here’s the Infrared Film Filter in Nik Color Efex
Infrared photography is fascinating because it uses light below the visible spectrum to produce ethereal black and white images and surreal false color with color films. Strictly speaking, it requires film sensitized specifically for infrared wavelengths or camera sensors with the infrared filters removed. But it is possible to achieve the same look digitally using regular color images.
How do you create a vintage look? Here’s how the Vintage filter in Nik Color Efex does it
One of the ways to create a vintage look for color photographs is to use the color grading tools in most photo editors to shift and fade the colors to look ‘old’. You can use guesswork (or experience) but in Nik Color Efex there’s a Film Efex: Vintage filter that can give you a good head start but still lets you make your own adjustments. Here’s how it works.
What is the Bleach Bypass effect and how does it work in Nik Color Efex?
The bleach bypass process is an old analog darkroom technique that produced characteristically punchy images with high contrast, high definition and reduced saturation. You can reproduce this effect digitally in many different programs. Here, I’m using the Bleach Bypass filter in Nik Color Efex, which is one of the easiest and best implementations of this particular look.
DxO Nik Collection 8 review
Verdict: 4.6 stars Nik Collection 8 has some interesting new features for existing users, but mostly for those who use Photoshop as their main ‘host’ application for launching the plug-ins. Silver Efex gets a major interface overhaul, however. This is very welcome, though its actual capabilities are little changed. Otherwise, apart from some workflow tweaks, it’s business as usual for this epic plug-in suite. Frankly, the Nik Collection is already such a wide-ranging, powerful and inspiring set of photo-enhancement tools that it’s always a bit of a surprise to find DxO has found anything to improve.
Live in color, dream in black and white: Nik Collection 8 is here
Nik Collection 8 is the annual update and refresh to the DxO Nik Collection, which consists of seven different plug-ins for Photoshop and Lightroom Classic, but which can also run as standalone applications and work as external editors for many other programs. Silver Efex gets a significant overhaul in this version, but other the big news is enhanced and updated integration with Adobe Photoshop and its masking tools.
I’m obsessed with the strange, chaotic and beautiful world of Nik Analog Efex
There comes a time to put the science to one side, to put the histograms and the eyedroppers back in their box, and to step sideways into a very strange and very different analog world. Analog Efex, part of the DxO Nik Collection, goes to places other effects tools don’t go. It’s richer, stranger and more random than just about anything else, and I love it.