I was taking a look at a few images, and thought this might be a worthwhile purchase, but I was wondering If it increased the noise a lot with its effects.
I realize you can't get something for nothing, and this seems to almost promise that, but its worth asking.
basically If you have used it or use it now . let me know what you think.

I have it but rarely used it since the native tools of Photoshop can almost satisfy almost all my needs.

I have it and love it... You can use "control points: to fine tune an image. Noise is not a problem unless you push it too far... Nik Define is great for reducing noise...

I Tried it a few months ago , and now It's permanently in my workflow . Just a few clicks replaces a lot of photoshop fiddling

I'm addicted to "tonal contrast" perhaps as mshi states you can do it all in photoshop but not with a couple of clicks.
I just hope Google dosen't do away with it or stop the development. Hate to see it die a lonely death.

WAYCOOL wrote:
I'm addicted to "tonal contrast" perhaps as mshi states you can do it all in photoshop but not with a couple of clicks.
I just hope Google dosen't do away with it or stop the development. Hate to see it die a lonely death.

You can build your own actions so that you can do things much faster than using third-party stuff. Nik's Tonal Contrast effects, for example, can be easily achieved by using Hollywood's Freaking Details technique, and you end up having much more control and much faster speed without using Nik's. By using Smart Object, you can always fine tune and make new adjustments without having to start it over from scratch again.

I also use this on occasions (but do use Dfine and Silver Efex alot) and quite like what it does.

Agreed - Hopefully google wont ruin it! At least we have the original softwares before they instagram every preset.

I use Lightroom, not Photoshop, for all my image editing and I find Color Efex Pro to be a very useful tool in conjunction with Lightroom.
The interface between LR and Color Efex seems to be almost seamless

Sounds like a useful purchase, and looks like a nice way to finish things off. thanks !

Use it regularly in my workflow. There are some nice tools such as Nik Control Points that are pretty near impossible to mimic in the same time period in PS. CEP 4 allows filter stacking and they have added some new filters and removed some of the old ones that had virtually no appeal. Try out the 15 day demo and while you are at it check out their webinars for some training.

mshi wrote:
WAYCOOL wrote:
I'm addicted to "tonal contrast" perhaps as mshi states you can do it all in photoshop but not with a couple of clicks.
I just hope Google dosen't do away with it or stop the development. Hate to see it die a lonely death.

You can build your own actions so that you can do things much faster than using third-party stuff. Nik's Tonal Contrast effects, for example, can be easily achieved by using Hollywood's Freaking Details technique, and you end up having much more control and much faster speed without using Nik's. By using Smart Object, you can always fine tune and make new adjustments without having to start it over from scratch again.


Most people don't have the time or knowledge to do that. It's all about getting a fast & good solution to something that you can't do.
And I can't really see how it could be "much faster" either. If I build my own plugins or actions they are not much faster than the ones I buy

Lars, I was going to respond much the same way but some people prefer to use Photoshop not matter what I think of them as purest. So I let it slide, whatever tools we use to get the job done, but I do love my Nik

uintaangler wrote:
I use Lightroom, not Photoshop, for all my image editing and I find Color Efex Pro to be a very useful tool in conjunction with Lightroom.
The interface between LR and Color Efex seems to be almost seamless


+1

Great program - I also use Tiffen DFX - but NIK is my mainstay

Hopefully google wont ruin it!

I doubt that Google is going to be in the photo processing plug-in business. They bought Nik for Snapseed, not Viveza and the rest of the plugins. I just hope Google sells off the plugins, rather than just letting them die a quiet death.

John

I use it as well and love it. Not only can you make actions and stack filters, but you can also copy/paste control points as well. CEP4 and SEP2 are my two favorite. I agree that Dfine works pretty well for NR too.

uintaangler wrote:
I use Lightroom, not Photoshop, for all my image editing and I find Color Efex Pro to be a very useful tool in conjunction with Lightroom.
The interface between LR and Color Efex seems to be almost seamless

Yes, but I don't know how to batch process from the Lightroom plugin and batch processing is pretty vital.

Is it possible to pick up a software copy used?

markadams99 wrote:
uintaangler wrote:
I use Lightroom, not Photoshop, for all my image editing and I find Color Efex Pro to be a very useful tool in conjunction with Lightroom.
The interface between LR and Color Efex seems to be almost seamless

Yes, but I don't know how to batch process from the Lightroom plugin and batch processing is pretty vital.

Yes, there is a way to batch process out of Lightroom. I've done it, but don't have the details with me right now.

I realise now that it's pretty straightforward to batch process from Lightroom to Color Efex (+the rest, I suppose):

Highlight a batch of images in LR, edit in Color Efex, edit the first image, Save All, then it saves the edited images back to LR. I use a lower quality for multiple images (jpeg,8-bit), if reasonable, to save time and space.

CEP & SEP are the two programs I use a lot, even though I bout their entire software suite.

John Caldwell