Introducing New & Creative Features in Nik Collection 4

[Music] well good morning good afternoon and good evening everybody welcome to a very exciting dxo webinar i'm your host photojoseph and i get to take you through the new nip collection tour which i am personally very excited about nick has been a part of my digital imaging life for um well let's just say longer than i'd care to admit because then that would be admitting that i'm old but i have been using this software for a very very long time it is fantastic and it is really exciting to see this evolving over the years and now of course the dxo has their hands on it um it has just progressively gotten better and better and this is a nice little upgrade that we've seen here today so and let's just talk about the agenda for today this is a top level overview we're going to be covering kind of everything from a pretty high level we're not going to go super deep into any one thing because we do just have an hour here but we are going to cover as much as we possibly can this presentation today is assuming that you have not yet learned much of anything about the knit collection if you see things today's demo that you're like oh i've already seen that already watched your video apologies for a little bit of repetition here but i will be using different images so hopefully it will all be new and exciting for you but we do want to make sure that anybody who's watching this regardless whether they've watched every training video out there or none at all get to understand everything that is new about this so no assumptions today so the nick collection here is basically what we're going to be covering today i'll just read through these bullet points we're going to talk about how you save and this is not the order that the demo is but we'll talk about how you can save presets with control points and even name your control points which is absolutely huge adjusting the color tolerance of control points we're going to see how you can now adjust control points in a whole new way which is really really exciting something called meta presets that applies multiple different filters at once very cool to play with uh the the ability to recall the the last change may at the last effect made in a filter if you forgot to save it as a preset um let's see here oh yeah new features like clear view and some new sim film simulations inside of the um inside of the black and white tool software effects pro we'll see some new presets and of course we're gonna also see some new layout uh a new interface rather of uh two of the redesigned tools so let me let me start by stepping back a little bit and give you kind of a little bit of a history if you will and just talk at a high level about what's going on here so the the net collection of course been around for a very long time and in 2012 i believe is the year if i got that right the nick collection was acquired from a company called nick software that originally developed it was acquired by google then google didn't do anything with it for quite quite a number of years dxo acquired it from google in i think 2017 and then started working on it now the thing is that even at the point of 2017 and then beyond when when dxo was working on it they were working on the original code that in some cases was over 20 years old and so it is time to start over it is time to rewrite these filters from scratch and that is the process that has now begun with nick iv not every filter has gotten the full treatment but silver effects pro and vasa have both been completely rewritten from the ground up all new code giving you all the same features obviously adding a bunch to it modernizing everything modernizing the ui and changing quite a few things about it and so we're going to focus today primarily on those two tools because that's where those are the ones that look the newest and have all the new capabilities however that said the other tools while they have not been updated to the new interface into the new code base they do still have some new functionality especially when it comes to the ability to uh to do the meta presets and the ability to copy and paste your settings inside of lightroom classic so there's a lot that is new among all of them but we're going to primarily focus on silver effects and visa because that's where the biggest meat of the new stuff is uh let's see here um i think with that setting that's that's a good enough starting point i think yeah let's just let's just jump into this all right let me get set up here we're gonna jump over to that is not the right photo uh we're actually gonna eventually come to this photo but not yet i want to start today in photoshop and within photoshop i'm going to open my notes up here i'm going to open up my first photo to work with which is that is that the right there we go that's the right one um here we go this guy right here this fall leaves photo so this is a raw picture this is this is a little bit older one from my collection this was shot in a canon eos 5d back 10 ish plus years ago and this photo as you can see is uh is quite it's quite colorful at least it could be once we're done with it now there's lots of greens and yellows and reds in here and i want to take this into the visa to have a little bit of fun with it now when i first open it it is a raw file we're in photoshop so it is opening into adobe camera raw i'm going to do my base processing here and open this up and actually at this point i want to pause and and talk a little bit more about what i will be doing throughout this demo i'm going to be showing you how to use these tools from a variety of situations not every one of these situations is going to apply to every user once of course we get into nick then it's all the same for everybody but as far as how we get into the knit collection i want to show you a variety of different ways so we're going to use photoshop with raw files as smart objects and not as smart objects we're going to use lightroom classic and i'm also going to show you how using lightroom cc which does not have a plug-in architecture so you can't actually use a plug-in i'm going to show you how you'd use it as a lightroom cc user and when we get to that part of it that is that lightroom cc even though that's what i'm going to use this same idea will apply to basically any other app that you're using that does not have a plug-in architecture there's a lot of different apps out there that people use some have plug-in architectures some don't the net collection might work and some of them might not it is designed to work within the adobe space and their plug-in architecture but like i said some other apps support it some don't i don't have a definitive list of what does and doesn't work but i'm going to show you how if it doesn't work the way you would like it to in your app that how you can work around that and still take full advantage of these tools right so with that said we're starting with a raw photo open an acr i'm just going to hit the auto button do a little auto balancing on there and i'm just going to click on open this time i'm not going to open it as a smart object we'll do that later i'm just going to open this and by by opening this and not doing it as a smart object what this means is that the image that we're seeing here has now been rendered out as pixels this is a permanent image if you will permanent pixels anything that i do to these pixels will be destructive now you'll see when we jump into the plugins that even though it is destructive the plugin will duplicate the layers so i can always go back i can even brush between them but the uh the basic understanding here is that we are working on a pixel-based file at this point so anything i do will effectively be permanent all right so that said i've got this picture selected here i'm going to jump into the vase and by the way i always like to point this out so this is something called the nik selective tool it's just a little floating palette that has the has all the tools on it you know you can make this smaller if you like having these buttons up here and you want to make a little smaller on there but quite often what happens is people close this and then have no idea how to get back to it so the way you do that is you go to the file menu and then you go to the automate menu and from there you choose next selective tool two in this case and that will reopen that window for you so so there's that uh just quick tour of this little box here as well this box itself isn't new this was introduced with the previous version but if you want to get into some of the presets on these if you click on the little triangle here it'll show you filters and recipes that you have marked as favorites and i actually haven't marked any as favorites right now so we're not seeing them but if i had any as favorites you would see those listed under there and that goes for any of these that has the disclosure triangle on there so that's how that works um otherwise you just click the button to open it so i'm going to take this one into vasa and like i said v-vasa is the first of the completely redesigned tools so i want to give you a tour of this i'm gonna go ahead and turn off my camera right now and i'll try to remember to turn it back on as we jump into the q a as well okay so here we are in the vasa this is the new look the new ui first of all on the left-hand side you'll see presets which actually presets themselves are new to evasa that's not something we had before so our presets are on the left across the top you have a compare and your zoom button so let me just apply a preset here real quick and then if i do the compare if i click and hold on this top button it does a before and after but i can also do a split view which is quite nice so i can do a split view there and i can even rotate that to show me the split however i'd like in there plus you have a side-by-side view so you can see your before and afters side by side which can certainly be really handy just depending on what you're doing but for now i'm just going to go ahead and leave it into the traditional viewing mode then you have your zoom buttons it's set to fit right now if i go to fill it will well in this case it doesn't get much bigger but if it was a vertical picture it would kind of fill the edges with that then of course you have your one to one zoom to get really close in here um you can pan around by holding down your space bar and panning around or using the navigator up here and then you've got your various zoom ratios here so kind of a you know two to one three to one or one to two whatever you'd like in there and when you choose one of those that button becomes the the default for that so as i can easily toggle back and forth between that i'm of course working on a pretty low resolution screen relatively speaking it's only 1920 by 1080 for the purposes of this broadcast but normally on your screen you'd see things would look a little bit differently just because they'd be smaller ui elements on your big screen anyway so we'll put that back into fit and then on the right hand side you have all of your controls so starting at the top you've got a little loop here which you can toggle to get out of the way if you don't want to this allows you to see up nice and close whatever you want to look at plus it allows you to pin any portion of this if you want to always stay focused on one portion of that you can pin that in then underneath that you have your histogram which of course gives you the full histogram view of the image which you can collapse that as well if you don't want it so let's just free up some space here i'll close up the loop i'll go ahead and leave the histogram open and i'm going to turn on just for a moment here my hot and cold areas which will highlight you can see highlighting in blue on there or if i brought this up highlighting in red and green and eventually i'm clipping showing me the overexposed or the underexposed areas by showing them in that solid blue or solid red or other solid colors in there and if you want to hide that you just click on those guys to turn that off i'm going to go ahead and leave that off for now so then we get into the adjustments you see here here we have first our global adjustments so really important thing to remember about vivesa is the vivisa is both a global adjustment tool and a local adjustment tool meaning that i can do effects that affect the entire image or i can localize those effects to one very specific small part of the image so totally up to you you have control of both and right now we're looking at the global adjustments you see it says global right there once again i can collapse that out of the way if i want to but from here any adjustments that i make do affect the entire image you'll see in here a lot of different controls you've got you know your traditional ones you'd expect to find your brightness contrast saturation and so on you can adjust the red green and blue channels individually even do full hue rotation in here and then you have selective tones highlight mid tone shadows and black points and for those who may have used viveza in the past that is actually new we did not have selective tone adjustments before so now that's there so that's another new feature in here underneath that is white balance once again another new feature for viveza this is because we're not working with a raw file this is not a um this is not a true white balance in the sense of raw files are retranslating the white balance think of this more like a white balance shift a color shifting tool this is going to show us how to shift the white balance uh or this is gonna allow us to shift the white balance warmer or cooler in there so that's what that is doing there and then at the very bottom of that we get to the selective adjustments i guess there's actually another one under here the selective curves in here if you want to but um we're not even going to play with that we're just going to go and hide that in there we're going to work with the selective adjustments primarily and this is our control points or also known as u points which i actually only recently learned the name u points is the letter u called u points it comes from the original source this is pointing like you point at something and it selects that area that's actually kind of clever um anyway so that's what the control points aka u points are i'm going to end up calling them both because i just i'm so used to calling them u points but that is what they are okay so that's your ui tour at the bottom you can see there's the the apply button in there and i'm gonna go ahead and reset this let's go back to neutral on here restart the image over and let's let's have some fun with it so let's see here so this image i'll actually add a little bit of contrast to start let's just just get a little bit of global contrast in there kind of riching it up a little bit and now let's jump right into color adjustments so i'm going to go to my control points grab a control point and i want to enhance the green of these trees right here here's how this works i click on one area and anything that i change now well now that i've dropped it first of all we see all these adjustments that have come up for the area that i've dropped i'm going to take the saturation and bring it way up and you can see that this brought up the saturation of that area let's actually zoom in closer let's go like a one to two zoom should do it there we go you can see that the green there has gotten quite a bit more saturated as i toggle before and after or if i want to see just what that control point is done let's toggle that on and off so you can see that it has increased the saturation of the green but we can also see the kind of yellowish in the stone and in the foliage here that that is also being uh having the saturation increased as well so what if i only want to saturate the green that's that's what i want to focus on is just the green well this is the power of the control points the ability to isolate what area you want to adjust but right now if i just drag this around and i try to figure out am i adjusting just the green or what am i adjusting here could be a little confusing as to what you're actually affecting which is why we have the mask view now when you go to the mask view now you can see exactly what is being affected you are seeing the mask that is being built in real time and now for the first time we really see what the u points or the control points are doing so let me step back once again and explain the idea here what's happening when you adjust an image globally you are of course adjusting the entire image the whole image is getting affected if you adjust an image just forget about viveza for a second let's just say you're in photoshop and you want to brighten a face one of the ways that you can do that is to make a new layer of the image and brighten that whole layer right so the whole image becomes brighter and then brush a mask over the face so you are effectively drawing a mask between the bright layer and the dark layer um i guess i should turn my camera on if i'm going to actually look at the screen and wave my hands to illustrate to what i'm talking about you would have your background layer that's your original your top layer that you've made brighter and then in between those you're going to brush in a mask and that mask is going to be over the face so that you don't see the brighter part anywhere except the face this is just one way of doing things in photoshop or any image editing tool at that point you are creating a mask and if you were to look at just the mask the area that you want to see the top layer see that brighter version of the image would be white anywhere that you don't want to see the the brighter image the top layer would be black and any shade of gray in between that is going to show some level of that photo the darker the gray the less the closer to black let's say the less of the top image you'll see the closer the white the more of the top image you'll see all the way up to where white is 100 black is zero percent and then of course every shade of gray in between so that's a mask right and that is a mask and it's simplest form in photoshop but now here in vivesa what we're doing with these control points is we're building a mask in real time based off of the chrominance and the luminance of where you've dropped that control point so the easy example is this is if i drop a control point on something that is dark green then the area that is part of that mask with that mask that gets built will be based off of parts of the image that are similarly dark so similar luminance level and similarly green the similar chrominance level so luminance and chrominance color values and brightness values is effectively what we're talking about here so when you look at this image here and i go in and i'm dragging this control point around we see the mask that gets built in real time based off of the chrominance and the luminance of where i've dropped it so if i just hide that mask view for a second you can see that it is on these green leaves on here if i turn that back on you can see that the green leaves are being primarily selected they're the brightest white and anything that's farther away the farther away it gets from that brightness value and that chromis value becomes darker values in here and is less affected so it to start if i want to affect just the green leaves i need to get my control point into a position that is selecting the green leaves right this is not the right position that is selecting something in the background we can toggle this back off to see what it is it's kind of selecting the shadow area there so that is not going to primarily select my leaves but if i move this over like so and get it in just the right spot now it is primarily affecting my leaves great but you can see from the mask it is not just the leaves it is also affecting or picking up a whole bunch of other stuff around here so this is where the new color selectivity sliders come in where i can restrict or expand the mask that is being built based off the luminance and the chromatids by saying give me less or more luminance and less or more chrominance so here's what i'll do i'll take the luminance and i'm going to increase the limiting think of it like that you're kind of increasing the limit of this and as i bring that up we're seeing less and less of the image being selected so more of it going to black less of it going to white and the stuff that is white is getting brighter white so it's more selected and then the chrominance as well and there's no right or wrong way to do this it's really a case of every image you have to adjust the sliders to find what works for that particular image and if i just want to affect those green leaves in there then somewhere around here is going to select just those green leaves and now i can also expand the the mask in here so i want to select a broader area of that green or a narrower area of that green and i'm going to select it right about so maybe i'll go a little bit broader on there i don't want to be quite so isolated i'll back this off just a little bit get a little bit more of the green in there but now i have a mask that is primarily those green leaves so now when i get out of the mask view as i adjust my saturation my brightness whatever on that you can see that it is primarily affecting those leaves and here's here's a great thing to show like if i bring up the brightness here it's obviously overdone but you can see how restrictive this is in fact let's just bring it way up there you can see just how restrictive it is so this is another great example of why you want to toggle back and forth between your mask view and your regular view so let's just say and this is clearly overdone but let's just say for the sake of the demo that i did actually want to make the green this bright at this point it looks fake because forgetting about the fact that it's so bright but it looks fake because this part of the green is super bright and this isn't like it's just it's too much of a disparity it's too much of a difference so now with the mask view turned off if i back the luminance and the chroma is down the range of what is selected will expand and i'll get more of that image into the into the selection area so that again allows you to adjust the mask either while you're looking at the mask or why you're looking at the final image and it's a balance you need to do both so let me just get this the way i want it which is to take up the saturation uh quite a bit take up the brightness just a little bit and um again i will go ahead and adjust this with the mask view hidden and that's looking pretty good so let me just toggle that off and you can see the difference in there it's a it's a very nice subtle difference over those greens making those really pop all right that's cool so now i want to name this i've just done this control point i'm going to name this control point green leaves because we now have the ability to rename them so we see that's just just double click on there and off you go and that's that okay cool now let me do another part of the image let's go up to the red leaves up here now these red leaves are quite unique among the whole picture if i zoom back out there's not a whole lot that's red but i really want to make that red stand out so kind of like i did here to the green let's do that let's zoom back in and i will jump over to the control points again just grab a new control point drop that into place my kind of go to i'm going to hide the global adjustment so i don't have to scroll as much there we go my default is always to go straight into the mask view i want to make sure that i've dropped it onto a good selection point it looked like i had a good point on there again i can change the size of that restrict what is being selected in there but i don't want to restrict it too much maybe a little bit of chrominance maybe not a whole lot of luminance in there and that will do a do a good job of that so let's find right about there cool hide that mask and now once again i'm going to take my saturation up a little bit and actually add a little bit into the red channel on there just pump a little bit more red into that and maybe darken it a little bit it's kind of like weirdly a little bit too bright so i'm going to darken that just uh just a hair there now let's zoom out and see what that looks like as i toggle that on and off there we go very nice adding a nice little bit of bright red popping into there i'm going to go ahead and rename that one to red leaves as well great all right let's do one more adjustment i want to do one over the waterfall area here however this adjustment i don't want it to be localized to just the rock just the water or just the green or something i want something that affects this whole area here so how would i do that let me drop a control point down here under the rock and make this a bit bigger and let's go into the mask view again and here you can see that it's like okay they're selecting just the water there it's primarily the rock this other part of the rock and so on but that's not what i want i want this whole area to be affected well let's go back to my adjustment sliders or my color selectivity sliders and remember if i drag these up i can restrict this and get very narrow right if i just wanted to affect the water i mean look at that perfect right just the water but here's what else i can do i can back this off and go negative go the other direction and get to a point where there's no more mask this is another new feature and this is kind of funny this seems like it's not that big of a deal but this is actually a really really big deal we have never had in the knit collection the ability to add a an effect with a control point that wasn't in a mask we never had the ability to do a simple radial gradient in the knit collection and now we do which personally i actually really am excited about because sometimes you don't want it to be isolated you just want something that affects that whole area so that's what i've got here so i've backed this off now and now with that is just a plain old normal radial gradient mask now i want to do let's see here maybe i want to bring up the brightness in there just a little bit what i really want to do is bring up the structure i want to really crank the structure up of that part of the image in there to just really enhance the the rocks the water just everything that's in that center view so as i toggle that on and off we can see the difference in there and it is subtle i recognize that and of course looking at this through the webinar interface it might not be super dramatic and obvious but it is a subtle yet beautiful change and i think that's an important point to make as well that when you're doing this kind of work of quite often it's not about being big and dramatic it is subtle and the subtle things are what makes the difference so that's all done there i'm going to rename this one as well i'm going to call this waterfall and just so i don't forget i'm going to call this a radial grad so that i know that that is affecting the whole thing and it's not a a u point building a mask okay so now i've got three of these control points made i've got a green leaves a red leaves and a waterfall i have another photo similar to this and i want to apply the same look to this i'm happy with this but i want to apply this to another photo so i'm going to save this as a preset i click on save preset we'll call this fall leaves and fall leaves 2 and i'm going to choose to save this with the control points this is enormous we now have the ability to save our control points here in the net collection now i know some of you watching this have been using this for a long time go hold on a second we always have that capability you just had to know the super secret handshake do it which was command option click or control i don't even i always forget i always forgot what it was because like it's just i don't it's a secret um now it's not a secret now it is revealed in the ui you simply click on save with control points and now those control points will get saved with the preset so let's go ahead and enable that so that's on fall leaves 2 i'm going to hit save now i'm going to apply this it's going to render that back into photoshop and as i promised you while it is destructive on this layer of pixels here if i hide this we'll see the original image behind it so there's my original version so if i wanted to at this point i could actually enable a mask view in here bring up a brush tool and and do like um you know do some kind of a big brush on there oops that's not what i want to do some kind of a big brush effect on there but that's not that's not what i want i don't need to do that um i just wanted to apply that effect so there we go all right so that effect is applied there now like i said i have a second photo so let me open another photo second fall leaves photo here let's open this one up and i'm going to go through the same process in here i'll hit the auto adjust in raw this is actually a little bit on the dark side i feel so i'm going to brighten this up just a little bit and that's fine and then i'll click on open and that is now open there we go i'll click on viveza that's going to launch the viveza and then from there i'm going to apply the preset that i just saved which has my control points in it as well so down here under custom we can see my presets fall leaves two the one i just did i click to apply that and it applies but here's the thing hold on my green leaves aren't exactly right my red leaves aren't right well of course not because the control point is not necessarily where you intended look here there's my red control point they're up here in the yellow leaves and the green one is on the green leaves but is it really in the right spot well that's the beauty of this is i can of course move these wherever i need and to ensure that i'm moving and moving the right one i can look at my list here there's my green leaves control point my red leaves one and my waterfall one so i can go to my red leaves one and right now it's you know it's easy and obvious which one is which but imagine if you had dozens of these having these labels in there super super handy let's go ahead and zoom in close to that red leaf one and get that into the right position not two to one that's too far let's do one to two zoom on there um hello there we go one to two zoom and let's pan up here to the top of the plant nope yes nope yep there we go and i'll turn on the mask view for that and i can see there like my position wasn't exactly right so i can grab that control point kind of move it into place let's just say right about there that looks pretty good and let's hide that and then let's go down to the green leaves section let's go up to this portion of the leaves scene there there we go enable the green leaves mask and you can see there it's not quite the right position so i'm going to once again reposition this and get it into the right spot and let's get that into just the right position here but let's just get this close enough right there and then remember i'm not locked into the chrome it's limited settings i'd set before so if i want to expand this out a little bit i can go ahead and do that that was just a starting point that preset so that's looking pretty good there let's go ahead and jump out of the mask and see how that's affecting the image coming back there we go we can see that bright green that's happening on the image there now let's go ahead and zoom out and i will reposition the waterfall one if that's needed so let's see where's the waterfall one there it is right there i can just reposition that remember that one's a radial gradient so i'll make that one a little bit bigger right there and there is my new final result so now you know this might be a good chance to do a side-by-side view where i'll go into the side-by-side split view and let's rotate that because we've got two vertical images on here and um and there we go and you can see the nice before and after there looking lovely all right i'm gonna go ahead and apply this and that is now going to render that into that image as well so there's the second way to to go about uh sorry the first way to go about applying a look to your images if you're using photoshop open them as a not as a smart object just open as a regular photo and off you go and this would apply if you're opening a raw through acr and then just clicking open or you're opening a tiff file or you're opening a jpeg file it's all the same idea here so next we're going to look at working with smart objects before before we do that i see a couple questions coming up so we're going to jump over to those um first question will you show access from photo lab 4 actually no that's not part of my agenda today i'm going to have to build that into another demo in the future but i am not planning to go from photo lab 4 today mark what is structure great question structure is localized contrast which probably doesn't help anymore the idea behind the idea being structure before we talk about how it works or what it actually does the idea behind structure is that it adds detail into the fine texture points of an image so if you have a brick wall it's a really good example of this a brick wall has a whole lot of texture on it if you look closely at a brick wall it's got all these little bumps and grooves and shadow and highlight areas on it really really textured the structure slider will enhance that texture it brings it out to be a little bit a little bit more prominent in this video and this sample here i was putting texture on the rock and on the water so all that texture in the rock becomes more prominent the texture in the water becomes more prominent okay so it's basically taking texture and making it more contrasty more more prominent it looks it's the right i keep coming back by the way but that's the right word so how is it doing it it is doing localized contrast which means instead of normal contrast takes the black point and the white point of the whole image and it stretches it out so everything that's dark gets darker everything is bright gets brighter that's contrast localized contrast which is what structure is is it's looking specifically around the edges of something so imagine let's keep this really really simple you've got hair blonde hair against a blonde hair just like i have against a dark background a black background make it super simple so you've got this really bright light colored hair against a dark background if you were to zoom in super close to the image and look along the edges of the hair that is going to be a very high contrast shift from the bright blonde hair to the and we're zoomed in like you know 1000 here bright blonde hair to dark background that line right there that edge right there is where the contrast is expanded when you do structure it is enhancing the making the darks darker and the brights brighter right along that edge so it makes that that object stand out more from the background without actually making the object brighter and the background darker which is what regular contrast would do now amplify this to something that is as textured as this rock face here and every little nuanced little bit of texture on there a little bit of darker green moss and the brighter white rock and so on everywhere where there's a contrast between the bright and the dark becomes more prominent because it only enhances the contrast around the edge of it and that's happening at a very much of a subpixel level it is very very fine detail enhancing so the whole image doesn't become brighter and darker higher contrast just the edges around the details do and you end up with all that texture being more prominent so that is what structure is doing hopefully that answers that question robert what is chrominance chrominance is color chroma or chrominance is color so luminance is brightness chrominance is color that's it okay uh let's move on so now hide my camera again now i'm going to do a smart object so let me just close these two photos here and open open open open uh this photo here all right let me open the photo this chap all right and i've already got done a little bit of color adjustment on this image the way that i want it we have this fun street portrait photo and this photo i'm going to open as an object not as pixels but as an object so what does that mean to open it as a smart object you notice there's a new little icon that shows up down here in the corner as a smart object i can at any time double click on that image and go back into acr and so let's say i want to make this black and white just using acr forget about any of the net collection for a second and i click ok and it's going to do that renders out as black and white and then i make some changes to this let's just like add levels to this and i change the levels on this image let's do it like that okay cool and then i go yeah you know i really didn't want this in black and white well i can double click on this go back into acr get out of the black and white mode and then now have that back to color and there's my levels applied to it let's get rid of those levels because that was hideous um so now what i've done is i have totally non-destructively edited the image going all the way back to the base pixels all the way back not even base pixels back to the base raw data and even though i've made adjustments to it i can go back and change things at any time that is what a smart object does since this is a smart object any nick filter that i apply gets applied as a smart filter which means i can go back in and re-edit that filter at any time i can even go back in and re-edit the raw image at any time so let's take advantage of the new meta presets to do this so here's the meta presets meta presets are combination of multiple presets applied at once with a single click and you can see which preset's going to be applied which filter rather is going to be applied by looking at the little icons here so like for example this oops sorry this one is going to apply in hdr effects along with a silver effects pro this one is viveza and colorfx pro and so on and if you want to know what these are going to do there's a little question right next to it and it gives you a basic description of what it is going to look like so that's fun all right so we can go ahead and um and start applying these and just seeing what we get so i don't know i'm going to try one let's try purple haze let's see what this looks like so i click on this notice now that the interface of the nik collection will not launch we're seeing the processing dialog over on the right hand side here on the layer stack we're going to see the results so there it's been added as a smart filter we see colorfx pro and vivasa have both been added if you look in the bottom left corner you'll see the progress bar saving out and it eventually renders out and finishes and there is our final effect so this is a final effect of two different filters being applied at once but because they're smart objects i can go in and i can change these at any time so this has applied color effects pro 4 and v vasa let's see what vivesa has done to this so i double click on vason here it's going to open up and we're going to see only the viveza effect so this is what was done within vvvasa we'll just put that in and you can see that it has done this kind of purpley effect on there compared to the original and i can change this now i can go oh that i like that but um a little bit too a little bit too cool let's kind of warm this up a little bit so we're going to take it this way we're going to warm this whole image up just a little bit probably helps if we turn on the white balance actually enable that bravo open up there we go okay so there i've got that little bit of a color temperature shift that i've added into there and i go okay that's cool i like that better than what i started with so now i'm going to go ahead and apply that now it's going to render this back to back into photoshop rendering from the original raw file so we're going to see everything re-render reprocess again so this is a slow process because you are working where every change you make has to get reprocessed from the base level all the way up but it is the most flexible way to work so like let's say now that haze is a little bit stronger than i would like so let's go ahead and go into color effects pro 4 because apparently that's where the haze is coming from and from here we'll look for where that haze is coming from and make some changes to it so here we're in color effects pro you can see now that this is the original interface so we're not seeing the new ui in here this this filter has not been rewritten yet um but it is obviously still working within the net collection and more importantly working within the meta filters so this has a graduated fog fog opacity on here it's actually the only thing that's been applied so let's just take the opacity of that down a little bit it's just a little bit too strong in there in fact let's take a control point and drop one on his hat and just kind of take the opacity of that down a little bit on his hat so it's not quite so strong perfect dig that hit okay and once again it's going to re-render back on top of that whole thing now of course if i want to try another meta preset i can do that let's take this image here i'm going to hit command j to duplicate that let me make a little bit more room here there we go so now i have two copies of this um we're going to delete all the smart filters on that top layer so now we're back to the original for this one and now with that selected let's try a different uh different effect let's do expired films let's see what that looks like so i'll hit the expired film one and um and we will see what that looks like so by the way folks i want to let you know as well that we have an absolutely enormous audience today and there are a ton of questions coming in there's just no way i'm going to be able to get to all of them i do apologize for that i will say if you have questions that don't get answered today we're going to do more webinars you can always hit me up on twitter i can't promise you that i'll get to your question but i will try photojoseph on twitter you can also try dropping questions on my youtube videos where i've done youtube videos about the net collection that's another good place to ask them um there's just so many people here there's no way we're gonna get to all of them sorry but i will do my best okay so here's a new look right here's another look this was what was it expired film um another look applied to that same photo and now i have two versions of that photo in the same stack and again at any point i can go all the way back into the raw level of this and adjust that image at the raw level if i wanted to like maybe i want to do a little highlight recovery because the uh the highlights on this hat we're getting blown out a little bit so we'll pull the highlights down a little bit there we go we got some detail back in his hat hit okay and it's going to render back in cool okay whoa we are running out of time already this is unbelievable there's so much to do okay we're gonna go into lightroom classic next in lightroom classic i'm gonna show you an incredible feature where we can copy and paste adjustments from one photo to another you think well lightroom does that of course lightroom has the ability to copy and paste adjustments what's the big deal there well it has the ability to copy and paste its own adjustments but not filters so if you are a lightroom user you know that the ability to copy and paste adjustments is awesome right you're say a wedding photographer travel photographer whatever you want to have a consistent look across all of your photos copy and paste adjustments is huge then you'll probably also know that as soon as you add a third-party filter on top of the image and the whole thing falls apart you no longer have that capability now let's go over to lightroom classics so here we are lightroom classic all right so as i was saying you if you use a third-party filter suddenly the whole thing breaks because you can't copy and paste the filter look except that now we can so i've got three photos here obviously wedding type photos wedding photo and i want to apply a couple of filters and i've already done some basic adjustments in here in lightroom which i've synced across so i've got my lightroom basic adjustments in place but now i want to do something with these in one of the knit filters so i'm going to start by taking this into vasa 3. so this is going to be our first edit point you'll notice here you get your standard dialogue you would always get when you open a raw image into a nic collection filter or any filter in lightroom you have to convert it it can't send a raw file over so you're going to edit a copy of this it's going to render out what it's going to render out in this case a tiff file so go ahead and let that render it is now going to render out that image as a tiff and then open that tiff inside of viveza which is conveniently opened on the wrong screen let's see there we go all right let's get out of the split view here now in this case um you know just you do your thing you you adjust the image the way you want to but i'm just going to apply a preset on here real quick um which if i look at my notes figure out which preset i was going to do is uh let's do let's do fill light okay we're gonna do this fill light adjustment on here preset on there um let that apply there we go so that's applied that it's gonna brighten it up a little bit uh cool all right so there's my adjustment not worried about making this image look amazing i just want to apply a filter so i've applied this vivaza 3 look to it cool i'm going to go ahead and apply this so again in a real world you've done a lot of work to this you've come up with your own custom look on that that's cool so there's that that tiff image but now i want to apply a second filter to this this time i'm going to jump into analog effects pro and i'm going to edit the original now remember i'm currently looking at the tiff file you can see down here it says tiff i don't want to duplicate this to edit another copy i just want to edit the original so i'm back into that one tip otherwise i'm going to end up with you know multiple multiple tips in here which i don't want so we're going to open this into analog effects pro and i'm going to grab a let's see here let's go for classic camera 7. let's see i'm going to add this classic camera seven look to it okay so this is my classic camera seven um i'm gonna turn off the dirt and scratches because i don't want that on there and you know maybe i make some other adjustments to this but um if you just take this kind of fade that out a little bit let's actually add a bit of a more different look to it a little bit of bluish on there and cool so there's my look there's the final look that i want so i saved this so i have now applied two different knit collection filters to this photo and once lightroom finishes thinking it will show us the end result of those two let's go back and forth here sometimes switching to the library module helps there we go and now we can see the final result of that so there's the original and there is the affected one i want to now apply this same look to these two photos here so here's what i do i go to the one that i've just worked on right click on that choose export copy and apply parameters from here i want to copy viveza in analog effects pro so i copy vvvasa and it tells me just copied it from there and then i copy analog effects pro and it's copied it from there in fact i had previously done one of the color effects which is still on the clipboard we can see that here but we're just going to do those to analog enviva click ok those two effects are now copied onto the clipboard i'm now going to select both of these images here both of the other images go back into that same new menu export copy and apply parameters and now i'm going to apply the adjustments remember i already have three of these on the clipboard right now but i'm not going to use color effects i'm going to use vasa in analog effects i'm going to click apply on viveza first because i want to apply them in the same order that i did before these are going to require editing a copy of course because it's a raw image to start with so i hit run and notice i have two images selected so this is going to simultaneously to both photos render them out as tiffs and apply that viveza look to it then i will select those two tiff files and jump into analog effects and do the same thing so while that is rendering out i'm going to uh jump over the questions because we are so running short on time on here and let's see here this question is when you open a file in photoshop and apply adjustments from vivesa or colorfx pro after you're done you have the option to save as if you rename the file doesn't the original raw file remain unchanged unless you ask it to apply change the original file okay so remember a raw file is impossible to edit when you're looking at your dot cr2 or rw2 or any app or whatever that raw file cannot be edited so no matter what you do you're never overwriting that you would have to save as a psd or a tiff file or whatever this is more about the layer itself in photoshop so once you've gone through acr and you're in photoshop with that pixel-based layer because you hit open not open a smart object that pixel-based layer if you were to effect anything on those pixel-based layer and then you know save your file close it whatever you can no longer undo there's no going back there's no getting back to that so that's the destructive aspect of it so once you're in photoshop if you did a save as then of course you would still have the original previous version but you still have your original raw always regardless so i hope that answers that question i hope that's what you were asking okay so now that has been applied i'm going to click ok so i can look at the two new images so there's the two versions see with the viveza look to it now i'll select both of those that i applied the viveza look to right click go to export copy and apply parameters and now i'm going to apply the analog effects pro and this time once again just as before i'm going to apply it to the original so i'm not getting multiple multiple copies click run and now it's going to apply to those two while that's rendering another question what percentage does this smart object layer increase a file size is it a method you use regularly uh second part of the question yeah if i'm going to spend if i'm going to go to photoshop to do something i am almost guaranteed to be doing stuff with smart objects just because i want that flexibility at all times um i may in the interest of saving file size later go ahead and flatten some of those but i'm always in smart objects if i'm in photoshop i don't care that it takes longer i don't care that it makes for a bigger file size as far as how much bigger it makes i don't know i don't have a metric for that sorry um but you can if you have photoshop you can find that out yourself just open a file open a raw file as pixel save as a psd open the same raw file open as a smart object and save and you can compare the differences there sorry i don't have a solid answer for you okay so both of these are done i click ok and now i can see there is the combined result so there's that look and that look and that one all applied there we are all applied to all of those photos at once so super super super awesome capability now let's see here i've got 10 minutes left um and i want to show you two more let me look at my notes one two more things i want to show you um yeah okay i need to show you here there's one thing i need to show you that i'm just going to go very quickly into so let's just start the whole process over i've got this photo here i want to edit this let's say in silver effects pro so i want to do this sure we're going to do it this way because i want to make sure that i show you something that i i that i don't forget to show you in my next demo step so i want to show you something very quickly in here i'm going to open this image in silver effects pro and let's say that um i'm just going to use a preset here just to start let's uh do this high structure smooth that's actually probably not going to be good high structure on skin is not generally good high key one there we go let's choose this one okay that's cool it's a little bit too high key so i dial down the brightness let's take that down a little bit and i go great that's the look that i want okay cool so i want to apply this same look to another image i click apply now we saw that i had the copy and paste we just saw that but i go to another photo where i want to have the same starting point which means i should call that up as a preset but i didn't save it as a preset right so here's what happens if i go back in here and i edit in silver effects pro again and i didn't save that previous adjustment as a preset that means there's no easy way for me to get back to where i was i could call up the preset that i started with and try to remember adjust the brightness what else did i do in there however there's a new feature in here which is to recall the previous edit so here i am in lightroom i uh here i am in silverfx pro i don't remember what the last thing i did was or how i got there but if i go to the edit menu i have this new apply last edit and it will apply everything that was done to the previous image onto here so there we go so that's how we do that so that is a super super awesome feature in there and then i can apply that and it'll render in okay um final step is to show you this out of lightroom cc which again would apply to any other app that doesn't have a plug-in architecture don't ask me why lightroom cc doesn't have plug-ins yet um totally beyond me but it doesn't okay let me just quit lightroom classic here and let's jump over to lightroom cc all right quitting was a bad idea here we go okay let me delete this image that i was working with earlier um because delete that photo delete all right here's the photo that i want to work with this is the original raw file let's just double check that hopefully i just delete the wrong one um yes this is my raw file in rw2 file this is the raw i have already done adjustments here in lightroom uh in lightroom cc to this i now want to take this into a nik collection filter i have two choices i could choose to edit this from here from this finished point in a knit collection or i can choose to start over from from the base level we can actually make that decision later right now i've got a raw file that i've adjusted in lightroom and if i right click on it to edit this there is no edit in or send to the plugin option so here's what i have to do and again this will go to any any app in the world that doesn't support the plugins i go export one photo and i'm going to choose to export original plus settings now from lightroom what this means is it's going to stick this on the desktop this means it's going to export the raw file along with an xmp file that has all the instructions for what i just did here in lightroom if i then open this up in photoshop i would be able to um i would be able to recall all those xmp settings and then edit away so here's what i'm going to do i've said this this is one of a couple of workflows so i've just exported this as a raw file um let's go ahead and launch photoshop again let me launch photoshop and i'm going to open that raw file in photoshop open desktop raw file you see the xmp file sitting next to it i open this file into the photoshop and there's all the adjustments so you see it looks identical to the way it did in lightroom but i want to start over so i'm just going to reset everything let's go ahead and reset the default so now we're back to the base raw file um looks like i straightened this out before so i'm actually going to do a quick little straightening here let's just do this draw a line across there straighten that good and now i'm going to open this as a smart object which again for me for my personal work i just prefer to work this way so now i've got a smart object now let's just apply a quick preset let's go or apply one of the filters i'm going to go into silver effects pro for this and when i'm in silverfix pro i'm going to show you some of the new things in here they're super exciting so in silverfx pro this is the new scp we've only been in here briefly before let me show you a couple new things in here one of the cool well first of all it's completely rewritten this is part of the veza collection of the viveza rewrite this as well my control points i have the same capabilities in here that i had with the other within viveza i can adjust the luminance and the chrominance of my selection in there so i've got that control so there we go i just isolated her hat in there and let's say i want to kind of brighten that up a little bit let's go down to my adjustments here and we'll brighten up her hat just a little bit so it's just her hat that's getting brighter cool so i've got that capability in there that's awesome but i have two other new adjustments in here that i want to highlight the first is a simple one clear view clear view and this isn't really the right image to show clear view but clear view is the ability to cut through fog and haze in an image and you can see here it's really kind of cutting through whatever little bit of mist there might have been in that room um very quickly cutting through that this is this can be super dramatic on the right type of photo this isn't the best photo for it but for those of you who've used clearview on the uh in photo lab before you know how good it is this is clear view from photo lab so that's awesome but what's really awesome in here is the new film grain so anybody who's used dxo film pack will recognize this this is all the custom designed film grains from dxo film pack look at all these beautiful film stocks that we have to choose from in here these are faithfully recreated film stocks from film scans from high resolution film scans of these actual films that have then been in the computer lab completely recreated digitally so that the grain patterns that you get from these really truly do mimic what you get from real film this is a huge huge upgrade to silver effects pro so i've just added the film grain of tmx 3200 let's look at this at one to one we can see the subtle film grain that's been added on here which is this beautiful beautiful grain pattern if i want to increase the grain size to make it a little bit bigger so i want to make it really crunchy i can do that on the intensity of that grain i can bring up as well and i mean if you look at this let me bring this really really contrasting just to make sure it comes through on through go to webinar you can see that this has just a beautiful structure to it really intense and very realistic looking film green so that looks fantastic okay so let's zoom out of there i've done this let's say this is the end result of what i want i like it hit apply i'm applying this back into photoshop now remember this is a smart object in photoshop smart layer with a smart filter i'm not going to save this so i hit command s i hit command stop let's go to the file menu and choose save and it's going to say hey it has to be a save as because it's a photoshop it was started as a raw file so i'm going to just put this on the desktop so that same file name psd okay cool so i save that all righty so now i have a psd file now remember we started from lightroom all right let me close this and hide photoshop let's go back over to lightroom now here's kind of the you know it's an extra step but this is how it works i'm going to let's just do a drag and drop um where's that psd there it is there's that psd file let's get this window out of the way there's my psd file you can see it's black and white i'm going to drag this into let's get into the grid view drag this into lightroom so now importing this into lightroom into the same album that i had before and i will now have this image now for those of you who might be thinking why didn't you just go to edit in photoshop and then open the plugins the reason is because lightroom cc does not give me an edit in photoshop as a smart object if i edit it in photoshop it would have rendered out the image which as you saw that's not what i wanted i wanted to keep that smart object capability so now i have that now i have a psd file in lightroom that has the smart object embedded in it and if i go in here and i right click and choose now i choose edit in photoshop it is going to open up that photoshop file where we now have our full smart object edit ability so it's kind of a workaround for not having the smart object editability from within lightroom cc just export the original raw open it in photoshop leave it as a smart set it as a smart object import it back into lightroom cc and now i can open it from lightroom cc and have the full raw full um smart object capability in there so that's one workflow the other workflow and this is the kind of really non-lightroom absolutely any app in the world that you want is let's see which photo oh this photo here um here's a raw photo right dart rw2 i'm going to open this just to kind of really prove the point i'm going to open this in preview right just the simple preview app in the mac and now i'm going to export this as a tiff file so let's say it's set to tiff there it is um make sure yup it's in the right place and good okay so that saves that off as a tiff file so give that a second to process there we have the tiff let's make sure that is it yes that is the tiff file now i want to open this in let's say colorfx pro well each one of these plugins is also an app it is an app so i can take this tiff file drag and drop this into colorfx pro 4 and it is going to launch into color effects pro 4 where i can do anything that i would normally do and then save it back into that tiff file and let's just go ahead and apply a preset on here remember i have this save and edit later option if i enable that and i click save then that tiff file that can live anywhere live in the finder live in windows explorer live in another app now has that layered capability built into it so if i go back into the plugin i can re-edit that at any time so that is your most base workflow from it doesn't matter where you are what app you've got take your original convert it to a tiff file and open that into any of the nic collection filters so that is what i wanted to show you today there's so much more to go into on this but we are out of time and that is um that is where we're at today so i hope that was awesome i will be back in a couple of weeks or maybe it's next week even i'm not sure look at the calendar all right folks that's it i'm out of here thank you so much for your time today i hope this was fun i know it was fast i know it was a lot but that's how we're all here i will see you next time guys you

Channel: Nik Collection

Views: 11,889

Keywords: Nik Collection, Nik Collection by DxO, Editing software, nik sofware, nik collection 4, photo joseph, photojoseph, creative photo editing techniques, photography, nik4, nik 4, update, new, photoshop plugins, nik collection new version, nik collection latest version, new features nik collection, new feature review, dxo nik collection, nik collection tutorial, non destructive photo editing, nik non destructive editing, nik selective, nik selective tool photoshop, lightroom plugins

Id: 9LhYz9NIZbg

Length: 57min 29sec (3449 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 06 2021