Save 15% using Nik Soft­ware Coupon Code

Here’s a reward for read­ing my Nik Soft­ware Review. Save money when you use my coupon code to buy Nik Soft­ware prod­ucts — WBEEM.

Just visit the Nik Soft­ware site and shop for your prod­ucts. Once you check­out and get to the screen below, be sure to put in WBEEM in the Coupon Code box right next to the big red arrow in the screen shot below.

Nik Soft­ware Review and Coupon Code

You can down­load any of the plu­g­ins men­tioned here from Nik for a free 15-​day trial. Check it out and see which tools work best for you. When you’re ready to buy, don’t for­get to save your­self 15% of your cash by using my coupon code: WBEEM.

Many of the images in my Nik Soft­ware Review can dis­play much larger — just click image to see a big­ger view.

Selec­tive Edit­ing with U Point Technology

Before we dive into the var­i­ous prod­ucts and fil­ters, let’s take a look at Nik’s U Point Tech­nol­ogy because it’s com­mon through all of the Nik Soft­ware tools in this review. U Points allow you to selec­tively edit parts of your pho­to­graph with­out the need to cre­ate lay­ers and masks. The oper­a­tion is sim­ple. You drop a point on an area of the image that you want to mod­ify using a given tool (e.g., fil­ter, sharp­en­ing, etc.). Once the point is in place, it rec­og­nizes the part you want to manip­u­late based upon the color and bound­ary that you set by drag­ging a slider. Then you can adjust the selec­tion by using other slid­ers to enhance color, light, con­trast and other con­trols. U Point Tech­nol­ogy cre­ates an intri­cate mask to affect the area you want. Let’s take a look at an example.

Here’s a shot that I took with­out get­ting the right light on the sub­jects face. You can see that his eyes are hid­den in the darkness.

Now let’s take a look at the same shot using a U Point in Nik’s Viveza 2.

You can click on the images to view a larger size. I cre­ated a cir­cle over his left eye and dragged the Bright­ness slider over to about 50%.You can see it made a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence. What you can’t see is the amount of con­trol it used to select which area to Brighten. Here’s the mask that Viveza 2 cre­ated with a sin­gle U Point.

Now try and imag­ine cre­at­ing that mask by hand. You can see there are dif­fer­ent lev­els of mask­ing and selec­tion. Even with a pres­sure sen­si­tive pen and tablet, you’d spend quite a bit of time to cre­ate some­thing that was even half as accu­rate as this mask. Yet, all I had to do was drag and drop a U Point, then select the size of the area with a slider. The U Point Tech­nol­ogy cre­ated a com­plex mask in a mat­ter of sec­onds, and I could then affect the selec­tion with ten dif­fer­ent adjust­ments by merely mov­ing a slider.

You can use mul­ti­ple U Points, either act­ing indi­vid­u­ally or con­trolled simul­ta­ne­ously in a group. It’s an excep­tion­ally fast and easy way to make selec­tive adjust­ments to your images and you get U Points in all of the Nik Soft­ware tools.

Nik Soft­ware tools work with Pho­to­shop, Aper­ture or Light­room on Mac or Win­dows platforms.

Nik Soft­ware Review: Color Efex Pro

This is my favorite col­lec­tion of fil­ters. It’s an abun­dant, some­times over­whelm­ing, col­lec­tion of fil­ter to process and enhance your pho­tos. 55 fil­ters seems like a lot, but there’s more to it. Inside the fil­ters you find more con­trols and adjust­ments to mod­ify their usefulness.

Let’s start with a sim­ple one — Pro Con­trast. This is the first fil­ter I choose for every image. You can see that it has three slid­ers that range from 0 to 100%. Then it has fine-​tune slid­ers to affect Shad­ows and High­lights. Finally, you can choose how much of the Pro Con­trast effect to apply using the Opac­ity slider. The rea­son I like it is because it quickly cor­rects Con­trast and Color Cast in an image. It’s great for clear­ing up flat or hazy images.

One of the bolder choices in Color Efex Pro is the Bleach Bypass fil­ter. It’s cre­ates a high key, gritty result. That’s typ­i­cally the last thing you’d want to use in a por­trait of a female sub­ject, so let’s do it any­way. Here’s a shot straight out of the cam­era so you can see where we started.

I don’t want to change my model into a gritty night­mare, but I’d like to con­trast her soft appear­ance with a grit­tier envi­ron­ment. To do that, I used U Points to remove the Bleach Bypass fil­ter rather than add it. Here’s the result.

Here’s the mask cre­ated by Nik’s U Points placed on the model’s skin.

Tonal Con­trast is another favorite fil­ter for many pho­tog­ra­phers who want to bring out the gritty tex­ture of sur­faces in their images. Here’s a look at the same photo and U Points using the Tonal Con­trast fil­ter instead of Bleach Bypass.

This brings us to the next part of using fil­ters in Color Efex Pro. You don’t have to select and adjust one fil­ter at a time. You can stack them, tai­lor­ing each one to work either glob­ally or selec­tively. Let’s imag­ine that I like the Bleach Bypass fil­ter bet­ter for this image, but I like the way Tonal Con­trast brings out her hair. No prob­lem. I just stack them to cre­ate the effect I want — using U Points to add or remove the fil­ter as nec­es­sary. Then I can add another one, such as Brilliance/​Warmth, to add a bit of warmth on her hair.

By using com­bi­na­tions of fil­ters, you can change an image very quickly and eas­ily. If you like a com­bi­na­tion and think you want to use it on another photo, just save it as a Recipe — Nik’s ver­sion of a pre­set. You don’t have to spend a lot of time man­u­ally pro­cess­ing your images using Color Efex Pro. If you like, you can get in and get out. Save the results to a Recipe and the next edit­ing ses­sion goes even faster.

Here’s a split view of a bet­ter sub­ject for Tonal Con­trast. The left side is unprocessed and the right side shows how Tonal Con­trast can add some punch and detail to an environment.

Bleach Bypass works well when you want to empha­size tex­ture and blow out the background.

Here’s an exam­ple that com­bines three Color Efex Pro fil­ters — Pro Con­trast, Tonal Con­trast and Darken/​Lighten Center.

The com­bi­na­tion of Pro Con­trast & Tonal Con­trast bring out the tex­ture of the Vehi­cle Assem­bly Build­ing, while the Darken/​Lighten Cen­ter directs your atten­tion to the nose of the Endeav­our Orbiter. Just as its title implies, it dark­ens the edges with a vignette while bright­en­ing the cen­ter to direct your eye exactly where you want the viewer to go. You can place the cen­ter any­where in your photo and con­trol the amount of light that’s dark­ened or lightened.

What about Portraits?

Color Efex Pro comes with a Dynamic Skin Soft­ener that works rather well. Here’s a split view.

You can apply it glob­ally, as I have here, but some­times you may pre­fer to use selec­tive soft­en­ing. Keep in mind that you can con­trol the effect using the slid­ers in the upper right, as well as tar­get the skin color for this fil­ter. It’s impor­tant to keep vis­i­ble pores on skin as you soften it, so you can reduce the opac­ity glob­ally if the result is stronger than you pre­fer. Also, each U Point has its own opac­ity slider. Since dif­fer­ent parts of skin on the face have their own tex­ture, you may pre­fer to tar­get them selec­tively to get the best result.

Now how about using the wrong tool for the job? As I men­tioned before, Tonal Con­trast adds a gritty appear­ance to most tex­tures. How­ever, it also works in reverse. Here’s an exam­ple of Tonal Con­trast on the same photo using the Soft­en­ing pre­set that ships with it.

Yet another soft­en­ing fil­ter is Glam­our Glow. This fil­ter let’s you also con­trol the warmth or cool­ness of an image, as well as the sat­u­ra­tion. Not only is it good for skin soft­en­ing and glam­our pho­tos, but it can add an ethe­real qual­ity to travel or HDR photos.

Here’s an exam­ple of Glamor Glow on an HDR shot in a restaurant.

End­less Borders

If you like to add frames to your pho­tos, Color Efex Pro has an inter­est­ing array of Image Bor­ders. There are 14 dif­fer­ent bor­der types that you can select from a drop­down menu. Then you can cus­tomize the bor­der with seem­ingly infi­nite com­bi­na­tions. The Size adjusts the width of the bor­der around your image. The Spread affects the thick­ness of the fring­ing around your image inside the bor­der. The Clean/​Rough slider lets you choose how fine or rough you want that fringe to dis­play. If you can’t make up your mind, hit the Vary Bor­der but­ton and it will ran­domly cal­cu­late vari­ables to let you see dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions of the Type you selected.

If you pre­fer tra­di­tional Black or White bor­ders, those types are avail­able. The other twelve types allow you to cre­ate some eso­teric vari­a­tions of bor­ders. Here are a cou­ple of examples.

There’s much more in Color Efex Pro than I can com­pletely review here. You have a selec­tion of Cross Pro­cess­ing fil­ters, Bi-​Color fil­ters, Black & White adjust­ments, Infrared fil­ters, more types of Con­trast fil­ters and Soft­en­ing fil­ters. There are fil­ters to enhance foliage or make a scene look like an Indian Sum­mer. Color Efex Pro has a great col­lec­tion of Film Type fil­ters, Color ton­ing fil­ters and grad­u­ated fil­ters. You can cor­rect color of your images to look more nat­ural or turn them upside-​down like a Sat­ur­day Night Live por­trait. You can add fog or grain to an image, or style it to look like an older news­pa­per or polaroid print. The options are astounding.

Most of the time, I don’t apply every­thing glob­ally. I’ll add a fil­ter with an eye toward how it affects a por­tion of the photo, and then do the same thing for another part of the image. For exam­ple, Tonal Con­trast makes asphalt stand out, almost as if it were wet. The soft­en­ing fil­ters do a great job of mak­ing a dreamy sky. The Remove Color Cast or Pro Con­trast fil­ters clean up an unwanted color cast so you can see the true col­ors in your image — great for times when you didn’t have a white bal­ance card to mea­sure the scene. If you only get one Nik Soft­ware plu­gin, Color Efex Pro is the place to start.

Nik Soft­ware Review: Sil­ver Efex Pro

Pho­to­shop, Aper­ture and Light­room can all con­vert a pho­to­graph to Black & White, so why do we need a spe­cial plu­gin just for mak­ing Black & White images? The answer is because there’s much more to mak­ing a com­pelling image than desat­u­rat­ing the color. Sil­ver Efex Pro is the pre­mier mono­chro­matic tool for pho­tog­ra­phers. It gives you very fine con­trol over Bright­ness, Con­trast and Struc­ture — Nik’s name for very con­trast con­trol in very fine details. Here’s a quick exam­ple of the dif­fer­ences between a Black & White con­ver­sion and the use of Sil­ver Efex Pro to process an image.

The right side of the image shows a stan­dard con­ver­sion from color to Black & White. On the left side, there’s much more con­trol. Let’s start with the bright­ness. I want the eye to go to the face of the rhino, but the stan­dard con­ver­sion leaves him about the same shade as every­thing else. The ground is far too bright, which brings your eye to the wrong place. I brought down the over­all bright­ness to darken the image. Then I added a U Point on the rhino’s face and increased the bright­ness in that area.

Next, I wanted to add more detail to image, so I moved up the Struc­ture slid­ers for the Shad­ows and Fine Struc­ture, while pulling down the High­lights a bit. Those changes affected the image glob­ally, but I also added about 35% to the Struc­ture slider on the U Points to enhance the rough skin on the rhino. Another alter­na­tive would have been to reduce the struc­ture on the over­all image while increas­ing it in the U Points to make the rhi­nos pop out a bit more in detail.

I ignored the color fil­ters and film types on this image, but added a Sele­nium tone to the Fin­ish­ing adjust­ments to deepen the impact of the blacks in the photo.

As you can see at the bot­tom, there are more options to include a Vignette, burn the edges or use Image Bor­ders as we dis­cussed in the Color Efex Pro por­tion of this review. That fea­ture actu­ally appeared in Sil­ver Efex Pro first.

Along the left side of the inter­face, you can see a num­ber of pre­sets. Just take a look at the slider con­trol and you can tell that there are a lot of dif­fer­ence options avail­able. Sepia tones, film noir,high or low con­trast, film types, antique plates and even pin­hole cam­era looks are avail­able in the pre­sets. You don’t have to just pick one of those, but you can use them as a start­ing place to begin your own tweaks.

Here are a few exam­ples of my shots using Sil­ver Efex Pro.

Nik Soft­ware Review: HDR Efex Pro

Nik Soft­ware has an inter­est­ing take on pro­cess­ing HDR images. HDR Efex Pro pro­vides tools to resolve prob­lems asso­ci­ated with brack­eted images and styl­ize the com­bined result in one prod­uct. The first thing you see when launch­ing it with a set of images is the Merge Dia­log, shown below.

Select the Align­ment check­box if you need help adjust­ing the align­ment of your brack­eted images. I don’t use this when I shoot on a tri­pod, but it’s quite handy for hand­held HDR shots. Why not leave it on all the time? First, why spend a mil­lisec­ond align­ing images that don’t need it? Sec­ond, I’ve noticed the align­ment results don’t match up with JPEGs of the orig­i­nal frames that I export, just in case I want to blend in some fine details later in Photoshop.

The next check­box is Ghost Reduc­tion. Again, I only select this one when I need it. It’s use­ful­ness depends upon your orig­i­nal images. It works quite well if you have a sharp shot of the mov­ing per­son or object in your brack­ets. If you don’t, then Ghost Reduc­tion can’t mag­i­cally sharpen an object that’s blurry in your orig­i­nal pho­tos. You can help it out by select­ing the image to use for Ghost Reduction.

Finally, you can apply Chro­matic Aber­ra­tion reduc­tion in the Merge Dia­log. How­ever, Nik’s own FAQ for HDR Efex Pro rec­om­mends that you get your best results by cor­rect­ing chro­matic aber­ra­tion in other tools, like Cam­era RAW, before import­ing them into this software.

There’s a handy loupe tool that lets you inspect your image for Ghost­ing or Chro­matic Aber­ra­tion, as these prob­lems tend to hide in minute details or along edges. Once you’re sat­is­fied with your options, just click the Cre­ate HDR but­ton on the bot­tom. After a bit of pro­cess­ing, you come into the main screen with a default view of your HDR image.

Now you can start tweak­ing the image to your pref­er­ence. Like most other Nik Soft­ware tools, there are numer­ous pre­sets along the left edge and pro­cess­ing pan­els along the right edge. The Tone Com­pres­sion pane is a new fea­ture in HDR Efex Pro 2 that I really like. The pre­vi­ous ver­sion let you select dif­fer­ent HDR Meth­ods based upon a list of pull­downs. In this ver­sion, you have three major cri­te­ria that you can adjust and see instant results on the screen. Whether you want to make a photo-​realistic HDR image or a com­pletely grunged-​out scene, these selec­tions give you the option that you can see as you dial in the com­bi­na­tion that works best for you. You can fur­ther enhance that com­bi­na­tion with the Tone Com­pres­sion and Method Strength slid­ers above the HDR Method.

To be hon­est, it’s a bit hard to describe. It’s bet­ter to show you. The first screen below shows what hap­pens when you pull the Tone Com­pres­sion Slider all the way down to –100%.

Now let’s take a look at the oppo­site set­ting of 100%

You can drive your image to extremes. Keep in mind that HDR Efex Pro also includes U Points for selec­tive changes. That allows you to make selec­tive changes to expo­sure, method strength, whites & blacks and other aspects of your image. In cases of these extremes, the U Points can only do so much, though. For the –100% image at the top, I can eas­ily reduce the expo­sure on the sky to darken it because the color is rather uni­form. Fix­ing those blown-​out signs on the roof is another mat­ter. It may take a plethora of U Points to fix all of the dif­fer­ent tones on the signs if you go this far. Then again, if you push the pix­els to these extremes, you’re prob­a­bly not plan­ning on undo­ing it with U Points. I’m of the opin­ion that adjust­ments to the Tone Com­pres­sion is best done in small moves.

If the Tone Com­pres­sion panel lets you define the shape of your HDR image, the Tonal­ity panel allows you to refine the details of that shape. You can make global adjust­ments to Expo­sure and Con­trast, and yet refine the extremes of each adjust­ment to pull out details, or just enhance the shape.

For exam­ple, let’s say that you want an image that’s dark over­all, but with bright ele­ments that pop out of the dark­ness. You can drop the Expo­sure slider down and then pull up the high­lights to quickly make that change. If that gives you too much bright­ness in those high­lights, go to the Whites slider under Con­trast and pull it down a bit to bring them under con­trol. Using just a few slid­ers, you can very quickly and eas­ily refine the appear­ance of your HDR image.

The Struc­ture slider can work on fine con­trasts to make your photo appear very edgy, or you can smooth things out by slid­ing it to the left. Adding too much struc­ture to an image can cause a halo effect, so this is another tool that works best with small moves.

The Color panel gives you con­trol over Sat­u­ra­tion, Tem­per­a­ture and Tint. Slide the Tem­per­a­ture slider over a bit to add a nice warm atmos­phere, or cool things down in the oppo­site direc­tion. Tem­per­a­ture is another ele­ment of the U Points, so you can choose to add warmth to selec­tively to one area of your image and cool down the rest for some inter­est­ing color con­trast effects.

The Fin­ish­ing panel gives some inter­est­ing options for Vignettes that are very cus­tomiz­able, as are the Grad­u­ated Neu­tral Den­sity fil­ter slid­ers. There’s a Curves panel with a selec­tion of pre­sets to choose top­ping things off. You can take your HDR expe­ri­ence from start to fin­ish with HDR Efex Pro (per­haps with the excep­tion of remov­ing dust spots).

Nik Soft­ware Review: Viveza

Viveza is a won­der­ful lit­tle tool when you really don’t need to use fil­ters for effects, black & white, or HDR. It just lets you develop your images with a com­bi­na­tion of global adjust­ments, U Points and Curves. Think of it as a devel­op­ment tool. You can brighten or darken areas. You can enhance sat­u­ra­tion or take it away. It’s the birth­place of the won­der­ful Struc­ture slider. That fea­ture alone sent pho­tog­ra­phers rav­ing about Viveza, which for­tu­nately found its way into the other Nik Soft­ware tools in this review.

Here’s a quick side-​by-​side view of what you can do rather quickly in Viveza to enhance your pho­tos with min­i­mal effort.

Those lit­tle white dots show where I’ve placed a U Point. There are two on the bot­tom to darken the side­walk, and one to brighten the light blue paint on that bar­rier. I used another one to add a slight amount of bright­ness and sat­u­ra­tion to the flower bed. There are two U Points in the sky — one to darken the blues and another to brighten the white clouds. Finally, I enhanced the bright­ness of the sign and back­ground in the cen­ter of the photo, and tweaked the Curves to make the over­all con­trast a bit deeper on the Blacks.

I’ve used Viveza for some quick por­trait edits, too. A lit­tle Struc­ture on the hair. Some U Points to brighten the whites of the eyes and another one to add con­trast to the iris. You can use it to whiten teeth with a lit­tle desat­u­ra­tion and bright­ness. You can even soften skin by revers­ing the Struc­ture slider. Viveza is an amaz­ingly ver­sa­tile tool for fin­ish­ing photos.

Nik Soft­ware Review: Sharp­ener Pro

A good sharp­en­ing tool can raise your image to new a new level. Pho­to­shop has got­ten bet­ter with some of its lat­est sharp­en­ing tools, but Nik’s Sharp­ener Pro pro­vides tools that would oth­er­wise take a lot of work. You can glob­ally sharpen every­thing, but I think the key to good sharp­en­ing is to use it selec­tively where you want to attract the eye, or to avoid adding a crunchy appear­ance where the photo should be smooth. Here’s an exam­ple of the dif­fer­ence Sharp­ener Pro can make on an image.

The right side shows the unsharp­ened image and the left shows how Sharp­ener Pro can enhance details. How­ever, there are places where we don’t want sharp­en­ing. I added a U Point in the sky and the tree in the back­ground to elim­i­nate sharp­en­ing on those ele­ments. The sky doesn’t need to be sharp, and I didn’t want to bring out more detail in the tree, as it’s a back­ground element.

Look at the dif­fer­ence in detail on the hedges in the fore­ground and the tex­ture of the build­ing behind the hedges.

While it’s nice to make such quick changes for images on a web site, one of the real advan­tages for using Sharp­ener Pro is to cre­ate the right sharp­en­ing for dif­fer­ent kinds of out­put. This image was set for Dis­play, but the pull­down menu also includes options for other types of output.

• Inkjet
• Con­tin­u­ous Tone
• Halftone
• Hybrid Device
• Dis­play

If you’re print­ing your own images, that option can save you money by avoid­ing wasted ink if you used the wrong sharp­en­ing. Why guess? Let the experts at Nik Soft­ware guide you. They’ve done the work so you don’t have to spend time print­ing and reprint­ing to find the right sharp­ness to print.

Nik Soft­ware Review: DFine 2.0

Mod­ern full frame cam­era have really raised the bar for shoot­ing at very high ISO while retain­ing usable qual­ity. On my old Nikon D200, I would never con­sider shoot­ing above ISO 800, and I hated the noise at that level. With my Nikon D700, I laugh in the face of ISO 800. Now I can eas­ily shoot a con­cert at ISO 1600 and other low-​light sub­jects even up to ISO 6400. The Nikon D4 goes even far­ther. So do we still need noise reduc­tion soft­ware like Nik’s DFine 2.0?

I think so. Even though the images are bet­ter, we still get some noise and the per­fec­tion­ist in us wants to elim­i­nate it. DFine 2.o attacks both Con­trast and Color noise to clean up your images. Here’s a split view zoomed into a 100% crop. You can com­pare the noise on the left vs the clean image on the right.

The results are amaz­ing. DFine elim­i­nates the noise and retains detail in the image. Look at the dif­fer­ence in the qual­ity of skin tone on the guitarist’s face. Then look at the smoky atmos­phere behind him. In both areas, DFine cre­ated a much higher qual­ity final image to use. Here are a few other pho­tos where I used DFine to clean up the noise and make a bet­ter image.

Nik Soft­ware Review: Summary

I’m an unabashed fan of Nik Soft­ware tools. Almost every photo that you see me post on my blog has some enhance­ment from Nik Soft­ware, and often more than just one. These tools allow you to do more than cor­rect prob­lems with the images out of your cam­era. They pro­vide an out­let for your cre­ative vision. Give your­self the same edge as most every pro­fes­sional and seri­ous enthu­si­ast uses on their images. Save your­self time. Use Nik Soft­ware tools. I love ‘em.

Don’t for­get, save your­self 15% using my coupon code: WBEEM.