Cheap if that’s your thing.
Having bought Nik Software a while back, Google now appears to be trashing all their desktop applications and focusing on mobile. The excellent desktop version of Snapseed is already dead and now they are offering the whole Nik collection of image manipulation apps for $150. Shop around and you can find further discounts down to $125.
Here’s the TechCrunch piece:
Click to read the whole article.
Readers frequently point me to SilverEfex Pro 2, the black and white app, but I have never been tempted to buy what was a very costly plugin as I rarely do monochrome. I see, and photograph, in color, mostly finding monochrome a crutch to make ‘good’ that which is mediocre.
Still, Google’s evil geniuses are making the whole bundle available for a free 15 day trial, so I downloaded the Mac Lightroom version which installed seamlessly and became available as a series of processing options, thus:
Mercifully the HDR component did not come over, for whatever reason, which spares me not using it to make garish chocolate box covers of my images. I gave the B&W plugin a run and it’s well engineered, decently speedy and the highlight for me is the localized adjustments where you can select a limited area to which effects are applied. Here’s a before and after of an image where the plugin has been used, with localized darkening of the fore- and backgrounds:
Nik monochrome plugin at work.
It’s easy to create very high contrast monochrome effects but, as I said, using the B&W crutch to save a mediocre color snap rarely works:
Crutch at work.
The Color Efex (sic) Pro 4 plugin provides a host of coloring actions, thus:
Color Efex Pro at work.
There are so many free versions of these plugins on the web that it’s hard to justify spending money on this, but as it’s included in the bundled price maybe one can live with that.
Dfine2 and the two sharpening plugins do nothing for me that Lightroom and Photoshop (the latter adds uprezzing in the Print menu) cannot, so once again it’s hard to see paying money for these if you already have Adobe’s applications.
Viveza 2 strikes me as a complete waste of money, adding nothing to the basic color processing controls already available in Aperture, Lightroom and Photoshop.
Bottom line: If you are into monochrome and need a capable, flexible tool which adds easily used localized adjustments, the Nik plugin may be for you. The other stuff is just fluff if you already have Lightroom and Photoshop. There are also Photoshop and Aperture versions of Nik’s suite, available for both Mac and Windows. I would look to buy these now if you are interested, despite Google’s protestations that they will remain available. There is no reason to believe anything from a company whose business is founded on the theft and resale of your private information and images. And I do believe they are lying.
All images on the Nikon D3x with the 35mm Sigma f/1.4 lens.