Even after all these updates and features, the one thing that is still lacking in the Nik Collection, and some others as well, is the almost total lack of attention to the UI/UX and consistency of usage.
Let us look at the latest version of the Nik Collection, one by one, and see what I mean by this.
Inconsistent menus, zoom, pan, navigation, buttons and settings. No standard shortcuts apply where they could.
#Photography #Nik #NikCollection
I had already uninstalled the Topaz Mask AI and the Topaz Studio 2 which I was considering to purchase as part of one of their packs. I am running MacOS Catalina 10.15.5 with all updates applied.
I had already searched around on the net and their own FAQs and forums and nothing helped. I had also downloaded the full installers, but, did not work.
I was about to log a ticket with and then I thought I would go through the apps to try and see if I could fix the issue manually.
Took me around 5 minutes to figure out and fix the issue. The solution is what I will share here.
I would recommend you download the full installers since that takes a lot lesser time to install than the online installers.
Once you start the installers, you might get an error message that the application is from the internet or unidentified developers. Not an issue, just right click on the installer application and click on “open” and then you will be prompted if you really want to run the app and you click on “open” again.
That will start up the installers. Once you have installed any of these products, you will not see them appear in Photoshop as most others do.
You will manually need to copy the plugins to the Photoshop plugin folder and then start up Photoshop to see them appear.
That’s it. Repeat the process for all Topaz apps.
Now when you start Photoshop, you will see them appear as they should have to start with. These are simple to add in Lightroom, so, that should not be an issue.
I can only hope that Topaz fixes these installation issues soon…
#Photography #Post #Topaz #Photoshop
DxO just released version 3 of their popular Nik Collection of plugins for Photoshop and Lightroom.
The plugin pack also contains stand-alone applications for all the 8 plugins and can, therefore, be used with any application that can export and import TIFF files.
There has been an issue for quite some time with the Collection that if you set your Lightroom presets to be stored with the Catalog, the plugins will not appear in Lightroom. You will have to manually add them, one-by-one.
ON1 seems to have no such issues and for some reason, picks up the applications automatically.
Let’s see what the new, non-destructive edit for Lightroom really means.
To be honest, not much. The idea is to export a TIFF file from LR to edit in the Nik Collection and the changes you make in the Collection, is retained and you can keep tweaking that for the TIFF file. The settings are saved back to the TIFF file and there is no “sidecar” file. This also implies that Nik will take a while to save the edited file every time.
The issue is since we already exported the raw file to a TIFF, we have already lost the raw data for any kind of recovery. This might not be a major issue in practice though. Once you have made all your basic adjustments in LR, then, Nik can be used to enhance and tweak the same bitmap/raster image over and over again.
You have to check the box to make sure the “non-destructive” part is saved. If you want to save space on the TIFF files, make sure that you select “ZIP” compression in the Nik Collection settings. Changing the setting here will work for all cases including ON1.
#Photography #Nik #DxO #Lightroom #ON1
Nitin Chandra's Blog 