Installing & Using DxO Nik Collection 2018 with Affinity Photo

[@yankee-in-london]

Glad to see this. I think more and more people are anti-Adobe these days (the pricing model more than the software). I did have a look on my Mac for where these folders might be located and there is a "Plug-ins" directory for photoshop but it is empty. Turns out the place to go is (root)/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Plug-ins/CC

[@yankee-in-london]

Note: my first attempt to send an image from Photo to Color Efex has openned the program but the "Preparing Image" popup comes up and then no progress :(

[@yankee-in-london]

Analog Efex get's a bit further but crashes while loading textures

[@RobinWhalley]

Thanks for adding the Mac directory. Much appreciated. I'm reading some of the problems you seem to be experiencing and they aren't affecting me. Are you running the DxO version of the plug-ins? Some of the problems you mention sound familiar from my experience with the old version which even reported: "This is an unlicensed copy" with one of the filters. The new version appears to be behaving itself.

[@yankee-in-london]

Well I remember you saying in your original video that the install was so transparent you weren't sure you'd actually upgraded. I had that experience too so I double checked but they do all have the DxO logo in the upper right so at least the apps appear to be the correct version. Maybe the plug-ins are somehow the old ones? Let me dig into that.

[@yankee-in-london]

I have checked to the best of my ability -- I'm pretty technical -- and am fairly certain there are no older versions of the plugin still on the system.

[@andrewturner6616]

Thank you for making this video; it prompted me to purchase the Nik collection from DxO to use with Affinity Photo, but alas I have found that, at least in my case, the plug-ins have the same colour problems as with the previous (free) Google version. The plug-ins used in conjunction with AP (full release .104) work fine with JPG images, but give weird and wonderful colour renditions with other file formats (tif, tiff), so are next to useless. The problem also existed with the Google version and is associated with AP, as colour issues do not seem to occur with other host programmes. All in all, and for the time being, there does not seem to be much difference between the DxO and Google versions. I hope that AP developers are listening and resolve the colour incompatibilities before too long!

[@RobinWhalley]

Hi Andrew. I'm really sorry you're having this problem. I haven't yet personally seen this but I'm going to see if I can recreate it and understand what might be going wrong. Could you use the Nik Plug-ins stand alone? I know that a lot of people say you can't do this with the latest version (I even agreed with them) but I'm going to publish a video soon showing how you can use them stand alone.

[@andrewturner6616]

Hi Robin, I have fiddled around a bit with Viveza 2 (google and DxO) and found that the plug-in does not play happily with AP when using a wide gamut colour space - in my case ProPhoto RGB. All my other software seems to be happy and displays the right colours on my calibrated monitors, but Viveza 2 seems to think that everything is in sRGB mode and so images appear muddy and de-saturated. If I convert the images to sRGB, then the colours display correctly. This is a distinct bummer. I have not yet tested the other apps. I also still have to test whether my working with images in 16 bit and 32 bit has any bearing on the matter. 8 bit and sRGB seems to work OK, but is very limiting, particularly as I print on a wide gamut printer. Re stand alone, I can invoke Nik plug-ins directly from my DAM and they all appear to work with no other host involved.

[@RobinWhalley]

Hi Andrew, thanks for the additional information. From the testing I have done the problem appears to be with the internal colour management of AP. Viveza works fine with other colour spaces either stand-alone or in an Adobe host program. There are at least two bugs I have identified. I will publish something more concrete in the next few days.

[@mwpoc1]

This goes someway to explain my problems.

[@the.smarts]

Thanks so much Robin, for taking us through that slowly and thoroughly. All working well. Many thanks.

[@RobinWhalley]

You're welcome! I'm please that it's helped.

[@sulimanchadirji5269]

Great tips, I am happy to be able to install Nick collection on Affinity. It's slightly different on my computer, but it worked. Thank you for the great tip.

[@RobinWhalley]

Great to hear!The Nik Collection works quite well in Affinity Photo these days.

[@robertsuffak813]

Thank you, Robin! This one is worth gold, very nice!

[@RobinWhalley]

If you like this, wait until you see the next one - again, lots of people saying something can't be done with the new Nik Collection and it can. I hope to record that in the next couple of days.

[@williamhenderson825]

Thanks Robin. I have my Nik loaded on my Affinity photo. One thing i see is that the " Brush" button is not there? Has this happened to you? thanks

[@RobinWhalley]

Yes. The Brush Button only works with Photoshop because it needs the Nik Selective Tool to work.

[@williamhenderson825]

Thanks Robin. Seems there are just a few things Affinity Photo can't do, but maybe in time. Thanks again.

[@JAS4BG]

Well, I was cautiously hopeful after watching your video. You can indeed access Nik plugins via Affinity, however, and this a big however for me, the layers in Affinity are not "Smart" in regards to these plugins. If I want to go back and re-edit some settings in the recipe, I will have no idea what those settings were unless I save the recipe in NIK for every single image I edit. Please correct me if I'm wrong. You produce excellent videos by the way. Cheers

[@RobinWhalley]

Hi Jeff, pleased you like my videos. You’re quite correct that Affinity doesn’t work with smart objects in the way Photoshop does and because of this your Nik settings aren’t retained. Affinity does have something similar to smart objects which is Live Filters but the Nik filters are not currently recognised as Live Filters. There has been a lot of requests to DxO to have full support of Nik in Affinity. With luck we will see DxO and Serif working together to provide this.

[@JAS4BG]

I guess we will know in a couple of months how far DXO has come to integrating the plug ins into their excellent software. They usually produce a major version around the start of December. I shoot a lot of low light theatre and traditional music. IMO DXO has the best Noise Reduction around and I've come to rely on DXO raw conversion as opposed to Capture One. Anyway, keep up the good work.

[@mwpoc1]

Thanks for this. Unfortunately, I see exactly the same problems with the DXO Nik Collection as the previous free ones. For example, open an image in Affinity and crop it and then open Color Efex Pro and you'll be presented with the uncropped version of the image. That's not great if you use the borders which I do a lot. Another example, open an image and then open Viveza. The main screen shows a desaturated view of my image while the Loupe doesn't. Make everything look the way you want it and then when you go back to Affinity the image is a mess to be honest. Is it only me that is experiencing these issues? I am currently using the demo version of the Collection as I am hesitant to pay for the upgrade when I see absolutely no difference with the older versions.

[@RobinWhalley]

I have identified what causes the problems and it's in Affinity Photo rather than Nik. You can work around them but it's not smooth. I'm going to cover this in my next video.

[@cerenademe9433]

Hi there! So, I'm confused - di you create the "Plug-Ins" folder inside of the Affinity folder first, and also the "DxO" folder inside of that, prior to installing Nik? Or did it create those folders during installation?

[@RobinWhalley]

Try this later video. I think it explains what's happening more clearly and should help kzbin.info/www/bejne/gWa7XpJtnMR5fKs

[@cerenademe9433]

@@RobinWhalley Hi Thanks! I actually got it working correctly. Didn't have to create any folders or do anything special during Nik installation. :)

[@RobinWhalley]

@@cerenademe9433 Good to know.

[@mango_wm]

Thank you. Great. What I am missing, is the selective tool, that I can normally use in Photoshop. Does it work in Affinity?

[@RobinWhalley]

The Nik Selective Tool is only availble in Photoshop. I can't recall for certain but I don't remember even seeing it in Photoshop Elements.

[@mango_wm]

@@RobinWhalley In Photoshop Elements 2020 it is!

[@mango_wm]

The installallation in PSE is as clean, as it is in Photoshop

[@RobinWhalley]

@@mango_wm Thanks. I couldn't remember as it's been a long time since I used Elements.

[@hgebe1]

Hi Robin, I use a Mac with both Adobe cc and Affinity and have purchased Nik Plug ins. How can I get Nik into the latest Affinity, they were in the original Affinity.

[@RobinWhalley]

If you already had the Nik Collection installed and registered in Affinity, and you install the new Nik Collection to the same location the new filters should work. No need to change anything and the new Affinity should just pick them up. If it hasn't, I would follow the steps in the video to install them again and register them in Affinity. I'm not sure why they wouldn't be correctly picked up.

[@stevehallam0850]

Viveza has some colour issues with Affinity Photo which can make it very difficult to use. All the others seem to work very well. There is nothing that Viveza does that I can't do by other means so I am happy to pay for the others which l love and are pretty well unique. Hopefully the Viveza issue will be resolved now that the future of the Nik collection seems assured.

[@yankee-in-london]

Yes I noticed this too on MacOS. Image came into Vivenza just fine but color profile was much less dynamic.

[@yankee-in-london]

Bizarrely ... I resized the screen and the proper color profile seemed to come to the fore!

[@stevehallam0850]

Ken Snyder It's definitely a weird size / resolution issue. Affinity are aware and hopefully it will be fixed. I will keep experimenting and try and make sense of it. The other apps are sufficiently good to make it worth buying anyway. Viveza is a bit of an oddball compared with the others.

[@yankee-in-london]

Well I did buy it as I have loved the software for a long while and would like to support it's continued development. Sadly the integration on MacOS seems to work less well than Windows. I still do use Lightroom (to my chagrin as I'd love to get rid of Adobe completely) so that integration is perfect.

[@RobinWhalley]

A friend of mine has reported some colour issues as well but he is running the old version of the plugins. I haven't experienced problems with the new version. There also appeared to be a bit of a colour space mismatch problem going on between Affinity and Nik.

[@lucienr]

Excellent and useful information. Thanks ! :)

[@RobinWhalley]

Thank you. I'm pleased you liked it.

[@mahamza86]

How does it scale on 4k displays? Because in the older version, text was tiny on 4k displays.

[@RobinWhalley]

I can't really tell you. I have never had a problem with the old version being too small on my 5K monitor and the new version looks the same. If you look at the comments on my video "Nik Collection was it worth it" there are a few who say it isn't fixed.

[@jullit31]

+Robin Whalley Out of curiosity: What's the size of your monitor and what scaling factor are you using? Because the old Google Nik Collection is tiny on my 4K 24" monitor with 200% scaling...

[@mahamza86]

jullit31 I got a 24.6” monitor with 200% scaling. And my question was about the old version of nik as well and it was one of the biggest annoyances of the old version. So is it solved in the 2018 version? if yes then I would spend my money otherwise, I wont.

[@RobinWhalley]

It's a 27" 5K Mac with the scaling set to "Default" (the description says looks like 2560 x 1440)

[@jullit31]

I see. Since 2560 x 1440 is half the number of pixels in each dimension (compared to 5K), that is also 200% scaling. However, I'm running Windows 10, so probably that is why it doesn't work properly.

[@ricktaylor7275]

I updated to a newer version of Affinity Photo a few weeks ago, and it crashes every time I try to do anything with a raw file and a lot of times when I use the old set of plugins on a jpg. It's completely useless for raw files now and almost as much so when I do anything to a jpg with it.

[@RobinWhalley]

I was using the latest version of both Affinity (released the other day) and the Nik Collection by DxO for the video and all works fine. It's likely to be a local configuration issue. When you talk about editing RAW images with Nik, I would be interested to find out how you are managing to open a RAW file directly into Nik from Affinity? Nik can't edit and save RAW files and never has been able to. The standard Host application behaviour is to convert the file to a TIFF or JPEG before passing it to Nik. If you open a RAW file in Nik directly by running Nik as a Stand Alone editor, it will read the embedded JPEG from the RAW file and allow you to apply edits. When you then close Nik to apply the changes it will report an error because it can't save the file.

[@Ru1uvus]

Perfect! Thanks for an excellent tutorial - to the point and spot on!

[@RobinWhalley]

Thank you very much.

[@edboatman2725]

I have the old Nic Collection installed in Affinity Photo on my Mac. Do I have to uninstall the older version to be able to install the new Nic Collection from DXO? Will the old and new versions conflict if I leave them both installed?

[@RobinWhalley]

The new version will automatically remove the old version when it's installed. I don't recall seeing an option to leave the old plugins. If you want the old version as well you will probably need to install it after you install the new one. Make sure you have a set of installation files for the old version before you start this. Uninstalling the new version doesn't restore the old plugins from what people have said. They don't appear to conflict. I ran both on one of my computers for a while to help deal with queries on my books. I didn't notice any problems but that's not to say there isn't any.

[@turnerx5]

Can't get it to work on my Mac. Affinity is greyed out when I click the + option to install elsewhere. Darn it!

[@RobinWhalley]

Don't worry. If you can find where the other plugin files are installed you can still set up a link to them in Affinity Photo. The process is just same, you just need to know the location.

[@marcthibault2835]

how to install. the new update. Dxo nik collection serie 2.??we must paid for this again i think??

[@RobinWhalley]

Yes, it's a paid upgrade but be sure you understand what benefits the upgrade will give you (something I strongly recommend with any software).

[@phillozoph50]

Fantastic.Thank you.

[@RobinWhalley]

Glad you liked it!

[@Max-Kramer]

I do not understand why everyone refers to DXO when they say about Nik Collection. DXO have nothing to do with Nik Collection, because it is officially available for download from the Google website! Even if DXO has done something, it is not rational to use an intermediary while you can use plugins in pure form from Google.

[@RobinWhalley]

The Nik Collection started life as individual plug-ins from Nik Software, a German company. Nik sold out to Google in 2012 and then Google sold the assets to DxO towards the end of 2017. At this point, Google withdrew the free download and if you wanted the software you had to apply to DxO. In early June 2018, DxO relaunched the software as a paid release and the free version is no longer available. It's a paid release because DxO has ported all the code to the code to use the latest libraries. They cleaned up a lot of bugs in the software and also provide support for new bugs. DxO now owns the Nik Collection and the reason I and others keep referring to it as DxO Nik Collection is to differentiate it from the earlier free version. It's the start of a new era (hopefully).

[@Imrankadir]

thank you so much

[@RobinWhalley]

You're welcome!