Go Beyond Basic Editing Using Adobe Photoshop with Nik Collection

[Music] so yeah welcome ladies and gentlemen uh my name is dan hughes uh like before i mentioned i've been doing some webinars boarding software um for 11 years now or so um you know a long time ago at nick software then google and now here for dxo as they've been continuing to develop all of these really powerful tools for us as photographers um this is a fun webinar for me to present because it's not sort of photo specific necessarily we're not doing we're not just talking about you know landscapes or portraits or detail shots or or you know different kinds of lighting and or black and white photography and so on we're talking about some of the inner workings of how to think about utilizing the nik collection as a tool set so um we're going to talk about the brush tool i've actually changed the order we're not going to go in this specific order but we're going to talk about the brush tool today we're going to talk about the nik selective tool preferences as well because there are some different options that are good to know about especially when using the brush tool especially when just accessing the nik collection from photoshop as that's what we're going to be accessing the tools from adobe photoshop today we'll talk about non-destructive workflows utilizing smart objects how to directly access presets so you don't you don't have to go into the nik collection and then click on the preset button you can just click on it right within the nik selected tool by favoriting presets within any of the nik collection that has presets so really nice option uh we'll talk about the last edit feature which allows you to basically reapply whatever your last edit was with a particular tool with a particular nick plugin and then we will also talk about presets or meta presets rather and we'll um those meta presets um are a way for you to start thinking about or if you're not already thinking about utilizing more than one of the nik plugins in your processing this tool the meta presets will help you to think about how you can combine different nik plugins together like color effects with silver effects or colorfx pro with analog effects pro to create some really interesting effects and um we'll be doing that today using smart objects in photoshop and that's going to be helpful because we can go back in and look at what each of those presets that we use meta presets that we use what it's doing um anyways let's close this don't need to save it and uh we'll start here on on our um her majesty's museum so uh first things first i'm here in photoshop but i've pressed the tab key on my keyboard and that tab key is just a nice little shortcut for hiding the tool sets on the left and on the right so by tapping the tab you can see we're here within photoshop and i've got a relatively simple layout for my interface with my histogram and my layers palette which the layers palette will become important today we're going to focus on some of the tools within the layers palette and then we have this little guy so in the lower left corner of the interface i have my nik selective tool which has been minimized so let's let's go ahead and click on that to maximize the selective tool actually i hadn't minimized it i just moved it down there and uh let's talk about this so before we launch into any of the tools specifically into any of the direct presets that you can access from the nyx selective tool um let's sort of get into this one this this thing is a floating palette it is the nyx selective tool it's one of the two ways that you can access the nik collection from um from photoshop here and i know that we have a whole wide swath of folks in the webinar today that lots of folks have been using the nik tools for a while some folks are brand new never even opened it so i want to make sure that i'm speaking to everyone or as much as possible speaking to everyone so this is one of the ways to access the software there's a few different layouts that you can use with the nik selective tool uh if i move into the upper left corner and this might be hard in the webinar to see you've got the x which is going to allow you to close out uh your nick selective tool you can click on the little line there which minimizes the nick selective tool and if i do that it's going to move it down into the lower left corner and then we can just maximize it by clicking on that little box there and then um the way that my nick selective tools listed out it actually lists out the name of each of the nik plugins right if or when you get more comfortable with the tools you can actually sort of minimize that um which minimizes some of the some of the tool set that you have access to but it makes it a smaller um palette so if you just want to be able to go into color effects pro or hdr effects pro it's easy to do that with this minimized palette i'm going to go ahead and sort of maximize my palette and um let's jump into these different presets right so uh if i were to just click on let's say colorfx pro 4 here the color effects software is going to launch and we'll have access to our 55 different filters right but if we go to the right on the nik selective tool and we click on the little carrot there's a little triangle expand collapse box or carrot if you click on that it expands into any of your favorited recipes or favorited filters i should say and because if i click on so right now these are some of my favorite recipes that you see um listed out here but if i click on the word filters you'll see a lot of the like recognizable names of different filters and these are some of my favorite filters and the beauty of this this part of the interface is that if i know that i'm going to use cross processing or let's say i know i'm going to use pro contrast and i want to start out my workflow with color effects with the pro contrast filter rather than just opening the nik software and it launching into whatever the first filter is that i used last time i can click directly into the particular filter that i want to use now it is highlighted on filters right now and again this it's relatively small type and i i should have enlarged my monitor i'm sorry i might lower my resolution so it's easier to see but right now filters are highlighted if i click on recipes both the filters and the recipes will be highlighted and will show up there within the next selective tool right so i can access both of them if i then click off of filters now i just have my recipes open now very quickly the the difference between a filter and a recipe the filter is the individual tool that you might use like pro contrast specifically or bleach bypass specifically and then recipes are um a combination of it's a recipe a grouping of the individual filters put together right so that's that's sort of how you could define uh the difference between a filter and a recipe now i'm going to click on blue monday here and we're just going to start out by talking about some of the different tools within color effects and this webinar isn't specifically about color effects but i'm going to use it here in this situation to talk about some of these different features i clicked on um blue monday i believe which is going to be a combination of these three filters photo stylizer cross processing and contrast only right so these three filters are being applied or or are you know enabled when we are here within color effects they're not technically applied because we didn't click the ok button or we didn't click the brush button to apply them in our interface so um but just note that you know this is a stack of filters and we got to it by clicking on one single button which is quite nice as opposed to opening up and being able to click on the individual filters and sort of creating our own stack those recipes are pre-built it's pretty pretty awesome actually so with that we should probably just take a look at what this particular recipe is doing this is a combination of photo stylizer cross processing and contrast only um if we click the compare button in the sort of top upper left quadrant of the interface here if you press and hold compare you'll see the original image and you'll see the enhanced image i'm going to push this a little bit further i'm going to go into the photo stylizer and my my intention here is to sort of show you um the brush tool for the most part that's that's what i want to kind of get into here so to do that i'm going to make make some adjustments that are going to be quite noticeable i guess and i'll just do that by applying a sort of strong application of our of our tools so i don't want that one i actually want uh one of the warming cross-processing effects which of course i'm not going to be able to find because i will practice this and practice this and then as soon as i go live in a webinar uh it doesn't do the same thing for me it does it is doing the exact same thing it's just i've probably changed what i've uh my thought process here okay l2 lt04 let's run with that and then contrast only so if we take a look at the before and after here's the before and here's the after i'm i'm kind of enjoying what it's doing in the sky in the top part of our interface our image not so much um on on the structure itself so um what we could do is use control points with each of the individual filters plus control points put the effect in minus control points are going to take the effect out or and in this case it's probably faster because i've got you know several different filters that i'm applying to the image rather than using those control points i'm going to click the brush button as i click the brush button i just want to point out this is going to apply these filters in to a duplicated layer in this case in photoshop but let's let's back up a second because uh the the major strength in my opinion anyways when using this brush tool is to combine it with using control points as well because the control points are going to make a really photographic looking application or selection and then allow you to then brush the effect in exactly where you want it which is a really cool combination of the sort of control point capability with the brush capability that we have here i'll show you an example of that i just want to show you the basic use of the brush first so i click the brush button within color effects pro it applies the filter to this duplicated layer in this case and it applies a black layer mask so you see over here on the right side of the interface again for maybe folks who are not familiar with layer masks uh a black layer mask this is going to conceal the entire layer right so that's a black layer mask and what it's doing is it's kind of hiding the layer itself these pixels if you follow me to my nik selective tool which has changed because i'm now in the brush tool within the nik selective tool i have the ability to brush things in there's a little eraser tool so i can click to erase and this is going to allow us to selectively remove the effect we can click the fill button so if i click fill watch what happens to the image and then watch what happens to that layer mask over here on the right as i click the fill button uh the entire layer is revealed and we also have a white layer mask and that's because in photoshop with layer masks black conceals and white reveals right so now we've got an entirely white layer mask which is going to reveal the entire portion of the image and now what we can do is go in and maybe erase the effect out of any area we don't want and when we do this it's going to be applying that erasure to um the layer mask so it's not really deleting pixels in this situation uh what it's doing is it's hiding those pixels behind now some of you might be saying well why on earth would you have done that combination of filters well i wanted to kind of show you um you know some sort of dramatic change and in this case it it sort of just works to use this really funky set of filters to create something i don't know a little more creative a little maybe less less realistic um and uh i don't know more at least my mind right now today more interesting at least to play with now um we are using this brush tool i've clicked on the eraser tool and you can see what it's doing to the layer mask but of course we are within photoshop right and within photoshop you have the ability to change brush sizes you have the ability um oops i'm going to go back one step huh i'm not sure what happened there but you have the ability to to um i didn't mean to do whatever i just did i got rid of my entire adjustment um anyways you have the ability to change the size of the brush and the hardness of the brush uh why don't i just show you that so um i i like to use the bracket keys personally there's a lot of shortcuts within photoshop um but if you use the left bracket notice okay here's my brush you can see it kind of moving around the image i'll maybe enlarge the image once if i use the left bracket i can make a smaller brush and if i use the right bracket on my keyboard i can make a larger brush right that same tool is up in the upper left hand corner for anyone not familiar and again i'm sorry so some folks are probably very familiar with this tool others maybe never seen this before if you follow my cursor into the upper left corner and we click into our our brush tool uh you can do all sorts of changes in here the brush capability in photoshop is massive we you know we don't we can't talk about all of the things i don't think i even know all of the things about the brush tools within photoshop and you know i've used the brush tool in photoshop but anyways you can change the size of your brush by way of pixels here we were doing that with brackets and then you can change the hardness of the brush as well so if we were to adjust the hardness and then we go into our brush if i go and click using my eraser what's going to happen is we get this very hard brush stroke right so you can see the edge is very well delineated um you can of course go back in and change that that hardness we can maybe bring it down to zero to make it very soft and then if i click here you'll see now we have a very soft edge brush well another one of those cool shortcuts is if you're using the left in the right bracket in photoshop to make a brush bigger or smaller right left and right you can also make a brush harder and softer if you hold the shift key down and then use the left in the right bracket if you use the right bracket while holding shift down it's going to give you a harder brush and if you hold shift down and use the left bracket it's going to give you a softer brush so it's a nice way to sort of you know add nuance or be careful of edges or you know have just that much more control over this brush tool once you know where those different brush dynamics kind of are now all that said and done let's erase this part out maybe i'll go into my my um my brush tool here and press brush because as i've as i've done this i've missed some of these areas in the outside of the side of the structure and i want to get the fat back so we'll go and brush that back in and you know i think in a perfect world i would be using a wacom tablet right now i'm just on my laptop and i'm using my touch um you know my my laptop um what the heck is it called any my touch pad there and uh so it's not as precise as using like a wacom tablet or something like that a brush based tablet but anyways long story short that's how you control your brush tool within the nyx selected tool you've got the brush capability the eraser fill and then trash and the trash just basically gives you a black layer mask again um and then of course you brush things in or out using your your brush tool uh when you're done you click the apply button now i'm going to click the apply button and i have a setting set up in my preferences and that preference allows me to keep this layer and layer mask and i point this out so no note this i have you know my upper layer here with blue monday that particular preset recipe applied to our image the default is actually to do something slightly different so if you're following along and now you don't have two layers you just have one layer that's been merged into your original background i want to show you what's happening right so i'm going to just actually let's just move on to the next image because we talked about the brush tool let's go into this next image right and i want to i want to move you through the preferences within the nik selective tool and talk you through all of them we're going to change one back to its default setting and you can decide whether you like the default or you you prefer to change it but um yeah i'm going to just sort of open these up hopefully for you so we're back in the nick selective tool here and in the lower left corner of the next selective tool are the preferences when i click on that little gear in that lower left corner my nic collection preference is open and we get these nice options first of all if when you launch the nik i'm sorry when you uh uh launch photoshop if your nik selective tool doesn't automatically open when you open photoshop this checkbox is likely off right so if you want to open the nic i'm sorry i keep running that wrong if you want to open photoshop and have direct access to the nik selective tool you just make sure that this little check box is on in fact follow me here i'm going to click cancel here if you're not sure where the nick selective tool is like let's say you set up the software and it's not showing up what you can do to make the nik selective tool show up in photoshop is go to the file drop down menu go to automate and then over to the nik selected tool so if it's not showing up and you want it to that's this is where you find it automate make selective tool 2. once you've clicked on it it will open and then if you want the software the nyx selective tool to launch every single time you just click that little checkbox it turns it on now these other options you get three other options here and it's kind of how photoshop and the nik collection interact together so um the default settings i believe look like this that is the apply filter to image composition apply brush effect merge to current layer and then apply favorite filters apply a nick collection let's talk about what these things mean apply to apply filter to image composite so what this does if i have it set to active layer now if i open up the nik collection it's going to apply the nik collection stuff whatever we do to whatever the active layer was or is in this case in my layers palette it would just be the background so it would adjust the background when we're not dealing with smart objects a sort of standard workflow we'll just adjust there um i'd much prefer it does make for a larger file but i much prefer having my pixels my background layer um or whatever layers i have to be doing what's called a merge stamp visible which basically makes um a whole other set of pixels so that we're working in a kind of more non-destructive workflow it makes it so we can kind of go back to the other layers when necessary so i prefer image composite but try out see what you like um apply brush effect so by default it's going to be set to merge to current layer and what that does is it takes anything that you've done and it sort of merges it together i'm going to show you that right now and then the last thing just to cover it really quickly uh apply favorite filters and recipes in last edit right now if i were to click on one of those recipes as we did you know the last example if we click on a preset from any of the other tools or a favorited filter it's going to launch that particular piece of software into the preset that you've used right that's exactly what we did on the last image i clicked on like one of the cool recipes for color effects it launches color effects and we have our three filters if you were to say apply in photoshop the software is going to launch and apply that recipe for us just basically within photoshop which is really great if you want to work much faster right because it's just going to take your recipe and it's going to apply it which is fantastic in situations where you know that the recipe is going to do what you want if you want to make sure that you can kind of launch and re you know adjust whatever you need to adjust within your recipe or preset i would say you probably want to be using this software as apply in the nik collection but again you know these are these options that you have and they're really nice to kind of experiment with and play with to see what you prefer so these are the defaults um i'm going to show you what happens when you use this merge to current layer and it's helpful and nice i just prefer to use the other option i prefer to use apply to separate layer but let's look at it i'm going to click the ok button and um let's click on um how about cool blue now let's go levander so we're going to use color effects again it doesn't matter which of the nik tools we use you know we can just basically go in and click on whatever of our recipes and presets that we want to use and it's going to launch in this case if i click on silver effects it's going to launch into our black and white conversion software and it's going to apply dark glow or contrasty one of these recipes or presets it's called presets within silver effects um let's click on blue monday right this is a recipe within color effects it's the same recipe we clicked on a minute ago let's just see what happens and i think i'm going to augment this a little bit i'm going to add another filter uh i'm going to click add filter because we we don't have to just stick with whatever the recipe is doing we can do whatever we want within the software it's one of the major benefits of the tool it gives you total control and we're going to click on infrared film right so i'm going to add the infrared film filter oftentimes when you click on a filter it's highly transformative and it's not exactly what you want right so the infrared film filter is trying to emulate um the process of shooting infrared film um and that can be really cool and really interesting again for kind of other worldly effects i'm going real crazy in this webinar i think um in terms of the sort of adjustments that we're getting here you know we're going very otherworldly at this point but what i want to do is make these changes so that you can kind of get a sense of what's happening and then you can see the differences with the brush tool and so on and so forth so let's say we love what's happening here to the foreground again you know we could go in and put control points in put them exactly where we want them to be might be a good thing to do in this case i think i even said that i was going to do that so i'm going to put plus control points into the areas where i know i want the effect and then maybe take minus control points and remove them from certain areas remove it from the tree and maybe the sky in the background and we'll just be applying this infrared film filter to the foreground primarily let's see what happens yeah let's go ahead and do this you know what here's another trick ladies and gentlemen um if we wanted to i don't want to duplicate these control points i want to i'm going to make some changes to contrast only i'm going to put the adjustment okay i'm doing this on the fly here's our trick i'm going to show you how to take the control points that are here within the infrared film filter right so the plus control points they're putting in the filtered effect in here the minus control points they're removing the effect from up here in the sky uh i'm going to show you how to duplicate those control points so that we have the same application of these filters in these different places and these sorry the same control points will be duplicated into each of the individual filters that we want these control points to be duplicated in so um to get the control points that i've applied to this particular filter onto contrast only i have to tell the software i want to copy them so i would do that by using this marquee option right so basically i'm going to just click anywhere that's not on one of those control points and when i click and drag so i click outside of control point drag i'm able to enable all of these control points by creating this marquee it's just the default so click and drag i'm going to encompass all of the control points that i want copied that's going to enable them it kind of turns them on you can see these the opacity sliders are now active and once you've activated any of the control points you want to copy you move into the filter the little options filter drop down menu so to the right of infrared film there's this little three lines and a drop down you click on that you say copy control points once you've copied the control points now you can move into the different filters where right now contrast only has no control points on it and we can move into the filter itself click on that drop down menu again that's to the right of the label and say paste control points and now what we're getting is the exact same set of control points applied to contrast only right we could do the same thing to cross processing if we wanted to i think i do want to do that so let's go into that stack and say paste right and then maybe photo stylizer we'll just leave active everywhere just just for giggles let's see what happens now um from there we're going to click the brush button so we've we've sort of used these control points in tandem kind of with this brush capability so i click the brush button in the lower right corner of the nik interface it did almost the same thing as it did last time it basically generated this black layer mask and it um has our layer of pixels here i'm going to go ahead and fill in the entire layer and then i'm just going to erase this maybe off of the grass in any of our greenery right and i'm i'm sort of what i don't know i guess i'm walking you through this um pretty as precisely about as accurately as possible anyways um because it's i want to show you the difference between that one preference that we were clicking on before and that was the preference to apply these filters uh to a duplicated layer like i did before or um to have it merge down into a single layer right and then i can sort of hit upon that again anyways let's say this is we've masked in where we want and we've erased out of the areas where we don't want it to be i'm going to click the apply button when i click apply watch the layers palette on the right right so when i click apply with this particular preference on now all of the stuff that we did within that that duplicated layer of pixels it gets merged down into our background and um you know the the benefit of that in this situation is that it it makes a smaller file in terms of file size but in my mind the drawback of that is if i needed to make changes to where i've masked that in i can't do that now because it's kind of baked into the uh into the application so there's drawbacks and there's benefits right so um to to again see those changes or or or to know kind of the difference i'm gonna actually walk us back a couple steps so i'm gonna hit command z i'll just delete this layer and then i'm going to go into our preferences and change the preference so i'm going to go apply brush effect and we're going to say apply to separate layer click the ok button and now whenever we click that brush button um whenever we click the brush button we will have a separate layer and this leads me to the next tool that i want to show you and that is the last edit right so when we started playing with this image we clicked on blue monday as a recipe and that applied the particular filters that are encompassed within blue monday and then we made changes to it then we applied those changes well that stuff the last application of these different tools is kind of like recorded right and and the software knows what we did last time so if i go to this button right here last edit it's going to launch the software into the last filter stack that we just used right so everything that we did a minute ago is going to be saved here which is a really cool way of working you know different images with the same filter stack uh or also if if you maybe made a mistake or wanted to make some changes it's you just delete what you did last time and then um you know you can kind of start over again here so that's a nice feature i'll show the last edit again on a different image as well anyways i'm going to click the brush button because all of our control points are exactly where we wanted them to be i'm just going to click the brush button this time make a larger mask or larger um larger brush i'm also going to make my image a little bit smaller because that'll make it that a little easier apply that right there so say we're happy with that brush in that mask i'm going to click the apply button and voila now we have our duplicated layer still with our layer mask so it's just we've just sort of differentiated those preferences at this point and sort of walked through that brush tool hopefully that's relatively clear all right so with that let's move into our next image and our next image is our image of these metal gears or one of them is a anyways so uh before we jump into this one i'm going to crop this photo i'm going to crop it square and um then what we're going to do is convert this to a smart object and i i just want a squared image for this particular photo because i kind of prefer it i'm going to do that ahead of time so that's basically ready to go for us now uh smart objects anyone who's not familiar with smart objects uh it's a smart object is a capability built into photoshop that allows us to do lots of different things but in this case it allows us to apply smart filters and the benefit of the smart filters is that we can go back and reprocess the image afterwards right we can everything's not sort of set in stone if i if i'm working the way that we've worked so far in this webinar we are working with multiple layers so technically it's non-destructive because you can go back because of that by the way non-destructive that term in in photography in in sorry in post-processing within photography it basically means you can always get back to the original image that you've launched right um and so the benefit of that is that nothing is necessarily set in stone it's sort of parametric you can get back to it if you needed to there are a couple little drawbacks of smart objects but let's just talk about what you can do with these smart objects with smart filters so to convert our image into a smart object you can do this in two different sort of steps within photoshop you can do it when it's open here within photoshop or if you're utilizing the adobe camera raw software you can actually launch an image right into photoshop as a smart object as well anyways since we're here within photoshop to convert our image into a smart object what you'll do is move into your layers palette and then right click on your layers palette and go to convert to smart object when you convert to smart object you got to kind of let it do it clicks away it processes the image a little bit and then it figures out that it's a smart object and that's weird for some reason oh there we go my preview wasn't showing up but um you'll notice now my my layer is no longer locked as a background as it was by default and i also have this little sort of piece of paper with the folded edge this is just indicating that this is a smart object so you can see that within my layers palette now let's go ahead and jump into analog effects pro so we'll we'll do some you know so fun processing on this image as a smart object this prompt that pops up is just letting us know that we are working with a smart filter and the brush feature is one of those things that's deactivated because of the way smart objects work the brush capability from the nik selective tool is not is not active you can't use it when you're using the nyx i'm sorry the um smart object capability so that's one of those little drawbacks that i was talking about i don't think that is the end of the world for a lot of users here but anyways this warning is just kind of telling you that uh by the way there's a lot of warnings that pop up from time to time it's letting you know that settings will be changed or in this case the brush capability is you know kind of off limits or deactivated because of the um the way that smart object works once you've read this a couple times you can actually click the do not show again check box and then these won't pop back up until you update your software um again or you you know you download a new version of the software and you might need to hit those buttons one more time anyways i'm going to click the ok button i i leave those features active so that in these webinars i can kind of walk you through what's happening um we're here within analog effects pro analog effects pro is a really interesting piece of software it it basically takes you know over 200 years of technological advances in photography and it throws them out the door and it reintroduces a lot of the sort of aberrations that might occur in different facets of film and different facets of analog photography so we are on a smart object i'm just gonna let's just start out by clicking on one of these so i'm gonna click on weather dry plate it's one of the presets that's built into analog effects pro you can see the before and after by pressing that compare button there's the before there's the after i'm actually going to just add a control point here and remove the detail extraction and then also darken down just to make a little bit more of a dramatic kind of scene darken down um the shadow areas here and you know let's say we're happy with this right now so cool we did some work we clicked on a recipe or a preset made some adjustments we clicked the ok button now um the benefit of the smart object here is that of course we can go back in so i can you know if i was not working in the smart object workflow so we were working the way that we were before in the other two examples that we showed basically what we had done if we wanted to rework it we'd have to basically delete the work that we had done and start over the beauty of utilizing these smart objects is that it's listed over here sorry smart filters it's listed over here on the right within our layer and i can just double click on analog effects pro and the software will launch in any control points that we had and any filters and tools that we used they are going to be reflected here so we can easily get back in you can see here's our basic adjustments there's that control point that we used you know let's say we don't want the image in black and white now we actually just want to get you know some color back into it i can go and click on one of these other film types so now we've got this kind of muted film type effects or we could go into the photo plate you know we can do anything any adjustments we might want to or need to we can come in here and readjust them it's really a a wonderful way of working so i'm just kind of clicking on these different features different tools and turning them on or turning them off to change it i can click the ok button that renders the image back over into photoshop and then of course it's a smart object we can go back and reprocess it by double clicking on the analog effects pro so it's it's really quite a wonderful way of working um there are a couple little drawbacks like uh the brush tool works the brush tool from the nyx selection tool does not work it's deactivated and layer masks are a little bit funky because of the way smart objects work but to learn more about that if you've never heard the term smart objects before um open up a browser you could jump on youtube there's some really great explainers or just open up a browser you know jump into the search bar and type in photoshop smart objects or photoshop smart object limitations or something along those lines and you'll get all sorts of great information from that adobe does a really good job to inform viewers on how those sort of intricate bits work as well um kind of like what nick software does you know ideally with these webinars so let's do this let's move on to our last and final image i want to show you um one more thing presets sorry the meta presets so the meta presets are a newer capability built into the most recent versions of the software uh and what they do is they combine two of the different pieces of software together right so if you follow me into the nik selective tool yours might open like this it might you know the meta presets might be closed so if you click on that little carrot it opens it up and then these meta presets combine different pieces of software together different pieces of the nik collection together to create a different look so a docksicle actually uses hdrfx pro and silverfx pro dryplate utilizes silverfx pro and analog effects pro and i just know this because these little icons here are reflected up here as well they're the same so you can kind of figure that out now if i click on let's say i click on expired film right now what's going to happen is the software is going to basically apply those two presets for us so i think i click did i click on a docsicle i've already it's already slipped my mind anyways i i clicked on one of the meta presets and it automatically just applies that look for us and so that's fantastic for a lot of reasons but first of all it just does the thing for us so i think i clicked on golden haze didn't i um and so golden haze is going to apply viveza as well as colorfx pro right it kind of created a higher key image and it kind of created this kind of warm um tone overall i'm going to go ahead and tap command z on my keyboard a couple of times to get us back to the original image command z is a shortcut for undo on a mac um that would be control z on a pc if i remember correctly to to undo to go back right to undo that stuff now basically what i did by undoing is i deleted what that meta preset was doing it got rid of it right uh here's one of the cool facets that you can you can utilize when you're utilizing the meta presets as a smart object or smart filter so if you follow me back over to the right side with our layers palette right click on our layer click to convert to smart object the software converts that image to a smart object and now if i click on gold and haze it's going to do that work for us so it's going to apply the the vasa preset and then the colorfx pro preset for us but it's a smart filter did i was that the right one yeah anyways it's a smart filter and um now we can go into each of those pieces of software and kind of decide what's going on i think i clicked on purple haze a minute ago didn't i um yeah anyways it doesn't really matter um but i i got those mixed up golden haze and um purple haze let's let's delete them the tools that i just used i'll just get rid of them and i'll click on purple haze one more time um as i did that it's re-rendering the image we'll do that one more time get rid of the color effects okay so i'm going to click on purple haze this time instead of golden hay sorry about that this is going to apply the presets but it's a smart object so we can come back in and re-process the image excuse me my throat's getting dry all right so there's our golden or purple haze so um let's say we don't or we want to turn on or off a particular tool like i can go into color effects bro there's a little eye that's to the left of of the smart filter label you can click on that to hide that particular filter you don't have to just we did to take a look and if i go into viveza if i double click on the title there this is going to let me yep this is going to let me go into viveza and adjust the original adjustments that the vasa was adjusting so this is telling me that this is a smart filter smart object um this photoshop this is telling me because it's a smart object and we've got the it's gets complicated but because there's multiple smart filters applied uh this is indicating to us that we're not going to get kind of the true preview especially because i turned off the adjustment this is where it starts to get complicated and of course i think now my computer wants to crash what i was going to do here is make a couple changes within viveza let's see if it'll let me even though there's a little adjustment there yeah so let's say i warm it let's reduce some of the red let's increase some of the structure let's just darken down the brightness a little bit overall and then click the apply button and now i've made those adjustments with infuvasa but i can go and turn my color effects back on if we wanted to we can go and make adjustments to color effects and so on and so forth so the the meta presets in my opinion work really well as the smart objects smart filters if you're interested in making changes if you just like the look of the different meta presets and it does exactly what you need it to do there's no need to use the smart object because the software is just doing the thing that you want it to do and it looks great right off the bat which is you know kind of one of the keys to those meta presets they're ideally or they are designed to help folks you know know and understand that you can use silver effects pro with color effects you know you can you can combine these different pieces of software together using your own creative thought process um or you can just click on one of these presets and it makes a cool look for you it works um lori i think with that i will um throw it to you if there are any questions because i think i covered everything and um yes you did yeah you did a very good job hopefully it was thorough yes it was very good um brian does have a question about the meta presets uh he was asking about going in and changing them but his question goes a little bit further than that he says how can i save a particular nick collection program combo with certain filters and or adjustments applied without creating a smart object so yeah wait where'd that again say it again yeah it says how can i save a particular nic collection program combo with certain filters and or adjustments applied without creating a smart object okay um there there are there's kind of two ways um neither of them are built into the knick collection both of them are you know um utilizing a droplet or an action within photoshop and then one of them is um doing it manually but with presets so that that means so the question is in regards i think anyways and correct me if i'm wrong brian and lori um the question is you have a combination of different tools that you like to use and you want to save that as your own kind of meta preset right now that the user does not have the ability to save their own custom meta presets so the work around is to save whatever you like to do within color effects um as a recipe and then set it as a favorite and then you know let's say you're combining color effects with silver effects you would do the same you'd make your preset within silver effects and save it as a um you know one of your favorite uh presets and then you can just click on it here one and then two but that's a little bit manual um so the second option is to do exactly that first thing right so make a preset in color effects make a preset in silver effects and then um write an adobe photoshop action utilizing those presets that you've created i've gotten that to work before i have not tried that with the contemporary version of photoshop um in the contemporary version of color effects or link collection but i've made that work before as an action hopefully that makes sense brian but neither of them are as simple as a single click you know right okay uh robert is asking if you can quickly review creating a smart object absolutely let's jump back over into let's say like this image so um you know what let's do this two ways robert uh i'll show you how to do it when you're right here within photoshop and then i'll show you how to do it within adobe camera raw so pre-launching into photoshop and then i'll mention the benefit of doing it you know as you're launching it into adobe camera and then into the photoshop so here we have our regular kind of standard layer process it's a background it's locked and what you'll do is move over to the right side into your layers palette right click on your background or on whichever layer or combination of layers you want to convert into a smart object because robert you can actually have three or four or seven layers and you can combine them into a single smart object but that's a whole other conversation anyways you right click on your background layer here and then click on convert to smart object and then the photoshop just goes in and does that for you it adjusts the uh the kind of file that it is and it makes it a new smart object i think you can do that in layers as well i can't remember where it's listed in the yeah it's right here so in look at all the things that you can do as well so um you know much like everything else in photoshop smart objects you know we can keep it simple and do what we've been doing or you can investigate much further and there's all sorts of different options that you can jump into um anyways that's that smart object now okay so let's close this out and i'm going to show you what you can do from adobe camera raw if we launch this into photoshop again just as a raw file adobe camera raw is going to launch um if we wanted to open this as a smart object from adobe camera raw you go into the preferences at the very bottom of your adobe camera raw software and um you can click on this little check box right here that says open as a smart object by the way um my files i opened them as 12 megapixel files because they're good size for demoing um so that things don't take as long this is a 30 megapixel file though so i just want to point that out so we're dealing with 16 bits because it's going to be better for post-processing in the long run in terms of getting more information and having more to adjust but i did res them down so that we um have a faster operating for our demo anyways robert yeah it was robert click on this little check box open in photoshop as smart object click ok the benefit of doing this from adobe camera raw is that now our non-destructive smart object process goes all the way back goes all the way to the raw processing which technically means you can open back up into adobe camera raw and access the original information which is pretty darn cool like if you double click on the little icon in the lower right corner adobe camera raw opens back up you know we can make our changes and that's going to be reflected um that's going to be reflected within our photoshop smart object it just re-renders it and then we can go on into our nik collection so it's it's really kind of cool um okay lori i think i got that one yes you did get that one okay so last question but it's kind of a combination two people are asking questions here uh number one alec would like to see you demonstrate in vivesa how you create a recipe okay and when you're in there um can you also let me find this can you show how you can copy control points from one filter to the or one recipe to the next you know how you can use some of the control points yes okay let's see um so i'm going to open viveza it's going to warn me that it's a smart object lori what was the first question the second one pertained to um control points being applied to different presets exactly so the first one is uh he just wanted to know how you can create a recipe oh got it yeah okay so in the visa we that that's where there's you know some differences in terminology color effects pro has recipes because it's combining different filters together the rest of them i i believe the rest of the nik collection we they're just called presets um but no no big deal it's just i don't understand what he's saying um i just want to make sure that i don't confuse other folks so um let's say we do some adjustments here i'm going to like do some funky stuff i i wouldn't use viveza for converting from color to black and white but maybe to create like a subdued um bleach bypass kind of effect where you've reduced some color um and then added some structure and some contrast so let's say we really like this as an effect and then um you know we place a control point or two because that's an important facet uh let's place one over here and one over here we can save this as a preset um with these control points i'm going to make some kind of adjustment let's let's increase the saturation back into the sky so now we have a bleached foreground but um saturation within the sky maybe even brighten this one up just a touch so there's a difference of tone yep place that right there okay so let's say we love this we're going to click save preset now when i click save preset um with viveza there's this nice little option with this checkbox that says save with control points so i'm going to call this bleach bypass with sky control points or something like that just so i know what it is click the save button i want to thank everybody for joining us today we are at the top of the hour uh dan thank you for this webinar and we do hope that you'll join us again yeah jeez i didn't even realize that we're at the top of the hour thank you lori um but yeah ladies and gentlemen have an absolutely fantastic uh holiday here if you're in the united states thanksgiving um we i'm gearing up for one last day of work before a couple days off and i'm pretty excited about that because i'm hopefully gonna do some shooting this week some photography um thanks lori thank you everybody have a really great week enjoy [Music]

Channel: Nik Collection

Views: 1,949

Keywords: Nik Collection, Nik Collection by DxO, Silver Efex Pro, Color Efex Pro, Dfine, Editing software, Lightroom, PhotoShop, HDR, nik sofware, analog efex pro, viveza, sharpener pro, photoshop plugins 2021, photoshop plugins, nik collection 4, nik collection 4 tutorial, nik collection, nik collection tutorial photoshop, nik collection for photoshop 2021, nik collection bangla tutorial in adobe photoshop, nik collection photoshop

Id: FNptsbnwG1Y

Length: 55min 32sec (3332 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 29 2021