Back in March, Google made the entire
Nik Collection photo-editing suite available as a free download. Despite my initial scepticism (and wariness of filters that claim to replicate the "look" of film), I have to admit - now that I've been using it for a few months - it is actually really good and serves as a helpful complement to Photoshop. The
Control Point technology is particularly useful for carrying out localised enhancements, saving a lot of time compared to manually creating masks.
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| Selective sharpening using colour range masking |
Of course, no amount of software wizardry can turn a bad photo into a good photo, but with a little care you can get some interesting results, as shown below. (Note: my photo-editing steps are usually a lot more subtle than this. I provide these photos as examples because it's easier to see the difference.)
Move your mouse across the images to see them as they appeared before processing. Most of these results were achieved using
Color Efex Pro, but the first image (the helicopter over the house) was enhanced using
Silver Efex Pro to create a High Dynamic black-and-white luminosity layer.
The complete Google Nik Collection suite is available at:
https://www.google.com/nikcollection/
It works best as a Photoshop plugin (under the Filter menu), but you can also run each application as a standalone program if you create short-cuts to the individual .exe files.
