Everything You Need To Know To Get Started with the Nik Collection 3 by DxO

[Music] my name is dan hughes um i was a webinar trainer from 2009 to 2014 basically 2013 i guess um and i teach photography at the rochester institute of technology now in rochester new york um we've got classes starting up on wednesday lori and i were just chatting about that a little bit but that's not why we're here to talk and i don't want to talk too much about myself because we've got a lot to talk about today um and what we have on this screen right here is what we're going to get into so we're going to talk about accessing the nik collection from photo lab from photoshop and from lightroom i'm actually going to start from photoshop and then we're going to move into photo lab and then into lightroom throughout the demonstration we'll talk about the um the basics of the interface and how to navigate seven of the eight are pretty similar and then there's one outlier the newest piece of software perspective effects which is uh the interface looks different um and we'll we'll talk about it and then like laurie said we're gonna go into where you can find more educational resources and even where you're going to be able to find this webinar after it's been posted i'm going to try not to move too fast we have to talk about eight different pieces of software you know in about 45 or an hour 60 minutes or so ladies and gentlemen let's go ahead and get started um my first photo here that i've got up is actually an image that was illuminated by several hundred people i think it was actually about 800 people helped us to light up the kodak tower here in rochester and then there's some other cool stuff going on in the image as well so there's george eastman as a young man um a little a portrait of him that's been like posted or pasted uh to the parking lot there and then mark osterman from the george easton museum is illuminating his model t here as well so there's a lot of cool little hidden gems in the photo anyways accessing the nik plugins from photoshop there there are two ways there's the nick selective tool here and i'm going to go into detail about this stuff and then the other way to access the nik collection from photoshop is to jump into the filter drop down menu in the top portion of your photoshop interface and then to go down to the dxo i'm sorry to the nic collection where you'll be able to find the nik collection in alphabetical order now um the thing is when when we look in photo lab and for lightroom users this is actually going to be the order in which you you basically see the software in alphabetical order um one of the beauties of the nik selective tool here is that this is the suggested order that you would use the software so going from define and finishing with the output sharpener in fact let's let's get into this a little bit i'm going to close the nik collective wow nick collection selective tool so if you've never seen this before if you're a photoshop user and you open up the software you have the nik collection installed but you don't see the nik collection selective tool the way that you would find it is to go up to the file drop down menu go to automate and then under the automate section there's a spot that says nick selective tool too and when you click on that your nik selective tool will pop up there's actually several different ways to view your nick selective tool you can you can minimize the whole thing by moving up into the corner and minimizing it it actually goes and minimizes it down into the lower well in my case the lower left corner of my interface you can open it back up by expanding and then you can minimize it so let's say you're not using the nik collection and you're using something else in photoshop but you want to keep this up you've got all the individual icons listed out so you can still click on color effects or you could click on viveza 2 if you wanted to um for folks who are a little bit newer to the software uh which i'm assuming most folks in this webinar are probably relatively new to the software uh if you open the nik selective tool up by clicking the little boxes here sorry i can't expand that any larger with this interface right now um you're able to read the actual pieces of software so clicking on those little two boxes opens it up into define viveza perspective and so on and so forth we'll talk about a couple more details in the nick selective tool as we move forward but for now let's go ahead and jump into define 2.0 which is the noise reduction software built into the nik collection so um i will just basically click on define two that tells the software to launch um and the beauty of define is it's an automatic noise reduction software it basically does all of the work for you so you don't really need to do anything you do have the ability to go past what it's doing or to adjust what it's doing but one of the beauties of it is you basically open the software it analyzes the image and then it does the noise reduction for you so for the most part i'm done i would just be able to click the ok button in the lower right corner of the interface and apply the filter but that wouldn't help you to learn the interface much so we're not going to do that right now but in use case that's all you'd really have to do most of the time now um the several of the pieces of software in the suite are going to look almost identical they will have slightly different views and slightly different things that will show up on the left side and they will be pertaining specifically to that software that you're launching but if you follow me into the lower left corner there's a help button which if you click on that it's going to open up a web browser and it's going to bring you right to the nik collection by dxo website help website the settings button in the lower left corner here which you'll note when we launch let's say silver effects pro or one of the other tools these buttons are going to look the same and you'll be able to access the specific settings of the particular piece of software that you're dealing with in this case we're in define so you're going to see the settings for define i'm going to go ahead and cancel that i don't need to make any changes and i don't want to go in depth into any of this stuff because we've got so much to talk about we're already eight minutes in so um if you follow me into the upper left corner of the interface right now we're in the single image preview and if we wanted to see a before and after which we're not going to see much difference because this image doesn't have much noise in it in fact let's zoom in i don't think we're going to see any difference so i've double clicked on an area in the picture and it's it it zooms into its 100 percent if i move into the lower right corner of the interface i can actually use my navigator to move around the image i'm going to go back up to the upper left corner and if we wanted to see a before and after so in this case the the non-noise reduced image and then the noise reduced image you'd click on this preview check box here within define and when i click it off now we're seeing the before and if i turn it back on you're seeing the after again there's not going to be much change because this image doesn't need any noise reduction in my mind or much if at all so but i do want to show you a cool trick and that's why i've opened this picture up so moving back into the upper left corner i've clicked on the split preview so i'll show this again but basically anything on the left side of this red line right here is the before and anything on the right side is the after and i'll show you that again when it's appropriate when we're making some adjustments to the image the third and final preview that we have in the upper left corner is a side-by-side preview as i click on that you're going to see on the left side is the original image and on the right side is the enhanced image in this case again the noise reduced version of the the whatever application of the software that you're using is um one last thing with the split preview here or sorry side by side preview right now we are viewing this image side by side but if we wanted to see it one on top of the other there's a twirling button right in the middle of the interface and if you click on that now what you're going to see is on the top is the original image and on the bottom is the enhanced or the noise reduced photo i'm going to go back to our single image view moving across the interface um define in sharpener pro there's a lot of information by the way that i'm going to throw at you and i don't expect everybody to remember all of this but just so it's said at least once and you can rewatch these as you see fit as well but define and sharpener pro both have a sort of mode interface at the top where you're able to go in and look at the image based upon you know different attributes of whatever define or sharpener pro is doing in this case in modes you could actually literally look at the individual color channels the luminance chrominance and then the noise reduction masks which is where you're applying the noise and where you're not right now if we click on any of these i don't think we're going to see a dramatic difference at least with the masks let's see let's click on the blue mode so this is just showing you the blue color channel and there isn't much noise so it doesn't really give you too much information moving across the top toolbar you have your navigation buttons i'm going to actually go ahead and double click again that's going to zoom us back out to our sort of full screen view so you can see the entire image the the pointer button in the upper right corner actually you'd only use this when you're zoomed in so i've already zoomed out but it's basically how you can move around the photograph your zoom button here so there's a it looks like a little lollipop or a magnifying glass really what it's supposed to be representing by default there's only one magnifying glass within define when we jump into some of the other pieces of software there's actually a plus and a minus because the interface is a little bit different a plus and a minus magnifying glass here's what you can do though by default it's going to be a plus right so if i click on it it's going to zoom us in in this case to 100 if i press and hold the option key on a mac or um alt if i'm on a pc it's going to switch from the plus so we'd be zooming in to a minus so hold option it switches so that you can zoom back out and now you just click one time and you're going to be zooming back out to your full screen view in this case moving back into the upper right corner you've got your hand tool so when you're zoomed in you're able to pan around the image and then the last button in the upper right corner before we move into the define interface section itself is a change tone background so you can actually shift through several different tones of backgrounds which can be very helpful in certain situations when you want to view the image at different sort of levels and based upon you know the brightness of your image you might want to actually do that you might change the interface or if you just prefer to have a darker gray background you'll have that clean neutral tone which is the idea of it being gray but you have three different options for lightness levels all right on to the right side so as we navigate um most of the plugins what you're going to note is that the the adjustment tools that are specific to the nik plug-in that you're in is going to be on the right side over on the left side you're going to have various different things depending upon the software but usually it's going to have presets right or you're going to have your filter list within color effects you're going to find that on the left side because define 2.0 is a noise reduction software it's it's designed to get rid of noise automatically you don't need presets because it's specific to the individual image that you launch into the software now the the one thing that i want to show you here that sort of stands out with define is that there's actually two different interfaces in defined there's the measure interface where most of the work is being done for us and then if you move into the reduce interface now it switches over to where we can do selective noise reduction right now the entire image has a certain amount of noise reduction on it and that's based upon the picture that you launch that's been analyzed but what you can do is click into the reduce section and then use control points or color ranges to tell the software where or what colors you want more or less noise reduction to be in and so that was the sort of trick that i want to show you i'm actually going to go ahead and just take a plus control point and um you'll note that these the contrast and color noise sliders they're set at 100 by default if i take the plus control point and i go and place this somewhere in the image you'll notice that now we don't have any of the noise reduction being applied to the whole image we are only going to be doing selective noise reduction with the control points and that's because we're using what's called plus and minus control points and control points are the selective capability or in this case one of the two ways of doing selective post-processing noise reduction here um and a plus control point tells the software that we only want to do noise reduction wherever we put this point and a minus control point is going to remove noise reduction from a particular area and i say that because this software defined 2.0 colorfx pro and sharpener pro have these kinds of control points we're going to talk more about control points as we move forward i just wanted to point that stuff out so far i'm going to delete this control point so i've just clicked on it and then and you can see it's active because you can adjust the sliders i'm going to go ahead and just hit the delete key on my keyboard that's going to get rid of the the noise reduction or the control point that's on the image i'm going to bring my contrast and color noise back to 100 percent and we're just going to click ok because we're going to keep moving we've got lots more stuff to talk about with these interfaces a lot of it matches or is the same and i want to make sure and point that out and then i also want to point out some of the differences and you find a lot of these differences because these different pieces of software are designed to do different things define is designed to do noise reduction if you vase it 2 gives us the ability to globally and selectively adjust tones and colors so i'm going to actually click on vivez 2 and we're going to jump into that you'll notice the interface looks pretty similar mine is not taking up my full screen you can actually do two things so that you get a full screen view you can just simply click the plus button if you're on a mac or the expand button if you're on a pc um or you can actually move into one of the corners of the interface and drag it out to the size that you want maybe you don't want it to be the whole screen or maybe you do you can adjust that based upon the corner and that's pretty similar to a lot of other kinds of windows or window interactions on mac or pc so that should be pretty similar for a lot of folks all right we're in vivesa 2 so our next chapter if you will you'll note we have those three views still we have a preview checkbox we move across the toolbar we have our um standard select key or select tool pan tool now we have a plus and a minus that's because vasa 2 is slightly newer than defined was and so nick just decided to put that in there nick software did um and another nice option within viveza you actually see this button within color effects and silver effects as well a couple other tools um is if you click on this far right button it's going to hide the adjustment panel and this is really handy if you're especially in a split or side by side preview and you just want more bandwidth more more sort of area for your image to show up so i'll click and expand that out this is viveza ii there's actually a webinar coming up on monday where we're going to go in depth into all of the things viveza 2. so join us for that if you can we're going to cover everything um one of the major differences though between define and viveza aside from you know the whole point of the software this is designed for adjusting light and color so adjusting brightness levels and color adjustments um but one of the biggest difference is that the control points here in viveza have a series of sliders right so the the the control points in define were only putting in or removing noise reduction the control points here within uh viveza what they're going to allow you to do is all of this stuff that's and it's actually all listed out on the right side so it's easier to read brightness contrast saturation structure shadow adjustments warmth my personal favorite red green blue and then hugh and the beauty of having all of these adjustments all sort of under um one spot here is that we can go in and really specifically adjust exactly what we need like i i want to warm up the building a little bit more because i think it's a little bit cool still i can go into the warmth slider and i can warm it and then if i say okay it looks good warm but maybe i don't want so much red overall in there i can start to reduce the amount of red right and each of my control points is going to make its own very specific selection and it's going to allow me to go and adjust the light and color i'm not sure what the limit is in terms of how many control points you can actually add onto an image but the last time i did a test i got to 100 control points and it was still letting me add control points but my computer was then just bogged down because of all the processing that goes into instantly making these selections that the control points are making as i go in and make adjustments right we could stick a control point in the sky i don't think this is going to be a very beautiful adjustment but we can go and brighten up those tones and you can see it's making a nice sort of photographic looking selection as i brighten it or darken it it's not really adjusting the brightness of the the tower because the control point recognizes that we placed it in the sky and so it specifically makes um a selection in the sky there all right oh so two more things to note um the help button is in the lower left corner still settings button is in the lower left corner and while we're in the photoshop versions of the software we also have a brush tool and that brush tool is going to allow us to brush effects in or out and in fact just to kind of show you exactly what that might look like i'm going to desaturate just some areas in the image let's go ahead and duplicate that point place it here and then put another point here just so i can show you what this brush tool is doing again unfortunately we can't go in depth into any one thing right now just because we've got so much to cover but i'm going to click the brush button this time while we were in define we clicked okay we're going to click brush and what the brush is going to do is it's going to allow us to paint the effect in in a particular area or remove the effect from the area where we don't want whatever adjustment we made within the nik collection so um if you here's the nik selective tool the interface is actually changed now because it recognizes that we want to use the brush tool and what we're going to do is either brush the effect in erase the effect we can fill the entire adjustment or we can we can clear the whole adjustment so watch what happens if we click fill it's going to fill in the entire layer mask and therefore anything that we've done to the image is going to show up so we can fill the whole thing we can um erase it all which basically it says what this is doing is it's actually using um layer masks for anyone who's familiar with layer masks in photoshop but anyways you can uh clear it and then we're able to paint the effect in wherever we want right so i'll take a brush tool and i can actually paint our sort of desaturated stuff in and the the beauty of this in my mind is now we're able to combine whatever selective tools you might want to use in photoshop in this way using layer masks with the selective capability of our control points which is really quite wonderful when we're done making our adjustment so we've desaturated that area we can click the apply button and that sort of uh solidifies our adjustment on the image all right so the last thing that i wanted to do on this image is actually go into perspective by the way i just as a disclaimer i don't think i would actually make those desaturation adjustments on this image i don't think that it's effective aesthetically but i just wanted to show you something so i thought that would be a good way of doing it so from here we're going to open up into perspective effects and what you're going to notice as we launch the software is that it looks pretty different and that's because this software is the first one that was developed by dxo so dxo has been developing the nik collection for the past few years and updating it and giving us new capabilities within the current or within the pieces of software and updating things as they go but this is the newest piece of software so what you'll note is that the interface looks very different now the point of perspective effects is to give nik software users the ability to fix perspective and distortion issues on our images and the interface looks similar to some of the other dxo pieces of software it's kind of like a hybrid thing that's been built into the nik collection and it's really quite wonderful because it's this nice updated ui and once you get comfortable with it i think you'll find it to be quite sort of ergonomic or easy to use some of these top toolbar buttons do the same stuff so in the upper left corner we can click on a split preview or side by side preview sorry and this is going to show you the before and the after we haven't made any changes so you're not going to see anything in fact instead of covering these buttons in the upper left corner let's go ahead and click the auto button here and this is going to automatically fix any distortion there shouldn't be much distortion on this image and actually before it does that it's going to want me to download a module so i've clicked the auto button and um these these modules are specific distortion or or profile uh modules that that dxo has developed that's specific to the camera body and the particular lens that it was shot with so what this is asking me to do is download this so that it can automatically fix these issues with the image and what you'll find is that these are just a few kilobytes they're very very small files they're profiles that get housed on your computer that perspective effects and the dxo software can access so i'm going to click download um it should take yeah see it's 308 kilobytes and basically by doing that now if i turn my intensity down on the right side here you'll be able to see the before and then if i slide it back up to 100 you'll see the after so there isn't much of a distortion with this particular lens thankfully and actually we can turn on or off the effect with the distortion checkbox so there's a little check box that's right here so you can turn it off turn it back on and then i have to hit auto again and it'll automatically fix that um we again we can't go in depth into all of these but let's say i hit the auto perspective button that's going to try and automatically fix the perspective based upon what it thinks it should do the auto button doesn't work every single time and so it gives you the opportunity to change and adjust perspective so i'm actually going to on the right side hit the redo or revamp button so this is going to take us undo back one step and then what we can actually do is use these different perspective tools to align with a particular line on the building or the horizon of a landscape or you know depending upon what your picture is of uh you'll be able to adjust this and there's actually a fine movement here as well that i'm not using and i'm just trying to do this very quick but this way we can change or shift any perspective issues if i if the most important part of this image was to make sure that the kodak building was standing straight upright and there's no sort of keystoning then i can use my two line adjustment so we can click the apply button and now if i go back into the upper left corner and i show you the side by side you can see the before and after and actually again because this lens is 28 millimeter lens and we're shooting basically right on plane with the center of the kodak building there isn't a whole lot of distortion um adjustments to be made but again the idea is that we're showing you the interface here so instead of like a super fisheye or something like that for more information on perspective effects there there's been several webinars that have been recorded and you can find those um at the webinar page i'll show you that later on as well for now i'm going to go ahead and click the save button and that's going to bring us back over into photoshop and our adjustment is applied all right so let's jump over into photo lab because we've got to keep moving here uh in photo lab i want to show you how to access the software i want to show you some of the subtle differences in accessing the software and then um i think i'm actually going to start with color effects i want to show you an hdr series but before i show you the hdr series because that's taking multiple images and merging them together let's just take a look at how you open one single picture from photo lab into the nik collection so first things first you'd click on the image you'd you'd want to make adjustments in your raw processor before so in you know the what's new or your essential tools and all of the adjustments that you might make in photo lab selective editing if you like to do that in photo lab there are some very powerful control points here in photo lab 3. they're very cool check those out via other webinars as well so you want to make all the adjustments to correct the image to stylize as you see fit and then when you're ready to go into the nik collection you will click on the nik collection button that's in the lower right corner of the photo lab interface so when you do this a prompt comes up it's your plugin selector and just like as i mentioned before you're going to get your plugins in alphabetical order here and then at the bottom there's a settings button and i'm just going to click on the settings button and this is where it's going to enable you to adjust the file format that you're going to be working with and it's image quality or bit bit depth um you can resize the images that you're bringing into the software and you can decide what sort of icc profile you might want to be working with depending upon how you're going to output the image or what your specific workflow might be um if you primarily make adjustments and and um output sorry let me rephrase this if you are primarily having fun with your images and then um uh outputting for web like maybe use instagram or flickr or uh 500px or some other you know your own website or something like that i'm going to recommend srgb color space for web but there are a lot of reasons why you might use other color spaces as well and if you're not terribly familiar with it that's okay um i guess for folks who are maybe brand new or maybe who aren't printing stick with srgb if you are making prints uh you'll want to look up and figure out the icc profile that's best for the kind of printing output that you're doing whether it's a lab or it's your own inkjet printer or so on um we're going to come back to this in a few minutes but for now what i want to do so that i get the best quality adjustment from from my nik collection i'm going to make sure that this is processing as a tiff file and it's a 16 bit per channel file this time we're going to leave the resizing checkbox off so we'll just click the ok button we didn't actually need to even move in there i just wanted to show you the interface so we've taken a look at define viveza and perspective effects let's jump into colorfx pro colorfx is a collection of 55 different filters i think of them as two different kinds of filters i think of them as corrective filters and creative filters so the corrective filters you'd use to kind of fix problems color um color problems uh color casts contrast problems if you've got a an image with a lot of flair in it you want to add contrast to get rid of that flare there's some really great filters in color effects to allow you to do that and then it's full of creative adjustment filters as well all right so as we open color effects this warning comes up and this is telling us that we are using a tiff file format which enables the nik collection to be able to work in a non-destructive workflow which basically means we can come back into the nik tools that we've adjusted the images on our images with and we can re-edit i'll show you that so i'm just going to click ok i'm going to hit the expand button to expand out to full screen and then follow my cursor to the lower right corner see how this says save and edit later it makes a sidecar file which basically means there's a there's a separate file that aligns with our tiff file it's actually sitting inside of the tiff file um and it allows us to re-edit the picture later on so this is a really nice feature this is new as of the nik collection 3 the newest version of the software so here we are in color effects this is probably my favorite piece of software i use all of them personally but this is just a collection of all of the most wonderful things in the whole world um let's actually play a little bit with one of the film effects so this is a highly stylized representation of the image there's four different film effects filters you know it does all sorts of different stuff um from your film and wedding and architecture favorites nature portrait actually i think i've changed this i think i've personalized my filter library and i must have done that in the settings so you'd be able to change that by moving into the settings in the lower left corner and then by adjusting your filter list settings you can actually decide which categories you want for your filter library based upon the different kinds of photography that you might do so these are all just suggested uh filters travel if i click the ok button um these are actually not going to adjust until the next time i launch color effects but if i open it up again you're going to see that these library callouts are going to be different all right color effects filter library this is all 55 of the individual filters you've got recipes recipes are um basically they're presets but they are combinations of the different filters put together so if i fit if i click on let's say fp100c it's going to warn me saying it's going to change the filters and actually this is my emulation of the fuji instant film i wonder if i have something that's not so here's here's one that's called inverted glow so if i click on my preset or rather recipe here it's i leave these warnings on by the way just because i do so many of the webinars once you know what's going to happen when you click on something if you just click the check box here don't show again this warning isn't going to pop up every time like it does on my computer anyways i've clicked on inverted glow and the um the filters it's using are levels and curves glamour glow infrared film and apparently there's some control points saved into this particular recipe as well but you can see that's what a recipe is going to do it's going to give us a different version different representation so this one's called carrot recipe and that's using bleach bypass you can follow me to the right side of the interface bleach bypass polarization and high key um moving back over to the left side i'm sorry for bouncing around so much i just want to make sure you see what's happening while we're doing this stuff um back over to the left side of the interface we move into the history browser here and in the history section uh we have our basically everything that we've done to the image while we're here within colorfx pro so we could go back to the original image as we make adjustments to different filters those are going to be added into the history browser as well i'm not even looking to see what that does to my image but that is recording everything we do in that history browser this thing here is built into hdr effects pro silver effects pro and colorfx pro possibly analog i don't remember now we'll have to actually look at that uh anyways recipes are your groupings of your different filters and they're presets the software comes with several presets and then you can make your own presets and then your filter library is the collection of the individual filters themselves you'll notice the interface looks pretty similar if we move across the top of the interface you've got your single image view your split preview and your side by side preview instead of having a check box like we had before with the vasa and define there's a compare button so that's slightly different from the other pieces of software if you press and hold the compare button you'll see the before if you let go you see the after and then the zoom function actually looks a little bit different as well because there's a whole bunch of different zoom levels percentages that you can zoom into but you'll just click on it you'll be able to sort of figure those ones out but they do look different and that can be kind of intimidating if you're beginning with the software or maybe just revisiting it after a long time away from the software all right so the last stuff that we're going to talk about here each one of your filters is going to be listed out in the order that you place them so bleach bypass polarization and high key you can actually click on a filter and drag it away if you needed to or wanted to so you can reorder it i don't again i can't go too in depth here because there's so many little things about each one of these that um we'd be able to cover several hours and we're what 40 minutes into the presentation already so let's say we really like what we've done to the image i'm just going to do one last compare so there's the before there's the after there's definitely some adjustments that would need to be made in fact there's too much contrast in this image now i'm going to back that down i'm going to bring the shadows out a little bit and then we'll just click the save button and that's going to bring us back over into photo lab as this saves i do want to open this image back up into color effects pro in a minute and i want to do that to just show you that we've we've got polarization bleach bypass and high key applied to that image and because we're working in this non-destructive workflow we're able to open the image back up so um here's what we've got to do i think we can um this is the original photo if you follow me i'm in the the film strip in the bottom here's our enhanced image and uh when we're ready to go back into color effects we just click on the nik collection this should work anyways click on color effects and it the software should recognize that we told the software that we're using this non-destructive process and therefore we should have the filters that we just used applied and i've done something wrong let's try that again i'm gonna hit cancel let's move across i need to figure out which one's which i think that was my second one let's see what happened so we should be able to click into color effects let me see my settings yeah it should be fine oh there here's what my problem was what i did just a second ago was i i processed it as a secondary tiff file meaning i made a second copy of our tiff and what i needed to do was go into export selected file without processing because that's going to tell the software that we actually want to open up um the the image that we had edited a minute ago so it opens up the original photo instead of making a duplicate so now when i open color effects as long as i didn't delete the wrong picture um it should launch with those particular filters applied yeah there we go so high key bleach bypass and polarization so i just skipped a step that you got to remember to do if you're going to use that non-destructive workflow okay so let's make a change i'm gonna reduce the blacks let's uh go into polarization let's just see what that's doing a little bit uh let's rotate that just to touch we can maybe take a minus control point and again the beauty of the beauty of using these control points and these non-destructive processes with this checkbox checked on is that we can go back in afterwards and re-edit the image we just have to remember to be changing that setting within the settings section so that it launches the correct image all right so let's launch hdr effects pro hdrfx pro is a piece of software designed for taking single images and allowing you as a photographer to tone map them or if you take an exposure series that's designed to capture an entire dynamic range of a scene you can actually enable highlight all of the images let's actually i'll show you how to do that so i'll click on this image that's furthest to the left of our exposure series i'm going to hold the shift key down on my keyboard and i'm going to click on the image that's furthest to the right of our image series when they're all highlighted like this you can see they're a slightly different tone than the other images we go into the nik collection this time i need to click on settings again so it doesn't hurt to get to know these settings if you're a photo lab user i do not want it to process these originals because i need them to be tiff files 16-bit ideally and i'm actually going to resize these images so that they're not going to take so long to open because these these photos were shot with a d or no a z7 nikon z7 and they're 45 megapixels so it would take a little while for the processing to occur i'm going to speed it up for our webinar so i've resized for our length to be 3000 our long side to be 3000 pixels it's actually a relatively small image and then we're going to click on hdrfx pro and what's going to happen is hdr effects pro is going to be making a photo lab technically makes copies of the images for us and it launches into hdr effects where it's going to merge all of these photos together to create the high dynamic range picture if these were full resolution images it would probably only take another minute or so for them to launch but because we've got five of them and they're 45 megapixels i figured why not speed up the process a little bit make it easier on my computer while it's live on the webinar and we'll make them much smaller files because for an interface walkthrough it shouldn't make much of a difference computer is under stress being that it's got photoshop lightroom and photo lab open all at once and now it's trying to do all this stuff while on live webinar okay so here's hdr effects pro this is the part of the interface that you're going to see when you merge multiple pictures together you have your film strip at the top which has all of the images that you're merging and it has their expressed exposure value so we've got middle which is the software says is zero two stops underexposed and three stops overexposed and then um if you follow me into the preview this preview actually allows us to see the full range of detail that we're merging you slide it all the way to the left you see the darkest representation if you slide it all the way to the right you see the brightest representation so you can see the information that we have here and then if you click on your your magnifying glass there's actually two different magnifiers that you can use um there's a ghost reduction magnifier which i don't think i have any ghost artifacts that i need to get rid of in this case but then there's also a chromatic aberration zoom and these are helpful when you're using the tools on the right side of the interface here where you can align so this image the series was shot on a tripod so i don't need the alignment on although it doesn't necessarily hurt it for it to be on i'm gonna turn it off just to see what happens ghost reduction um i don't have anything that's moving there might have been people moving through here but i don't think they're going to create any ghost artifacts with this particular merge based upon what i've done before but if you needed to you could turn that on and the ghost reduction is going to remove things that are moving between those individual frames that you've shot or it will try to adjust that anyways sometimes it doesn't fully remove things in which case you have to make some adjustments chromatic aberrations if you're using your um your lens corrections within your raw processor you don't even need to have these on um but you can adjust your chromatic aberrations as necessary if you have chromatic aberrations be in those higher contrast areas this looks pretty good in the areas where i would assume that they would be happening okay so let's click create hdr what's happening now is the software is merging those images and tone mapping them to basically create a realistic looking hdr photo and again this is going to pop up every single time for me because i don't click don't show again so i apologize because it gets annoying i'm sure to have to see that come up every time it is um it is a warning just telling us that if we want to be able to re-edit the image make sure this little check box in the lower uh corner here is on so um note that the interface looks pretty similar this time we are dealing with merging multiple images to grab together and creating a high dynamic range photo so instead of having a filter list on the left side you have a series of presets that are built in um i'm i find the n vogue recipes here or presets to be quite nice in a lot of situations most of them are very realistic looking and i like that so i i stick with those n vogue ones but there's um 38 other no 20 yeah what what am i looking at here there's a bunch of other presets that are built into the software here apparently i can't do math um you've got custom presets so follow me on the left side here custom presets these are the ones that that i've created myself if you create them uh you will show they will show up here on that part of the interface and the way that you add your own preset is you would adjust your image do all the things that you might want to do and then uh you'd click the i'm just going to make a dramatic adjustment here so and then i'm going to rephrase this i've made a couple of adjustments on um our image and when i'm ready and i say okay i want this to be a preset because i love what's happening here it's not particularly nice but you can click the plus button that's to the right of the custom label there and that's going to allow you to name your your recipe so i'm going to call this dark airport erie canal and click ok that's a pretty specific name for a recipe or a preset but that way it's easy to find and we know what we're looking for here so this is the recipe should i decide i don't want it anymore and this rings true with with all of the different plugins with custom recipes or presets you can delete them you can actually export them so if you've got a couple different computers you want to use them on or if you want to share them with friends you can export them and then you can revamp them so if you decide okay well i actually want my tone compression to be higher and my method strength to be higher and we want less detail but deeper hdr method and i want my exposure brighter again um we can revamp that recipe by clicking the lower right button and it's going to update it for us um the last couple things is if you've imported any recipes i have not um they would show up in here and then if you um have a if you want to see your history we've we've already gone over the history state browser um while we were within the color effects software the difference here is that we can actually move back into those merge settings so should we decide that we need to adjust the chromatic aberration or the ghost reduction or something you can do that by moving into the history and go to the merge settings you'll note the top portion of the interface looks almost exactly the same as color effects did and then the tools palette on the right you've got your um the stuff that's specific to hdr effects pro all right i'm going to save that as a tiff file it's going to generate a whole separate file for us and that will show up in our photo labs software whew we got a couple more pieces of software to look at got about 10 minutes left and hopefully we've got some questions and maybe i can answer some of those questions in the next few demos so in the next few pieces of software that i'm showing you the beauty of silver effects pro is that it is going to look almost exactly the same as hdr effects pro does except instead of creating a high dynamic range image we are creating a black and white photo from a color photograph so this is an image from my last visit to chicago it's an infrared photograph the white balance has been slightly adjusted here but let's say we wanted to convert it from color to black and white again before you would go into uh any of the nik collection i would recommend using your raw processor to massage the image whether that's just a lens profile or a camera profile or you're making dramatic adjustments to the different sliders built into the software that you're using uh do that first and then go into the nik collection so to access the collection from lightroom you will be on the image that you want to deal with that you want to adjust and then move into the sort of browser portion of the software the image preview and right click on the photo once you've right clicked on the photo you can go to edit in and any of the plugins you've got installed into your lightroom system is going to show up here in your lightroom interface so we're just going to click on silver effects pro this next prompt opens up is the ability to edit a copy or edit originals because this is a raw file it's going to make us edit a copy and so we're just going to click edit and what's going to happen is the original raw file is going to be left untouched and then we're going to get a duplicated version just like we did within photo lab it's actually very similar the software looks and works almost exactly the same whether you're launching from photoshop lightroom photo lab anything the the slight little differences are going to be the non-destructive processes that you have and we're seeing this prompt for again and then in photoshop you have your brush capability so here in silver effects we have all of the greatest tools that you'd ever need for creating a really dynamic black and white image right this software also has the envo presets i actually just like them i think because i made the end vogue recipes and presets um so i had the opportunity to do that for nik software and i'm super proud of them so i show them off as often as i can but let's say we like this highlight fade i'm just going to move into so basically we're starting with a preset in terms of workflow and then we're moving in and we're making our adjustments um as we see fit uh based upon the specific image that we're working with i'm going to increase the soft contrast darken down the blacks a little bit and then i'm just going to place a control point in the trees here just to add a little contrast and maybe even move into the blacks adjustment they amplify blacks darken those down just to touch oops went the wrong way so control points please come back to the vasa webinar on monday we're going to explain all about control points if you can make it to that and that will be recorded of course as well so if you can't make it you can you can watch afterwards but we'll talk all about how control points work because in my mind they are the most important aspect of the nik collection um these these pieces of software do really amazing things other than control points but um in my mind the most important aspect of the control of the software is the control point capability long story short let's just take a look at our split preview or side-by-side preview i keep mixing them up here's the original infrared image converted to black and white and then here's where we've landed with just a couple clicks clicking on one of the invoke presets and then adjusting the tools palette on the right one more thing before i click the save button um in the lower right corner of all of the software you're going to have a loop feature sorry all of the pieces of software aside from perspective effects you're going to have a loop feature which actually follows your mouse around so you can see in the lower right as i move my mouse it's going to follow my cursor while i'm on the image anyways it's kind of locked it down there so i can it'll follow me around and then you also have a histogram and so if you scroll over the loop histogram window and you click on histogram you will have your live histogram showing up and in in silver effects specifically you will also have what's called the zone mapping system and this zone mapping system breaks the tones down into 11 different zones zone zero is black with no detail zone 10 would be white with no detail and then let's see if we can find a zone where the sky is so this is zone six if i click on the zone you can see these little lines showing up these little sort of zebra lines uh that's telling us that all of these tones are currently in zone six it's just a really nice way to kind of be able to tell how bright or how dark the different parts of your image are and again as a calibration zone 0 would be black without any detail at all and zone 10 would be white without any detail at all if you were to look at my histogram you'd note there's basically nothing in the image that's white or dark black except for the border in the image all right so let's click save i've got sharpener pro and analog effects pro let's see if we can do that in five minutes the beauty is we've covered so much stuff and so much of it is the same whether you launch from lightroom or photoshop or you're using colorfx or viveza the interfaces are very similar you just have to navigate those subtle little differences that are based upon the individual piece of software and what it's designed to do let's say we wanted to print this photo and if we want to print it we probably should sharpen for print to do that we use sharpener pro's output sharpener so what we're going to do is launch into that next and we're just going to use this same picture to do that so we're going to edit in we're going to go to sharpener pro we're going to look at output sharpener um now note this prompt it will allow us to edit a copy or edit the original image if we wanted to uh in this case i'm just going to i'm going to edit a copy because what we're going to do here is sharpening that's going to be specific to a print size but if you click on this little twirler in the bottom you'll also see the lightroom export dialog here that allows you to change so i've got to click this one edit a copy is lightroom adjustments you can adjust a tiff your color spaces um your bit depth resolution and then compression if you want tiff compression based upon the file format that you're on in fact i'm just going to go ahead and click edit because it doesn't matter whether i'm on edit a copy or edit a copy with lightroom adjustments in this case because we didn't make any adjustments in lightroom after the adjustments we made in silver effects so we'll click edit that will launch sharpener pro you'll note the interface looks very similar and actually i will relate this interface more to the define 2.0 interface there they are of a similar vintage if you will and so in interface design they're gonna they're gonna be very similar you've got your um different previews your preview checkbox you've got your mode as i mentioned before and your mode basically is gonna allow you to see different sharpening aspects as you see fit the way that you would use this is you'd move over to the right side of the interface i'm going to recommend if you're always printing the same way to set up some presets and you can add a preset by making adjustments to your tools palette and then clicking the add preset button so here you go let's say we were going to make this into an inkjet print and the beauty of sharpener pro is it gives you the perfect amount of sharpening based upon the kind of sharpening it needs to do based upon the printer that you're using in print technology that you're using so let's say i was going to print on an epson printer using the super fine setting at 2880 on a luster paper and we're going to make a 20 by 30 inch print so i've set it to inkjet because that's the kind of output that we're going to do there are several different kinds of printing outputs or display if you're going to put the image up on the web and want to sharpen for web you can do that as well inkjet auto luster 2080. i can inform this software that i need to sharpen for a different size image if we wanted to but we're going to say we're printing a 20x30 and now if i click on let's say my side by side preview note in this case we used a preset in silver effects that actually applied some film grain and so you're going to see a dramatic sharpening of that film grain as well and that's going to be this is the correct amount of sharpening as i've zoomed into 100 uh for this particular image printed on a luster paper from my epson printer so you're seeing on the left is the original on the right is the enhanced i don't there's there's no like real um subject necessarily in the image so it's probably smart to kind of just look around the photo and make sure it's doing what what you want it to do you can actually see a pretty dramatic difference in the detail here compared to there but again you're seeing the the grain that i added with silver effects exasperated as well sort of um adjusted as well so that's sharpener pro we're going to click save okay one minute so bear with me stick around if you can uh and i want to show you analog and then i've got a couple links that i want to show you as well in fact i'm just going to launch analog we won't even finish the edit i'm going to bring exposure up here and then let's just dehaze the middle and add a little vibrance and then what i'm going to do is launch into analog effects pro show you the interface because it is actually a little bit different than the rest of the nik collection again and that's because this software is designed to emulate different analog melodies so different different almost problems that you would run into with shooting analog processes and the way to use this so it actually launched into the recipes or the custom presets these are some of the custom presets that i've made if we click on cameras the first time you launch the software it's gonna launch into this cameras mode and it will by default be in the classic camera mode and and stick with me for just a second if you've gotta head out um the way that you use this software is by moving into this portion the upper left corner in choosing the tool combination so it's a very extensive piece of software once you get to know it and i think you'll find that with color effects and with silver effects and all of them really but analog effects pro has a lot of stuff that you can do to the image and you start with the tool combination um and or you can click on the camera kit down here and you can decide which from your tools you want to use one of the interesting parts about the software is that it has an instant help so if you look in the lower left corner here as i scroll over levels and curves or film type it actually tells you what that particular filter is going to do or if i uh click on let's say the um wet plate and then i use a preset it's going to inform us in that instant help down in the lower left corner what this preset's going to be doing as i click on the preset you you have a whole other set of filters that are applying um on the image with the goal of emulating in this case like a wet plate process a historical photography process that that was analog or is analog because there's a lot of people that are doing this stuff now still okay i'm going to say that's that for the interface portion of the webinar i want to show you just three more things ladies and gentlemen if i can get them to show up on my screen and of course it's not going to let me because i have analog open i'm going to click cancel we're going to move this window onto the screen and we're going to go full screen here um so resources you you may have found this webinar several different ways via an email via um you know the nick selective tool will actually inform you of upcoming webinars by the way it's pretty cool there's a little message center on it but if you want to see upcoming webinars or some of the webinars that we've done in the past uh photojoseph and all of the uh ambassadors nick ambassadors and all the guests have a whole slew of different trainings built in here so combine what you've learned today with maybe some of the specific stuff that you'll find in these different webinars and that's a great resource there there is the nick youtube channel so if you literally just jump on youtube and you can type in nick software just look for the logo or use the direct link nik software lessons and you'll find we've got tons and tons of content here and then lastly the last resource that i want to talk to you about which this can be reached from the software if you launch the nik tool and then click on the help button in that lower left corner this is what's going to launch your nik collection by dxo support area and so you can get to the user guide here and release notes as well as specific questions and faqs and there's a whole lot of really great stuff in here like let's say we wanted to go on an analog effects pro tour because i didn't get to talk to you that much about analog effects pro we could click on that and then my screen isn't um i'm going to click on view page and this is going to launch the analog effects pro help page the specific help page so really handy so the other the way that you can get to this support section if you access it through the nik software specifically the way i told you to get help right you click the help button your your specific software help site will launch or um when you're on the nik software website um if you go to um not explore yes explore and then customer support when you click on customer support this support page opens you ladies and gentlemen it's really i'm honored to be able to do these [Music] things [Music] you

Channel: Nik Collection

Views: 14,805

Keywords: Nik Collection, Nik Collection by DxO, Silver Efex Pro, Dfine, Editing software, Lightroom, PhotoShop, HDR, nik sofware, nik collection 2, nik collection 2.5, nik collection 3 tutorial, nik collection 3, nik collection 3 by dxo, nik collection 3 review, nik collection 3 new features, nik collection 3 photoshop, nik collection selective tool photoshop, nik collection 3 photoshop 2020, tutorial, nik collection tutorial, nik collection tutorial photoshop

Id: dqO5vghju50

Length: 61min 43sec (3703 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 19 2020