trols. The presets do much the same job as Actions or Presets sold for Lightroom by others, and include a bewildered range of functions such as ragged edges (Polaroid transfer simula- tion, and so on), soft focus, toning, grads and more. Where I have used plenty of Actions, Presets, Templates and Layer libraries in the past I have never come across anything offering the same degree of dy- namic control of parameters. It’s fair to say that Color Efex Pro 3 can do almost anything any other such collection or plug-in can manage, faster, better and with true ease of control. There is also a version for Capture NX2 which adds all this to your Nikon software for only £111.32 (£105 show price), and a ‘Select’ version which has only 34 filters instead of 52, at a little over half the normal £254.29/£225 price of the full multi-applica- tion Complete version.
Silver Efex Pro 2.0
We will visit Silver Efex in a future article, like the other modules. Here, I won’t go into much detail except to say that it is considered the best black and white conversion plug-in so far designed.
I have been using Adobe Camera Raw for monochrome conversions direct to Photoshop RGB files. Most of the virtual filter, film and paper effects can be found by digging deep into the many control tabs of ACR. However, it would take hours to create custom curves that imitate real films – and it is not possible to add grain realistically using either ACR or CS5, despite the noise controls available. Silver Efex Pro 2 has a whole list of film types in a drop-down menu.
What makes NIK better is that as you allow your cur- sor to wander over this menu, the entire preview pane image changes instantly to reflect the film type and a small 100% before/after panel has its ‘after’ result instantly reveal the grain and sharpness applied. This is real time, no need to tick or de-tick ‘Preview’ as with so many programs. It’s even faster than Color Efex Pro
3 which uses thumbnails to rep- resent different presets, which must be clicked-on to preview. Silver Efex can preview as fast as you can fly the mouse down a list of options.
Dfine 2.0
Although Dfine sounds like a sharpening utility, it is actually noise reduction. The U-point method makes it one of the best on the market for localised noise, such as the grainy effect which can appear in sky blue tints even at low ISOs. However, the use of control points negates the main benefit of Dfine 2 which is its very fast adaptive noise reduction. It can analyse the image in a few seconds, apply and preview the NR result. A small magni- fied section allows you to check for the softening effect on any detailed areas. Most of the time, you’ll be able to live with the degree of softness introduced. If you can not, then switching to manual control and using the U-point zones will take time but can be worth the effort.
Sharpener Pro 3.0
With modules designed for capture sharpening (‘raw’ sharp- ening in NIK terms) or output sharpening, Sharpener Pro could really do with being combined with Dfine 2 into a single in- terface. It’s more than useful to be able to balance sharpening against NR in one process. Sharpener Pro is best used on files which have been given no ACR/LR/Aperture etc sharpening. Then you can use the RAW Pre- Sharpen stage correctly. It really makes you think, when you see the before/after 100% pane, and tiny details pop out of the im- age which seemed vague before. The output sharpen stage uses screen display or printing process and lpi to adjust its ef- fect. All I can say is, Newsprint looks extreme but I’ll bet it is great when printed! You are al- most certain to get better prints with this plug-in as part of your workflow. To be continued… – DK
www.niksoftware.com MASTER PHOTOGRAPHY 19
Raw or cooked?
Well, it’s clearly cooked as the colour will tell you. But the straight conversion from raw above is not even all that straight – it is already adjusted to bring out tone and colour differences. This is the image as presented for publication originally. Now look at the result below, achieved using Viveza 2 (also possible with Color Efex Pro 3) and Sharpener Pro 3. The NIK Complete Collection now has this photographer hooked because I know which version will sell.
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