You can customize the filters within the variations that the filter set offers, changes location, size and intensity but there's no way to add your own lens flares or dust and scratches. I'm super impressed with the variety of filters here and all of the hard work that must have gone into making it work well. Third: Part of the Nik Collection is a set of filters to make digital photos look more like their analogue counterparts.
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Again, ultimately not a big deal as you can just delete your control points within the second filter and move forward without too much pain. But if you're making a composite image and want to use the same Nik Tools filter on a second or third smart object, when you run the filter on the next smart object you'll notice it has the same control points as the first filter. Before running the Nik Tools filter, create a smart object out of the layer you want to edit and the Nik Tools becomes re-editable, right? Right. Or you can solve 1 & 2 easily with one extra step before running the filter. Photoshop built in the work-around years back. That in itself is not such a big deal, right? As for problem 1, just hide all your other layers, then run the Nik Tools filter you want. There are two problems with this is 1. the filter applies to everything that's visible, not just the layer you're working on, and 2. you're stuck with the adjustments you just made, or stuck deleting it and rerunning the filter and making different adjustments. You can then create a mask of that layer and work as normal. Nik Tools default way of working the filter is to create a duplicate layer of everything that's visible on the canvas then apply the desired effect(s). Well if you make adjustments directly to your layers, you realize that the last four hours of detail work has been in vain, and you're going to have to start over, or at least at an earlier point where you smartly saved your work. We've all worked on projects, spending time getting the colors just right and the cropping just perfect, etc, just to realize that we've been working in the wrong color mode, bit depth or needed a different aspect ratio for the frame or print size we needed. If you're pretty heavy into Photoshop, then you've probably gone the route of developing a non-destructive workflow. Second: Alright this one's a bit picky, and there are quite a few work-arounds for this problem set. Basically since it's not going to be improved, you can't think of it as something that will be useful forever. So great price but nothing more moving forward.
CAN GOOGLE NIK COLLECTION BE USED BY ITSELF FOR FREE
You can also use the program in both Photoshop and Lightroom, so it can really speed up your work flow quite a bit when applying similar effects to a large number of photographs. There are, as is so often the case, a couple caveats to that recommendation:įirst: What I didn't realize when my friend mentioned that the collection was now available for free was that Google actually made the purchase in 2015, and when they decided to release them for free, they also decided that they weren't going to update or improve them.
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You can also process multiple filters built into Nik Tools simultaneously and relatively quickly. So trying to adjust an overexposed sky around tree branches becomes much faster and less annoying. It uses a different measuring algorithm than photoshop to make selections, which can definitely save time trying to make super-tricky or complex selections. After playing with them for about a week, I have to say that I would recommend them in general as a good supplement to Photoshop. Finding out that they're free now made me give them a whirl. If you're not familiar with Nik Tools, the easy way to understand them is that they're a set of highly complex filters designed to work with Photoshop or Lightroom. I had actually looked at them in 2013 when I was getting back into photography but didn't have the money to purchase them. About two weeks ago, my friend Jon mentioned that Google had bought Nik Tools and decided to make them free.