Just wondering if anyone here in the ALT group uses Color Efex (either with LR or PS)? I've always sort of wondered how it would be useful. I finally decided to bite the bullet and buy Silver Efex so I can get away from using PS for conversions and I find myself wondering about Color Efex.
I have it because it came with the complete collection, but of them all, it's the least used. It's a nice collection of preset filters to tweak, and the customization level is fairly high. It's a good tool if you're using photographs as a design element in, say, a website or printed advertising where the photographs themselves aren't as important as a consistent and complimentary style.
Color Efex has a number of useful tools in it but by far the most valuable of the NIK tools is Viveza.
You should note that some Mac users (me included) have had problems with Color Efex 4. Just poof and PS shuts down. Very irritating. V4 has some nice features but they also got stupid and left out some of the basics from past versions like saving various settings of particular filters (can be done now as a recipe but it is slow, cumbersome, and just plain silly) so between the crashing and thoughtless programming I am not feeling particularly generous towards them. They did refund my money after lengthy conversations with them trying to resolve the issues but I would have rather had the program actually work. Still using V3 which works fine.
I use it some and have an earlier version.
I tend to go to Color Efex for the solarization filter and for Tonal Contrast. The Tonal Contrast filter is great for extracting detail, textures, although you can easily go overboard. Its rare that I use anything else.
However, I have the LR collection. Moving to the CS collection in the future and using layers might encourage me to blend multiple filters more often.
Unlike others, I rarely use Viveza.
Silver Efex is in my near daily use.
I actually really like Color Efex. The method of adjustments makes my postprocessing work a lot easier. It's hard to explain, but for instance, the warmth and brilliance tool provides a much more natural way of warming or saturating an image than with traditional tools...The warmth will add warmth without adding color cast to other colors, which is really nice. Tonal contrast and Pro contrast are really nice for quickly adding just the right punch. I also use bleach bypass (usually with a low opacity) and glamour glow in combinations with other filters and in varying amounts to adjust tonality to my liking, and it does a very nice job. Like all applications like this, it's easy to go overboard, but when used correctly, it has done a great job for me.
Definitely. Tonal Contrast itself is worth the CEP purchase...now that you can stack filters, it's even better.Try stacking Tonal Contrast and a week Bleach Bypass...
sbeme wrote:
I use it some and have an earlier version.
I tend to go to Color Efex for the solarization filter and for Tonal Contrast. The Tonal Contrast filter is great for extracting detail, textures, although you can easily go overboard. Its rare that I use anything else.
However, I have the LR collection. Moving to the CS collection in the future and using layers might encourage me to blend multiple filters more often.
Unlike others, I rarely use Viveza.
Silver Efex is in my near daily use.
Scott
Is this the only real difference between getting the Nik suite for LR vs PS?
NIK for LR means you need to export your LR image to Nik, process, and reimport. No layers, no "re-do", it is what it is when you're done. NIK for PS is much better, allowing for layers and being able to adjust with smart filters.
Of the 3 that I have, I use Viveza the most, then Silver Efex, then Color Efex 4, but I'm using Color Efex more now that they've added the ability to stack filters!
I have the collection as well and use it and SEP2 the most. I use it as a plug in with Aperture 3 and never had it crash. I do have my memory pegged out at 16gb so it's pretty fast. The warm and brilliance preset like Jman said is nice as well as lighten and darken center preset. I use both typically. I have the color efex 4 version so it's nice being able to add multiple filters together.
I have it and use it occasionally. I've got the complete collection for LR and use Nik Sharpener the most, followed by Silver Efex Pro and Viveza. I'll use Color Efex Pro occasionally (I don't use DFine or HDR Efex).
I used the entire suite including DFine, Sharpener Pro, Viveza, CEP4 and SEP2 with Aperture 3 for virtually all of my favorite files. However, after trialing Lightroom 4, I'm able to achieve similar looks for my needs much more quickly without the Nik software suite and generating TIFFs. I've been very pleased with the performance of the sliders and local adjustments in LR4, while Ap3 left a lot to be desired in this regard.
I use Color Efex 3.0 Pro, but in the NX2 flavor. I just launch a TIFF from LR into NX2, then apply the filter within NX2.
As mentioned, Tonal Contrast is awesome and frankly my most-used filter (and the best local contrast filter I've ever used). I suppose I'll get around to trying out 4.0 eventually, but I'm a fan of how NX2 does masks, etc, and 3.0 lets me "combine" filters anyway because of how NX2 works.
Great feedback from everyone, much appreciated. I am going to get SEP, as planned, not sure about Color Efex. I guess I will trial it and see what I think. The ~$200 price tag seems high just for Tonal Contrast and possibly the warming filter (based on comments, it seems that these would likely be the primary reason to purchase).
Has anyone discovered any less expensive (or free) plugins that are roughly equivalent to Nik's Tonal Contrast or Warming?
I just picked up LR 4 and will be migrating that way soon, so I'm looking forward to the new processing features there as well.
Jacob D wrote:
Great feedback from everyone, much appreciated. I am going to get SEP, as planned, not sure about Color Efex. I guess I will trial it and see what I think. The ~$200 price tag seems high just for Tonal Contrast and possibly the warming filter (based on comments, it seems that these would likely be the primary reason to purchase).
Has anyone discovered any less expensive (or free) plugins that are roughly equivalent to Nik's Tonal Contrast or Warming?
I just picked up LR 4 and will be migrating that way soon, so I'm looking forward to the new processing features there as well....Show more →
You get a lot of filters for $200 (or whatever they're charging), but for me at least Tonal makes it worth it all and is my most used. I'd highly recommend a demo. That filter alone, though, has really shot up a lot of my photos (when used properly).
I did forget another great one, and that's Glamour Glow. Applied sparingly, this filter is amazing at softening light just a tad, and is outstanding for portrait work or other shots where just a bit of delicacy in the lighting is desired.
Like Tonal Contrast, though, Glamour Glow's default strength is a bit much for me. Playing with it a bit, you can get a very nice effect from it that is pretty hard to duplicate manually.
I think it also has a dynamic skin softener filter (I think?) which basically acts like a slight negative clarity within a certain range of (dropper-selectable) skin tones. I don't do lots of portrait work, but it's nice when I need it.
The "sunlight" filter is neat on certain photos, but only if one can get a grasp on how to handle it because it's a bit strange.
Many of the filter's I'd say I don't use often only because they don't fit my PP style - some of them are a bit heavy-handed and remind me of the "stylish" filters you get on the Ipad apps (like Snapseed for instance). Not to say they're low quality, but I normally don't process my photos in such a manner.
There are a bunch of the film simulations which can be nice, cross processing options, etc.
Another one that occasionally comes in really handy is "Pro Contrast" because it's got two sliders. "Contrast" naturally and "remove Color Cast". For some reason (maybe it's me), sometimes this remove cast slider can get rid of a color cast quicker than I can by messing with WB sliders. It seems to me to be a bit different than a normal cool/warmth slider, but I could be wrong (maybe some tint adjustments are going on simultaneously?)
So you guys got me curious about the upgrade (I was still on the original Sfx and 3.0 of Cfx) so I went for it. Two things:
1. Holy crap, there are many, many more filter options with the varying presets under each filter group. And that "add a filter" feature is nice. I will probably use this more often now.
2. If you had the original collection under Aperture/Lightroom and upgrade the ones available (Veviza or the two fx's), you also get the PS plugin.
To follow up... I finally picked up some Nik products for use with LR4.
I ended up going with their Creative Bundle Complete Edition which includes Silver Efex 2, HDR Efex, and Color Efex 3 (with free upgrade to 4). This only ended up costing $50 more than Silver Efex alone, so I figured why not.
I've only been tinkering around in it for a few days but I can already see a few filters in Color Efex that will be very useful and add quite a bit of appeal. Those that I noticed right away were the Tonal Contrast and Brilliand & Warmth (both mentioned here), as well as the Color Contrast Range and Bicolor filters.
I'm very interested now in building some 'signature' processing effects using these in combination. There are so many to experiment with... should be a lot of fun, if not time consuming!
I also love to use Tonal Contrast, Brilliance/warmth and Pro contrast filters ... but I find that they tend to increase noise very much/ to deteriorate the file ... have you experimented the same issue? ideas about a PP process to avoid/ limit it?
I bought a full suite license back at xmas when there was a sale.
But I haven't had the time to play with it yet.
I have listened in on their excellent web classes where they have had pro photographers show several examples on how they have used the various filters on their shots.
The Brilliance and Warmth filter looked very good.
